by Brian Tracy
If you expect good things to happen to you, you’ll be positive and optimistic in your approach to people and situations. If you look for the good in others, you’ll probably find it. If you expect something wonderful to happen to you today, it probably will.
Positive expectations are the mark of the superior personality. They create in you an attitude of positive expectancy that goes hand in hand with happiness and self-confidence. They give you a form of mental resilience, a nonchalant optimism that enables you to respond constructively to the challenges you face every day. And as I said in Chapter Two, you can manufacture your own expectations by deciding to do so.
Where then do your expectations come from? Penetrating the layers of personality one by one is the only way to get right to the root cause of the way you think and feel. It is the only way to bring about rapid and permanent changes in your life and in your performance. Everything is from the inner to the outer. What you are doing and saying on the outside always has its roots in your inner life.
Your expectations are determined by your beliefs about yourself and the world you live in. Your expectations about people, work and every part of your life are generated by what you believe to be true in that area. Even if you have false or self-limiting beliefs, they will manifest themselves in your expectations, your attitudes and ultimately, in your results.
According to the law of belief, if you have a benevolent world view, if you believe that the world is a good place and that you are a good person, then you will expect the best from yourself, from others and from the situations you encounter. Your positive expectations will be expressed in a positive mental attitude and, by the Law of Correspondence, people will reflect back to you your attitude toward them. You will get back what you give out.
Your beliefs therefore determine the quality of your personality. And where do your beliefs come from? This brings us to perhaps the greatest breakthrough in psychology in the twentieth century—the discovery of the “self-concept.”
THE MASTER PROGRAM
Your self-concept is your bundle of beliefs about yourself and about every part of your life and your world. It is the “master program” of your subconscious computer. The Law of Belief says that your beliefs determine your reality because you always see the world through a screen of prejudices formed by your belief structure. Your self-concept, your belief structure, precedes and predicts your performance and behavior in every area of your life. You always act in a manner consistent with your self-concept, consistent with the bundle of beliefs that you have acquired from infancy onward.
In other words, you are where you are and what you are because of what you believe yourself to be. Whether you are rich or poor, happy or unhappy, fat or thin, successful or unsuccessful, your beliefs make you this way.
If you change your beliefs in any area of your life, you begin immediately to change in that area. Your expectations, your attitudes, your behavior and your results all change.
Your outer world is an expression of your inner world, and cannot be otherwise. “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
Each of us has been programmed to walk, talk, think and act the way we do today. You cannot think, feel or behave any differently on the outside unless you change your master program, your self-concept, on the inside. A negative or erroneous idea in your self-concept will be expressed in negative attitudes and behavior in your life and relationships.
But you can change your program, your self-concept, by replacing self-limiting ideas and beliefs with self-liberating thoughts. You can begin to think of yourself as you want to be rather than as you are. You can decide to make every part of your life positive, exciting and uplifting. You can create your life as a masterpiece. And when you do, these new constructive thoughts begin immediately to clothe themselves in their physical realities.
ASPECTS OF YOUR SELF-CONCEPT
There is a direct relationship between how well you do anything and your self-concept in that area. You perform as well as you believe yourself capable of performing. You are as effective as you believe yourself to be in whatever you do. You can never be better or different on the outside than you believe yourself to be on the inside.
Whenever you feel good about yourself and are doing well at your job, or in your relationships, or at a sport, you are demonstrating a positive self-concept in that area. Whenever you do poorly or feel inferior or clumsy, or behave badly in some situation, your negative beliefs about yourself are being demonstrated in your behavior. As within, so without.
What makes positive change possible for you is that your self-concept is largely subjective, not objective. Your beliefs about yourself, especially your self-limiting beliefs and doubts, are not based on fact at all. Negative ideas about yourself and your abilities are usually based on false information and impressions you have taken in and accepted as true.
As soon as you begin to reject these self-limiting ideas, they begin to lose their power over you. By deliberately changing your self-concept, your true potential becomes unlimited.
A young man, about twenty-five, who came to my seminar was working as a construction laborer. During our discussion of the influence of the self-concept, he had a mental shock. The lights went on for him. He was stunned.
He told me that his father, an uneducated working man, had told his children continually, “Our family has always been laborers and we always will be. It’s our lot in life. That’s just the way it is.” As he grew up hearing this, he accepted it as a fact, a belief, and when he left school, he went to work as a laborer.
In the seminar, he suddenly realized that he had bought his father’s limited outlook on life without question. He had swallowed his father’s belief system whole. He looked at himself and the world the way his father had.
Now, seven years later, he was still “working by the sweat of his brow.” He had inadvertently allowed his father to shape his self-concept with regard to his work and his possibilities. He saw how his beliefs about himself had shaped his expectations and his attitude. He realized that he had continually attracted only laboring opportunities and that his outer world, his relationships and his lifestyle had all been determined by his beliefs.
He decided at that moment that he didn’t like being a laborer. He had always felt he could do much more, but he had also felt trapped. Now, he experienced a new sense of freedom and control. He realized for the first time that his limitations were on the inside, not on the outside.
After the seminar, he quit his laboring job and got into sales, starting at the bottom. He did poorly at first, but he was determined. He read every book he could find on selling. He listened to every audiocassette program. He attended every sales seminar available in his area and he even traveled to seminars in other cities.
We kept in touch. Within one year, he had doubled his income. In two years, he was making four times as much. He went to the top of his sales force and was soon hired away for more money and greater opportunity.
Within five years he was making more than one hundred thousand dollars per year, had a beautiful home, a lovely wife, two children and an exciting future lying before him. He was the master of his own destiny.
The turning point for him, as it was for me and thousands of others, was learning how his self-concept controlled his life and then deciding to change it. Everything followed from that.
Not only do you have an overall self-concept, which is a general summary of your beliefs about yourself, but you also have a series of “mini-self-concepts.” These parts of your self-concept control your performance and your behavior in each individual area of your life that you consider important.
You have a self-concept for how much you weigh, for how much you eat, for how much you exercise or for how fit you are. You have a self-concept for how you dress and how you appear to other people. You have a self-concept of yourself as a parent, and as a child to your parents. You have a self-concept for how popular you are, at work and amo
ng your friends.
You have a self-concept for how well you play each sport and even for how well you play each part of each sport. A golfer may have one self-concept as a great driver and another self-concept as a poor putter, and that’s the way he or she will play.
If you are in sales, you have an overall self-concept for how good you are as a salesperson, which determines how well you do in sales. You also have individual self-concepts for how good you are at prospecting, identifying needs, presenting solutions, answering objections and closing. In each of these areas, you will be relaxed and competent, or tense and unsure, depending upon how you think of yourself performing those tasks.
You have a self-concept for how well-organized and efficient you are, in both your personal and your work life. And you will always behave in a manner consistent with your self-concept. You cannot behave in a way that is different from your subconscious programming any more than a computer could decide to disregard its programming.
You have an overall self-concept for how competent you are in your field and for how much money you are capable of earning. You can never rise much higher than your self-concept level of ability or earn much more or less than your self-concept level of income.
In fact, if you earn more than 10 percent above or below what you feel you are worth, you will feel very uncomfortable. You will immediately begin engaging in compensatory behavior. If you earn 10 percent too much, you will begin to spend the money, lend it, invest it in things you know nothing about or even give it away or lose it. Such “throw-away” behavior is practiced by anyone who suddenly finds himself or herself with more money than is consistent with his or her self-concept.
There are many stories of men and women who have won large sums of money in various lotteries. In most cases, if they were working at laboring jobs when they won the money, in two or three years they were back working at the same jobs, their money was gone, and they had no idea where it went.
If you earn 10 percent or more below your self-concept level of income, you begin to engage in “scrambling” behavior. You begin to think more creatively, work longer and harder, look at second-income opportunities or think about changing jobs in order to get your income back up into your self-concept range.
Where money, weight or anything else is concerned, you gradually get into your various “comfort zones,” and once there, you do everything possible to stay there. You resist change of any kind, even positive change.
The comfort zone is the great enemy of human potential. Your comfort zones become habits of living that are hard to break. And any habit persisted in over time eventually becomes a rut. Then, instead of using your intelligence to get out of your rut, you use most of your energies making your rut more comfortable. You justify and rationalize your situation as being unchangeable. You feel and say, “There’s nothing I can do.”
But there is a lot you can do to change your future. In the pages to come, you will learn how to break out of your comfort zones. You will learn how to step up to the keyboard of your own mental computer and input a new belief system for yourself. You will learn how to redesign your self-concept so you can get more of whatever you really want in life.
THE THREE PARTS OF YOUR SELF-CONCEPT
Your self-concept is made up of three parts, like three layers of a cake. The first of these three parts is your self-ideal. This is the vision or ideal description of the person that you would most like to be in every respect. This ideal image exerts a powerful influence on your behavior and on the way you think about yourself.
Your self-ideal is a combination of the qualities and attributes that you admire most in other people, living and dead. It is the sum of your dominant aspirations. It is your vision of what the perfect person should be.
Exceptional men and women have very clear self-ideals, toward which they are constantly striving. They set high standards for themselves and strive to live up to them. And so can you. The more clear you are about the person you want to become, the more likely it is that, day by day, you will evolve into that person. You will rise to the height of your dominant aspirations for yourself. You will become what you most admire.
Sadly, unsuccessful and unhappy men and women have very fuzzy ideals, or in most cases, no self-ideals at all. They give little or no thought to the person they want to be or to the qualities that they would like to develop in themselves. Their growth and evolution eventually slows and stops. They get stuck in a mental rut and they stay there. They lose all impetus for self-improvement.
When one looks up to, and respects, the qualities of integrity, purposefulness, courage and action orientation in others, one begins to incorporate those values in oneself.
As you clarify your fundamental values and work to integrate them into everything you do, your personality improves, and because your outer life reflects your inner life, your work, your relationships and every aspect of your outer life improves as well. More about this later.
The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image is the way you see yourself, and the way you think about yourself, as you go about your daily activities. Your self-image is often called your “inner mirror,” into which you look to see how you are supposed to behave or perform in a particular situation. You always behave consistently with the picture that you hold of yourself on the inside. Because of this, you can improve your performance by deliberately changing the mental pictures that you hold about yourself in that area.
This process of self-image modification is one of the fastest and most dependable ways to improve your performance. As you begin to see yourself and think about yourself as more competent and confident, your behavior becomes more focused and effective.
When you deliberately change your self-image, as you’ll learn to do later in this chapter, you’ll walk, talk, act and feel better than you ever have before. You will change both your personality and your results by changing your mental images.
The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. Your self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. It is the emotional component of your personality, and it is the foundation quality of high performance. It is the key to happiness and personal effectiveness. It is like the reactor core in a nuclear power plant. It is the source of the energy, enthusiasm, vitality and optimism that powers your personality and makes you into a high-achieving man or woman.
Your level of self-esteem is determined by two factors, which are like the opposite sides of the same coin. The first is how valuable and worthwhile you feel about yourself, how much you like and accept yourself as a good person. This is the “personal assessment” side of self-esteem. This is your rating of yourself, aside from what is going on in your life at the moment.
This first factor is not dependent upon external variables. A person with genuinely high self-esteem can have innumerable difficulties and setbacks in life and still retain a high, positive estimate of himself or herself as a human being. Unfortunately, there are very few people who have reached this state of evolution where they can retain a sense of inner value independent of external circumstances.
The second factor determining your level of self-esteem is your feeling of “self-efficacy,” how competent and capable you feel you are in whatever you do. This is the “performance-based” side of self-esteem. It is the bedrock upon which most real and lasting self-confidence and self-respect are built.
These two parts of your self-esteem reinforce each other. When you feel good about yourself, you perform better. And when you perform well, you feel good about yourself. Both are essential. Neither can endure without the other.
The best measure of self-esteem is how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the better you do at everything you put your mind to. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have, the more positive is your attitude, the healthier and more energetic you are and the happier you are overall.
And since how you feel is largely determined by how you talk to yoursel
f, silently or aloud, you can raise your self-esteem at will by saying, over and over, with enthusiasm and conviction, the words “I like myself! I like myself! I like myself!”
Or, better yet, you can say “I love myself! I love myself! I love myself!” This may sound corny when you first hear it, but it is extremely powerful. As an experiment, look up from this page and say to yourself, as if you meant it from the bottom of your heart, “I like myself!” several times. Better yet, look in the next mirror you pass and say “I like myself.” You’ll find that you can’t say this five or six times without feeling genuinely better about yourself.
We have taught this to our children. Whenever they are unhappy or misbehaving, we coax them into saying, “I like myself,” and they soon break out in smiles and cheer up. It seems that the more open and receptive a person is to this message, the greater the impact it has on his or her personality.
Liking yourself is very healthy. In fact, it is the key to personal effectiveness and to happy relationships with others. The more you like and respect yourself, the better you perform in everything you do. You are more relaxed and positive. You are more confident about your abilities. You make fewer mistakes. You have more energy and you are more creative.
Some people have been taught to believe that liking yourself is the same as being conceited or obnoxious. But exactly the opposite is true. Both the “superiority complex,” behaving in an arrogant or conceited way, and the “inferiority complex,” behaving in a self-deprecating way, are manifestations of low self-esteem, of not liking oneself very much at all. People with genuine self-esteem get along easily and well with just about everyone.
THE RULES OF SELF-ESTEEM
There are two rules of self-esteem and self-liking: Rule number one is that you can never like or love anyone else more than you like or love yourself. You can’t give away what you don’t have.