PNTV: Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz (#18)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on the great book Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. As always, great book, Philosopher's notes. We've got six pages of PDF with 10 of my favorite big ideas or so, and this is a great book. So Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 20th century, and he discovered in the process of doing countless surgeries that some of his patients, when they had a new appearance, their lives totally changed. Other patients still thought they were unattractive. They still thought that they couldn't get any benefit from the physical transformation in their appearance. And this struck Maxwell Maltz really deeply. And he spent the second half of his life looking at, rather than outer scars, what he called inner scars. And he really got into self image psychology and the power of our subconscious mind to create a healthy and happy life. And psycho cybernetics is essentially the combination of that self image psychology with a science that was really popular during his time called cybernetics. So we'll go over some of the big ideas that form the core of psycho cybernetics. But first let's look at the idea of cybernetics. It comes from the Greek word for the steersman. It literally means the steersman. And cybernetics was, as I mentioned, a popular science, all about things like guided missiles, servo mechanisms that had a target that could be programmed and then they had a program that would allow them to have a target and then be launched and adjust their course to reach the target. Right, that's cybernetics. So the idea is that we human beings are goal oriented, much like a, a guided missile or a servo mechanism, and that we operate best when we have a clear goal and we're taking action toward that goal. So that's the basic idea of psycho cybernetics. And here are some of the big ideas that I love from this book. The first one is this idea. Maxwell Maltz is passionate about the idea that we all have what he calls a success instinct. Our kind of deepest goal, if you will, is to succeed. It's to achieve great things in our life. And he talks about the fact that everything in nature has a success instinct. Squirrels don't need to be trained to gather nuts for winter. Right. And birds don't need to go to school on navigation to know where to fly and to navigate thousands of miles across open water. They didn't read stories about great navigators. They had a built in intelligence within them that guides them naturally. And he says we all have that built in mechanism and he calls it a success instinct. The challenge is that we're conditioned in ways that kind of get in the way. We have a subconscious mind that's been primed with negative stuff. And our job is to basically re. Hypnotize ourselves, repress, program ourselves in powerful ways. And he says that imagination is one of the first keys We've got to be able to imagine ourselves in a greater life, imagine ourselves in really positive, powerful ways. We're not going to go into detail on that. You can check out the note for more on that. For now I want to get into the idea of hypnotizing ourselves. And he says that everyone's been hypnotized by society, by our parents, by our peers, we've all been hypnotized. And that hypnosis is literally running the show. We've got to ask the question, is that what we want running the show? Are those beliefs that we have ingrained into our subconscious mind what we really want to be running our lives? And his suggestion, and my echo would be probably not. And we talk about this all the time in the four agreements. That's Don Miguel Ruiz's whole point. We've been domesticated, we've been hypnotized and we need to create new agreements. In his book, in this case, we need to de. Hypnotize ourselves but quickly on hypnosis. Maxwell Maltz shares some really cool stories on hypnosis to bring home the idea of just how powerful our subconscious mind is. So did you know you can take an Olympic weightlifter, right? So an incredibly world class, strong, strong human being. And you can hypnotize them, right? Basically turn off their conscious mind and communicate with their subconscious mind and tell them that they aren't strong enough to pick up a pencil or a pen off of a table. You can hypnotize a world class strong human being and tell them under hypnosis they are not strong enough to pick up a pencil. And guess what? They aren't strong enough to pick up the pencil. They will struggle to pick up the pen. It's amazing. Now their actual strength didn't change. They still had the physical potential, the physical ability to pick it up. But they were conditioned, they were hypnotized to think that they can't pick it up. And suddenly they can't pick it up. It's amazing stuff. And you can do the opposite. You can program someone positively and tell them they're stronger and you'll see significantly greater results in strength. It's an amazing thing. Applied kinesiology, you might have heard of that before. How we program ourselves moment to moment. Whether we talk about things that we're afraid of, that weakens us, or we talk about things that we love and that we're proud of, we're going to be stronger. So really powerful idea. We're hypnotizing ourselves moment to moment to moment to moment. So we want to pay attention to what we're telling ourselves and how we're hypnotizing ourselves. Really cool idea. I love that one. Isn't that amazing? So that's pretty good. He talks about the fact that whenever we do anything, we want to allow our natural behavior to come through. We don't want to be overthinking things. Our conscious mind is basically there to set goals, to set our intention, and then we want to let our subconscious mind get to work. We're going to talk about this in a great book called Overachievement, where a guy named John Elliot talks about how the greatest performers trust themselves. They just let it rip. They're not self conscious when they're doing anything. Whether it's selling merchandise or performing an art, whether it's music or basketball or whatever it is a sport, they're just going off. There's a trusting mindset. So Maltz talks about how important that is, that we just let ourselves express ourselves most powerfully. So that's pretty cool. He talks about the importance of habits. And I didn't know this, but he says. What does he say? He says the word habit originally meant clothing or a garment. Right. So the things that we do consistently, our habits are almost exactly like the things that we wear. They are the things that we wear. Our habits are almost like our clothes. Right. And our self image is going to determine the habits that we have. Right? Really cool idea. And my question in this note, in this context, which I come back to again and again and again and again and again, is how are your habits? Are you wearing old clothes? Do you have old habits that no longer serve you?

Are you?

If so, is now a good time to do some kind of cleansing of your closet? Get rid of some of the old clothes, get rid of some of the old habits that don't serve you any longer. And my question in the note is, what's one habit that you need to start building that would have the greatest positive impact in your life? And what's one habit that you need to stop doing that if you stop doing it would have the greatest positive benefit. So new clothes that you're going to start start wearing and something you're going to stop wearing. What habits can you build? Really cool idea. He talks about the importance of goals as well and that we've got to be moving toward our goal. And he describes it as kind of like riding a bike. Now you can ride a bike in balance easily when you're moving, right? So you have a certain place you want to go, even if it's just forward or around in circles, but you're moving. But, but if you're not moving, it's really hard to keep balance. Unless you're really good, you're going to have to put your foot down because you can't keep your balance. Same thing with our emotional well being. We want to keep on moving toward a goal that keeps us dynamic, keeps us in flow and keeps us more healthy. We talk about this in the positive psychology stuff we do as well. He talks about the fact that Nobody is right 100% of the time. The greatest athletes in the world still miss way more than half of their shots in basketball. The greatest baseball players, you know, what are they? The greatest ones are batting 30% effectively. They have a batting average of.300, right? They're striking out or getting out 7 out of 10 times. Yet they're the greatest in their sport. So no one succeeds 100% of the time. It's an amazing idea to remember Babe Ruth had the most home runs in his era. He also had the most strikeouts. We've got to reorient our relationship to failure and have fun with it. That is the key to reprogramming ourselves. Tapping into the power of psycho cybernetics. That is all we have time for. Hope you enjoyed and look forward to sharing more with you soon.

See ya.

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