12

GET READY MENTALLY AND EMOTIONALLY

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.

—JOHN MILTON

Rudyard Kipling, the British writer, once penned a poem of basic advice for young people, in which he maintained that the world and everything that’s in it is yours:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foe nor loving friend can hurt you,
And all men count with you, but none too much.

Kipling was describing mental and emotional balance. To succeed you must be able to deal with people of all sorts, listening to their ideas and observing their values without compromising your own principles. You must deal confidently with those above you in the chain of authority, while maintaining open communication with those below you. You must be secure enough in who you are to take criticism from friend or foe. When someone you love disappoints you, you can’t let that disappointment destroy you. You must respect the values and opinions of others without allowing others to control your life.

You can achieve this mental and emotional balance by following these steps:

1. Recognize your own self-worth.
2. Destroy the Gloom Bug.
3. Acquire proper perspective.
4. Be patient.
5. Acquire a sense of humor.
6. Learn to deal with conflict.
7. Expect to succeed.

RECOGNIZE YOUR OWN SELF-WORTH

One of the greatest mistakes you can make is to underestimate yourself. It’s far worse to underestimate than it is to overestimate.

The reason is quite simple: You act in harmony with the way you see yourself. If you overestimate your ability to accomplish something, you will act as if you can do it. And usually, by stretching your abilities to the limit, you can accomplish what you set out to do. But if you underestimate your ability, either you will pass up the challenge or you will tackle the job only halfheartedly.

There are some who say that the bumblebee greatly overestimates her ability to fly. Her body is much too large for the flimsy set of wings nature gave her. But the bumblebee thinks she can fly, she flaps her wings as if she expects to fly, and guess what: She flies, and she flies very well.

In the United States it is taught from grade school on that all people are created equal. But many of us take that to be just a high-sounding phrase. It’s more than a phrase; it’s true. Nobody on earth is more valuable than you are. Your life is as precious to you as the greatest people’s lives are and have been to them. And your estimate of your self-worth is the only estimate that counts. What other people think about you is your reputation. What you think about yourself represents your true worth. Thomas Edison’s teachers thought he was just another hard-of-hearing, slow-witted kid. Edison knew better, and he showed them.

You are a bundle of potential. All you need to do is to convince yourself that the potential is there. How do you convince yourself? You tell yourself. You talk to yourself throughout your waking hours. Your lips may not be moving, but your brain is sending out a constant stream of thoughts; and these thoughts are framed in words.

When you spill sauce on your best clothes, you think, “Oh my, look what I’ve done! And I just got this outfit out of the cleaners!”

That’s your conscious mind speaking. You also have an unconscious mind, which stores all the memories you call on when you need them. You don’t go around all day thinking about April 15. Yet that date is stored in your memory, along with the knowledge that it represents the deadline for filing your federal income-tax return. You might say that you put it out of your mind until it’s time to think about your taxes, but it’s not really out of your mind. It’s like data stored on a computer disk. The data may not be visible on the screen, but they’re there to be called up when needed. Your unconscious mind is comparable to a computer disk. Your conscious mind is comparable to a computer’s monitor screen. The unconscious mind holds much more information than the conscious mind can keep track of at anyone time.

The important thing to remember is that the unconscious mind believes what the conscious mind tells it. When a conscious thought flits through your mind, your unconscious mind “hears” it, “believes” it, and “records” it. Your conscious mind may forget about it immediately, but it’s permanently on file in your unconscious.

Your unconscious mind is the storehouse for your habits—all the things you do without consciously thinking about them. Therefore, your unconscious mind has a profound effect on the way you act.

When your unconscious mind hears you think “I’m clumsy,” it believes you and it moves you to act clumsily. If it hears you say “I’ll never learn the Texas two-step,” it will believe you, and you won’t learn the Texas two-step.

Pessimists are always feeding their unconscious minds with negative thoughts. Their unconscious minds believe what they hear, and the pessimism becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. The team that goes into a contest expecting to lose will lose. The team that confronts a superior team with the confidence that it can score an upset is more likely to pull off an upset.

Therefore, it’s important that you make a conscious decision: I will allow myself to think only positive thoughts about myself. You may say, “How can I think positive thoughts all the time? Nothing good ever happens to me.” That’s the first negative thought you need to banish from your mind.

Your experiences are like coins. Each has two sides, two ways of looking at the same thing. Successful people know how to tum to the positive side of any experience.

For instance, if you’ve been planning a weekend of golf and the weather suddenly turns wet and blustery, you might say, “What a bummer! My weekend is ruined.” Or you might flip to the other side of the coin and say, “Well, no golf this weekend. But what an opportunity to improve my bowling!”

If you made an error on the job that cost the company money, you might say, “What a goof-off I am! One more blunder like that and I’d better look for another job.” Or you might flip the coin over and say, “Now that I know what I did wrong, I’ll never make that mistake again. That clears away one more obstacle to success.”

When you do something well, congratulate yourself. Tell yourself how good you are. Don’t be humble; you deserve the praise! When you fail to meet your usual standards, tell yourself that this isn’t typical of you. You can do better. And then do it!

Respect those who have accomplished great things in life, but don’t be intimidated by them.

There was once a farmer who became interested in politics and was eventually elected governor of his state. As governor he had an opportunity to meet some of the greatest leaders of his day: senators, ambassadors, cabinet members, elder statesmen, former presidents, presidential candidates, and even the president himself.

The farmer told himself, “These people are no greater than I am. I can accomplish anything they can accomplish.” So he decided to try for the White House. And Jimmy Carter became our thirty-ninth president.

If people tend to underestimate you, don’t be discouraged. Tell yourself, “They don’t know me the way I know myself. I’ll show ’em.” Then go out and show them!

If you try and don’t succeed, find out why you didn’t succeed, then look for ways to eliminate the cause of the failure. When you do that, you’re turning a pattern of failure into a stairway to success.

Remember, you’re never a failure. You’re just a success waiting to happen. When you start thinking of yourself in this way, you will succeed.

DESTROY THE GLOOM BUG

When you acquire mental and emotional balance, you hold yourself accountable for your own successes, accept responsibility for your own failures, and take the initiative in turning setbacks into lessons in success.

Successful people learn from others, accept advice and counsel from others, and welcome the assistance of others. But they don’t put others in charge of their lives, and they don’t blame others when things go wrong. Following Kipling’s advice, all people count with them, “but none too much.” They look at life proactively, controlling events instead of letting events control them. They listen to advice from others, but make up their own minds about whether to follow it.

People who put other people in charge of their lives or entrust their destiny to the flow of events are vulnerable to discouragement.

Discouragement often results when people disappoint you or the tide of fate seems to be flowing against you, but you don’t have to let these things depress you. Your problem is not what has happened or who caused it to happen; it’s how you feel about what’s happened.

So the cure for discouragement is to change the way you feel about things.

People can be severely discouraged and not realize it. Here’s how this happens:

• You constantly think in negative and illogical ways.
• As a result of your negative thinking, you have bad moods.
• Your bad moods bring on more pessimistic thoughts and actions, creating a vicious cycle.

When you feel this way, what began as a low-grade virus has become a full-fledged bug. You have had a few bad breaks and you’ve let these breaks lead you into negative thought patterns.

Before you know it, you’re stricken with the Gloom Bug. Here are some thought patterns that bring on the Gloom Bug:

Grayless perceptions
Leaping to conclusions
Overgeneralization
Overemphasizing the negative
Minimizing the positive
Blaming yourself
Unrealistic emotions
Gotta do’s

When you’re in the throes of grayless perceptions, you see everything in black or white. If you’re not doing everything right, you’re doing everything wrong. If you’re not a total success, you’re a total failure. There are no gray areas.

When you leap to conclusions, you assume that whatever happens is for the worst. You assume, without any evidence, that people are reacting negatively to you. You expect’the worst, then accept your expectation as reality.

You overgeneralize by accepting a single setback as a pattern of failure. If you make one goof, you tell yourself, “I’m a failure.” If someone annoys you one time, you say to yourself, “That person is a jerk.”

Overemphasizing the negative will lead you to focus on a single negative detail and let it color your whole outlook. If you make one mistake, you base your self-esteem on it, forgetting about all the right things you do over the long haul. It’s like Michael Jordan basing his self-image on one baseball strikeout, without considering the brilliant record he compiled as a basketball superstar.

Sometimes we cheat ourselves of self-esteem by minimizing the positive, telling ourselves that upbeat experiences are insignificant. At the same time, we’re willing to hold on to a negative belief that is contrary to everyday experience. We exaggerate the shortcomings of ourselves and others while minimizing strengths and assets.

Some people blame themselves for everything negative that happens, even when they’ve had nothing to do with it. They believe that somebody has to be blamed for everything and, noble souls that they are, they step in and accept it. Self-blame sends them on a guilt trip, which compounds their depression.

Don’t let unrealistic emotions take control. You assume that your emotions represent reality. You feel inadequate, so you must be inadequate. You feel like a failure, so you must be a failure.

Many people put their lives on autopilot, letting themselves be guided by an illogical assortment of things they’ve “gotta do.” They are always telling themselves and others that they’ve “gotta do” this or they “mustn’t do” that. They live in a world of “shoulds.” When they don’t do what they feel they should do, they feel guilty.

The Gloom Bug can be controlled with a piece of flypaper and some Reality Spray. First you trap the bug on the flypaper, then you apply the Reality Spray. The flypaper is a chart on which you write down the thoughts that are getting you down. Then you identify the type of negative thinking those thoughts represent. Next you state the reality that contradicts the negative thought.

Figure 12-1 at the end of this chapter is an example of the way an individual might use a piece of flypaper.

Figure 12-2 is a clean piece of flypaper you can use to identify any negative thoughts you might have.

Think of some negative thoughts you have had about yourself. Enter them on the flypaper. Identify the type of Gloom Bug they represent, and apply the Reality Spray.

ACQUIRE PROPER PERSPECTIVE

Up close, the earth looks flat. From outer space, it’s round. The difference is in perspective.

On the ground, the Andes look impassable. From a jetliner flying at forty thousand feet, they shrink to manageable size. From the space shuttle, they’re hardly noticeable. The difference is in perspective.

When we see things in proper perspective, we see them in their proper relationships as to value or importance. Different people have different perspectives. People in their seventies see time in a different perspective from that of those in their twenties. A multimillionaire sees a three-hundred-thousand-dollar home in a different perspective from a salaried person earning thirty thousand dollars a year.

A person planning to drive to the next block may see the potholes in the street from a perspective quite different than one who plans to drive across the continent.

People often fail to look at their lives in perspective. They are so concerned with immediate things that they don’t bother to take the long view. That’s because they don’t expect to go very far. The hourly worker looks ahead only to the end of the present shift. The supervisor charged with maintaining the employee’s records may look ahead only to the end of the pay period. The manager may have to set annual goals, and thus work from a wider perspective. The CEO may have to think of market trends in twenty-five-year cycles.

If you plan to go far in life, you have to adopt a long-range perspective. What may be viewed as a major obstacle to the worker trying to get to the end of the shift may be just a temporary nuisance to the manager looking a year into the future. What may look like a major economic disruption to the manager with the twelve-month view may be seen by the CEO as a mere blip in the long-term cycle.

Acquiring perspective enables you to respond realistically to the events in your life. The teenager whose sweetheart has just found another love may be distraught, convinced that romance has died forever. The parent, looking at the situation from the perspective of midlife, knows that the next “true love” is just a wink and a smile away.

The person without proper perspective will go through life making erratic decisions. Salespeople without perspective will make major changes in their presentations after each rejection, and thus never stick with an approach long enough to know whether it really works in the long run. Managers without perspective will keep their staffs in confusion, often taking emergency approaches to problems that, given time, will work themselves out. Entrepreneurs without perspective will try one enterprise after another, interpreting each setback as a failure, never sticking with one effort long enough to achieve success.

BE PATIENT

Patience is the balance between boldness and prudence, rashness and wisdom. It is illustrated in the fable of the golden goose. The goose produced a golden egg each day, but that wasn’t enough for the impatient owner. He decided to slaughter the goose and harvest all the eggs at once. The result: no more goose and no more eggs.

Poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson gives sound advice: “Adopt the pace of nature: Her secret is patience.”

Impatience is what causes people to give up on their goals before their efforts have had a chance to bear fruit. Patient people learn to distinguish between disasters and temporary setbacks. When things don’t work out, they ask “Why?” Then they tum the “why” into “how” and begin developing strategies to convert the setback into a success.

When you develop your action plan, set realistic timetables. If the timetable you’ve set seems to be unrealistic, remember that most things take longer than you think they will. Recalculate, make your adjustments, and keep moving toward your goal. Remember Yogi Berra’s famous dictum : “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

ACQUIRE A SENSE OF HUMOR

Nothing softens the blows of life like a good sense of humor. How often have you had an experience that you considered humiliating, mortifying, and even degrading at the time but that you were later able to tell about with laughter? If it’s funny in retrospect, why wasn’t it funny at the time?

The answer is in your reaction to it. If you can learn to look for the humor at the time of the experience, you’ll save yourself a lot of emotional pain, and you’ll cause other people to be more comfortable around you.

LEARN TO DEAL WITH CONFLICT

There’s no such thing as life without conflict. The history of humanity has been a history of conflicts. But not all conflict is destructive and not all conflict is bad.

You will encounter two basic types of conflict: personal and interpersonal. Personal conflict arises when you are confronted with two or more conflicting options. The options may involve conflicting needs or desires and may arise from conflicting values. You will encounter several types of personal conflict:

• Positive/positive. You’re planning to use your annual bonus to take a vacation in Europe, but you encounter an attractive investment opportunity. You can’t afford both the investment and the vacation in the same year. You have a conflict between two positive actions and you have to decide which to take.
• Positive/negative. You’ve been looking for a position in marine biology, a career choice that is in harmony with your congenial competencies. An opportunity comes along that offers good pay, good hours, and great benefits. But it would require you to live in Alaska, and you hate cold weather. You have to decide whether the negative factors outweigh the positive.
• Negative/negative. You’ve submitted the low bid on a contract, and you immediately realize that you made a mistake. If you accept the job, you’ll lose money. If you pass it up, the work will go to a competitor and you may lose the customer’s long-term business. You have to decide between two negatives: losing money on the contract and losing the opportunity to obtain future business from the customer.

If you are focused on your vision and your goals and have an action plan in place, decisions involving personal conflict can be reached more easily. You simply choose the option that will move you closer to your goal in harmony with your action plan. Of course, your action plan should flexible enough to change to accommodate opportunities that will move you toward your goal more quickly and easily.

Interpersonal conflict occurs when people who live or work together have different values, goals, or viewpoints. When the time comes to act, there is disagreement. One person’s interests may conflict with another’s. Anger and resentment often result.

Often, differences can be resolved by considering the other person’s preferred behavioral mode. If you understand what motivates the other person, you may be able to reach a compromise that will satisfy the emotional needs of both parties. Give the top gun an opportunity to win. Give the engager a chance to look good. Satisfy the accommodator’s need to feel secure. Find a way to satisfy the meticulous person’s need for logic and order.

This is the win/win approach to conflict resolution. When you take this approach, you look upon the conflict not as a battle that must be won, but as a problem that must be solved. The parties to the conflict get together and define the problem. Then they explore creative solutions.

EXPECT TO SUCCEED

Success rarely comes to those who expect failure. If you think you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail. If you expect to succeed, you’re likely to succeed.

Studies have shown that people tend to live up to high expectations. Classroom experience has shown that children of ordinary ability whose teachers expect them to perform well will do better than more gifted children whose teachers hold low expectations for them. The children adopt the teacher’s expectations and perform accordingly.

If you hold high expectations for yourself, you will perform up to those expectations. If you hold low expectations, you will perform down to them. That’s why it’s important to aim high with your vision and to set ambitious goals. If you expect above-average performance from yourself, you’ll get it.

As you meet the ambitious goals you set for yourself, your confidence will grow, your expectations of success will be higher, and you will move on to greater achievements. One way to create the expectation of success is to visualize yourself doing something perfectly. This is called mental rehearsal. In one famous experiment, members of a basketball team were divided into three groups. One group practiced free throws in the gym for twenty minutes a day for a month. Another group stayed away from the gym, but each player spent twenty minutes a day visualizing himself making perfect free throws. The third group neither practiced nor visualized. At the end of the month, the group that practiced in the gym had improved its free-throw average by 24 percent. The group that visualized itself making free throws improved by 23 percent. The third group showed no improvement.

The experiment provides dramatic evidence of the power of the subconscious mind. When the players consciously “saw” themselves making perfect free throws, their subconscious was unable to distinguish between visualization and reality. It therefore believed the players were successfully making the shots. When the time came to make the shots in reality, the subconscious mind set up the expectation of success that led to improved free-throw shooting.

You can use this same technique in whatever you are undertaking. Visualize yourself executing the strategies in your action plan, moving steadily and surely toward your goals. Imagine how you will feel when you have successfully completed each step.

For example, if you’re in sales, visualize yourself giving an effective sales presentation. In your imagination, allow the prospect to raise tough objections, and visualize yourself overcoming them, skillfully closing the sale. Imagine yourself receiving a plaque as salesperson of the year, winning a free trip to Hawaii, and enjoying the fruits of your success.

If your goal is to move into a management position, visualize yourself in your executive office suite. Imagine the way you would run your department, fashioning creative solutions to business challenges. See yourself enjoying the benefits of an executive’s salary and enjoying the perks of management.

PUT YOURSELF IN CHARGE

People who enjoy mental and emotional balance are self-reliant and self-determining. They don’t blame their troubles or shortcomings on any person, circumstance, or system. They look within themselves for answers as to how things got to be a certain way and how things can be changed for the better.

They know that if they don’t accept responsibility for their own circumstances, nobody else will. They will graciously accept help, but they are far more concerned with giving it. They make their decisions based on their own values and judgments. They work toward their own goals and live up to their own standards, respecting the views of others but refusing to be controlled by them.

If Christopher Columbus had been overly concerned about the views of others, he would never have sailed westward. If Robert Fulton had been governed by others’ perceptions, he would never have built a steamboat. If the Wright brothers had been bound by others’ perspectives, they would have remained earthbound.

Dream your own dreams and pursue your own goals. When you dream and then act in harmony with your dream, you create a powerful current that can sweep you toward the realization of that dream.

Figure 12–1

Figure 12–2