Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (6 page)

If people are rude or indifferent to you, you can experience their behavior as an attack on your personality or character. This interpretation of their attitude or behavior can make you angry or depressed.

Psychologists say that everything we do is to increase our self-esteem and sense of personal value, or to protect it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. If your self-esteem is not as high as it could be, you will be sensitive to the actions and reactions of other people toward you. You will take everything
personally
, exactly as if what they said or did was consciously and deliberately directed at you. However, this is seldom the case.

The fact is that most people are preoccupied with themselves and their own problems. As much as 99 percent of the time, people are wrapped up in their own thoughts about themselves. They de-vote the other 1 percent of emotional energy they have available to everyone else in the world, including you. The person who cuts you off in traffic is so involved with his own thoughts, he is not even aware of your existence. It would be silly to become angry or upset over his thoughtless action.

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SET YOUR OWN SAILS

There is a rule that I have learned from experience:
Never do or refrain from doing something because you are concerned about what people
might think about you. The fact is that nobody is even thinking about
you at all.

Of course, I am not talking about criminal or antisocial behaviors. But it is amazing how many people make decisions to get into or to
not
get into relationships, businesses, new endeav-ors, adventures, and other things for fear that someone else might not approve. They stay in marriages they hate, they work at jobs they dislike, or they turn down business opportunities for fear that someone, anyone, might criticize them. The truth is that no one cares more about your key life decisions than you do.

Plan accordingly.

In Abraham Maslow’s studies of self-actualizing people, those 1 or 2 percent of men and women who are fully mature, fully functioning adults, he found a particular quality that they all had in common:
They were completely honest with themselves.
They were objective and clear about their own strengths and weaknesses.

They did not hope or pretend that they were other than they were.

This self-acceptance was a foundation stone of their self-esteem and self-respect.

Because they knew who they were, and who they were not, they did not feel that they had to continually earn the approval of others.

They took the opinions of others into consideration, but then they made their own decisions. They were not overly influenced by the possible approval or disapproval of other people. You should do the same.You are the one who cares the most and who is most affected, in any case.

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THE RESPECT OF OTHERS

When Somerset Maugham, the famous English author, was asked by a reporter for his chief motivation for writing, he replied, “I write to earn the respect of the people I respect.” The fact is that much of what you do, or fail to do, is influenced by the same concern.You do many things in your social life to earn ccc_tracy_2_18-39.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 27

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the respect of the people you respect, or at least not to lose it. In fact, the people whose respect is most important to you largely determine how good you feel about yourself, both at home and at work. The respect of others has an inordinate influence on your self-esteem because it is so closely linked to your self-ideal and your self-image.

Exceptional men and women look up to and seek the respect of men and women of character and accomplishment. They strive, at an unconscious level, to behave and to live up to their ideals of how an excellent person would behave.

One of the most important decisions you make as you go through life is to decide for yourself the specific people whose respect is of the greatest value to you. Once you are clear about who you respect and why you respect them, you can then organize your life in such a way that you continually earn that respect, whether they know of your actions or not.

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SET HIGH STANDARDS

In the famous book
In His Steps
, by Charles M. Sheldon (Christian Library, 1984), an entire town agrees, prior to every act or decision, to ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” and then to behave accordingly. The eventual outcome for the townspeople was that the problems that had divided them were soon solved and the town became happy and prosperous. They created an
ideal
for themselves and then built their lives around living up to it.

In a study of successful men and women, most of whom had started from humble beginnings, researchers found that these people had almost all been avid readers of biographies and auto-biographies when they were young. As they read the life stories of famous men and women, they imagined themselves having the same qualities and characters of the people they were studying.

When they became adults themselves, those qualities and virtues had become part of their thinking and guided their choices and decisions in later life.

Modeling
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much as possible. In the military, the heroic acts of soldiers and sailors from the past are taught as part of the curriculum, encouraging young soldiers and sailors to think and act like them when the situation demands it.

The people you most admire and look up to have an inordinate influence on how you think and feel about yourself, and the kind of decisions you make. Who are
your
role models?

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CHOOSE YOUR ROLE

MODELS WITH CARE

There is nothing wrong with being thoughtful and concerned about the feelings and reactions of others toward you and your choices. When you select admirable people to look up to, you develop an inner guide that leads you to conduct yourself in an excellent way yourself.

What is silly and self-defeating however, is for you to allow yourself to be inordinately influenced by the fleeting opinions of people whose regard and respect is of no concern or value to you. If you have been raised with destructive criticism, you can easily slip into the trap of organizing your life around trying to gain the approval, or escape the disapproval, or people you don’t even know or care about.

Here is the way to avoid this form of negative emotion: Decide for yourself the men and women you most admire, and the qualities they have that you would most like to emulate.

From now on, when you have to make a decision, think about someone you admire and ask, “What would he or she do in this situation?”

When you ask this question, you actually connect at an unconscious level with a higher power that will then give you guidance and insight. You will experience a deep inner knowing of exactly the right thing to do or say. You will make the right decision and achieve the desired result. This is a technique used by many successful men and women. Give it a try and see what happens.

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THE WORST NEGATIVE

INFLUENCE OF ALL

The fourth major cause of negative emotions, according to Ouspensky, and the trigger of anger, resentment, envy, jealousy, and frustration of any kind is
blame
. It is blame especially that generates
anger
, the worst of all the negative emotions. Anger is more destructive than any force in the human world. Uncontrolled anger destroys health, relationships, families, businesses, and societies, and is the chief generator of wars, revolutions, and social conflict.

The primary cause of anger can be traced back to destructive criticism in early childhood. Whenever a person is criticized, he reacts exactly as if he is being attacked, with defensiveness and resentment. Since any behavior that you repeat over and over becomes a habit, many people develop the habit of responding with anger to every problem, disappointment, or frustration they experience. Eventually, they reach the point where they are always angry about something.

To become angry, a person must be able to blame someone for something that has happened or not happened that they don’t like or approve of. Many people are so preoccupied with blaming others for their problems that they lose contact with reality. They see the entire world through a lens of blame and its sister emotion, guilt.

Whenever there is a problem, personal or public, the angry person automatically concludes that someone must be to blame. The individual then spends his time and emotion apportioning blame among various parties. This obsession with blame and anger, leading to resentment and envy, can often consume the person who experiences it.

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NO ONE IS GUILTY

Here is a common example. Two people in love get married. Both of them have the best of intentions and the highest of expectations for the future, or they wouldn’t get married in the first place. Unfortunately, people and situations change over time. The couple finds that they are no longer happy together and decide to divorce. But then the problems really begin.

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Instead of agreeing, like adults, that they have reached a point where they are incompatible and they no longer want to live together, blame must be apportioned. Someone must be guilty. The guilty party must be punished. Lawyers and judges now have to get involved. Detectives and accountants are hired to dig up dirt on each party. The situation gets worse and worse, until it finally ends in anger, bitterness, accusations, and even hatred.

The best of solutions, when a marriage or a relationship does not work out, is to accept that fact as an unfortunate reality, make reasonable provisions for each party, and then for each person to get on with his or her life. Many couples are doing this today through mediation rather than going through the bitterness of a traditional divorce. The results turn out to be better for everyone involved.

It is a psychological fact that most people feel that they are right in whatever they do. But as soon as one person starts to blame the other, and even worse, demand that the other person admit to being guilty, the emotional and legal battles begin. The saddest part of these legal battles is that they usually end where they started, with no one having gained very much.

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ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY

The best way to eliminate anger of all kinds is to
accept responsibility
.

The acceptance of responsibility immediately short-circuits the emotion of anger. All the energy that anger requires for its existence is cut off. As soon as you say,
“I am responsible!”
your anger stops.

Because of the Law of Substitution and the fact that your mind can hold only one thought at a time, you cannot accept responsibility for your situation and be angry at the same time. The idea of blame, on which the emotion of anger is based, is canceled out by the decision to accept responsibility.

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POSITIVE VERSUS

NEGATIVE WORLDVIEWS

There are two basic ways of looking at your world. You can have a positive and
benevolent
worldview or a negative and
malevolent
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worldview. By taking responsibility for yourself and what happens to you, you become positive. You see the world in benevolent terms.You become more optimistic toward yourself and your possibilities.You become a happier and more effective person.

In contrast, when you take a negative or malevolent worldview, you see problems and injustice everywhere. You see oppression and evil. You see guilty people all around you. You see limitations and unfairness rather than opportunity and hope. Worst of all, you spend your time apportioning blame to various people and institu-tions for all the problems you see.

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DIFFERENCES IN RESULTS

For example, in this country, some people are better off than others.

This has been true of all societies throughout human history. This can be for various reasons. It may be the result of different people having different talents, ambitions, and desires. It may be the result of some people working harder, having a better start at life, being born with greater intelligence, or simply being at the right place at the right time to catch a favorable trend in the economy.

In any case, people who are well off are not to blame for the fat that other people are not well off. People who are healthy are not to blame for the fact that other people are sick. People who are successful and happy are not to blame for those who are unsuccessful and unhappy. People who are building a good life for themselves and their families are not at fault because other people are not.

Success does not cause failure.
Correlation is not causation
. Because both situations occur simultaneously, this does not mean that one caused the other. An honest acceptance of this simple fact would solve many arguments and disagreements at the philosophi-call and political levels.

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THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS

The root cause of negative emotions, the main factor that predisposes a person to blaming and to anger and resentment, fear and doubt, envy and jealousy, is the
inability to forgive
someone we feel has hurt us in some way.

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