Awesome theory stuff

This is from an APP I just downloaded, "Change your thinking, change your life", and I'm sure you guys will like it and find it useful too.
In case you download it, Chapter 1 is longer than this, so don't skip to chapter 2.
Hope you like it as much as I did, keep going strong.

1 Chapter

Change Your Thinking

There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.

—William James

Once upon a time there was a woman, about 30 years old, married with two children. Like many people, she had grown up in a home where she was constantly criticized and often treated unfairly by her parents. As a result, she developed deep feelings of inferiority and low self-esteem. She was negative and fearful, and had no confi- dence at all. She was shy and self-effacing, and did not consider herself to be particularly valuable or worthwhile. She felt that she was not really talented at anything.

One day, as she was driving to the store, another car went through a red light and smashed into her.When she awoke, she was in the hospital with a mild concussion and complete memory loss. She could still speak, but she had no recollection of any part of her past life. She was a total amnesiac.

At first, the doctors thought it would be temporary. But weeks passed and no trace of her memory returned. Her husband and children visited her daily, but she did not know them. This was such an unusual case that other doctors and specialists came to visit her as well, to test her and ask her questions about her condition.

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■ STARTING OVER

Eventually, she went home, her memory a complete blank. Deter- mined to understand what had happened to her, she began reading medical textbooks and studying in the specialized area of amnesia and memory loss. She met and spoke with specialists in this field. Eventually she wrote a paper on her condition. Not long afterward, she was invited to address a medical convention to deliver her pa- per, answer questions about her amnesia, and share her experiences and ideas on neurological functioning.

During this period, something amazing happened. She became a new person completely. All the attention in the hospital and afterward made her feel valuable, important, and truly loved by her family. The attention and acclaim she received from members of the med- ical profession built her self-esteem and self-respect even higher. She became a genuinely positive, confident, outgoing woman, highly articulate, well informed, and very much in demand as a speaker and authority in the medical profession.

All memory of her negative childhood had been wiped out. Her feelings of inferiority were wiped out as well. She became a new person. She changed her thinking and changed her life.

■ THE BLANK SLATE

The Scottish philosopher David Hume was the first to propose the idea of the tabula rasa or blank slate.This theory says that each per- son comes into the world with no thoughts or ideas at all, and everything that a person thinks and feels is learned from infancy on- ward. It is as though the child’s mind is a blank slate that every passing person and experience leaves a mark on.The adult becomes the sum total of everything he or she learns, feels, and experiences growing up. What the adult does and becomes later is the result of this early conditioning. As Aristotle wrote, “Whatever is impressed is expressed.”

Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of human poten- tial in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept. This is the idea that each person develops a bundle of beliefs re- garding oneself, starting at birth. Your self-concept then becomes


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the master program of your subconscious computer, determining everything you think, say, feel, and do. For this reason, all change in your outer life begins with a change in your self-concept, with a change in the way you think and feel about yourself and your world. The child is born with no self-concept at all. Every idea, opin- ion, feeling, attitude, or value you have as an adult you learned from childhood. Everything you are today is the result of an idea or im- pression you took in and accepted as true.When you believe some- thing to be true, it becomes true for you, whatever the fact may be. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”

■ FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE LASTING

If you were raised by parents who continually told you what a good person you were, who loved you, encouraged you, supported you, and believed in you, no matter what you did or didn’t do, you would grow up with the belief that you were a good and valuable person. By the age of three, this belief would lock in and become a funda- mental part of the way you view yourself in relation to your world. Thereafter, no matter what happens to you, you would hold to this belief. It would become your reality.

If you were raised by parents who did not know how powerful their words and behaviors could be in shaping your personality, they could very easily have used destructive criticism, disapproval, and physical or emotional punishment to discipline or control you. When a child is continually criticized at an early age, he soon con- cludes that there is something wrong with him. He doesn’t under- stand why it is that he is being criticized or punished, but he assumes that his parents know the truth about him, and that he de- serves it. He begins to feel that he is not valuable or lovable. He is not worth very much. He must therefore be worthless.

Almost all personality problems in adolescence and adult- hood are rooted in what psychologists refer to as love withheld. The child needs love like roses need rain. When children feel unloved, they feel unsafe and insecure.They think, “I’m not good enough.” They begin to engage in compensatory behaviors to make up for this inner anxiety. This sense of love deprivation is manifested in misbehavior, personality problems, bursts of anger,


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