Maximum Achievement

by Brian Tracy

  THE BREEDING GROUND

  Just as you are born with no self-concept, you are born without negative emotions. You have to be taught negative emotions as you are growing up. You usually learn the negative emotions that are the most popular in your family. You imitate the negative emotions and reactions of your mother or your father, or both. You imitate the negative emotions of the people with whom you identify. If someone suggests to you that your way of acting is inappropriate, you dismiss their input by saying, “That’s just the way I am.”

  Often, you’ve had certain negative ideas for so long that you’re not even aware of them, or where they came from originally. But one thing you can be sure of: You weren’t born with them. They are not permanent. You can be free of them if you want to be.

  THE ROOTS OF NEGATIVITY

  You develop a propensity for negative emotions as a result of two experiences that happen to you early in life. The first of these experiences is destructive criticism. More damage has been caused and more people destroyed by destructive criticism than by all the wars in history. The difference is that wars kill the physical bodies of people while destructive criticism destroys the inner person and leaves the bodies walking around. Virtually every problem you have with yourself and with other people can be traced back to some incident in which your value and worth were challenged or attacked by some sort of criticism.

  Children up to the age of six are open and vulnerable to the influences of the important people in their lives. They have no capacity to discriminate between true and false evaluations and criticisms. The child’s mind is like wet clay upon which their parents and siblings write and leave marks. And the more intense the emotion, the deeper the groove.

  When you grow older and develop the powers of discrimination, you can “consider the source” of negative input. If someone criticizes you, or disagrees with you, you can stand back and judge whether the assessment is valid. You can choose to accept what you consider to be helpful and reject the rest.

  When you’re a child, however, you have no such ability. Because you are still in the process of learning who you are, you are like a little sponge. You absorb the evaluations of the important people around you as if they were telling the absolute truth, as if they were actually in a position to know your true character and capabilities. The more you value their love and respect, the more likely you are to accept what they say about you as a valid assessment of your character and worth. And once you accept something as true about yourself, you begin to see yourself by the light of that belief.

  Your mind attempts to serve you by validating what you’ve decided is correct about you. It sorts and winnows your perceptions. It causes you to see examples that “prove” your beliefs while simultaneously causing you to ignore experiences that contradict it.

  If you’re told that “you’re a bad boy,” or “you can’t be trusted,” or “you’re a liar” (all children tell lies; it’s part of their learning how to interact with other people), you start to believe that these criticisms are indelible facts about your basic personality. If you accept them consciously, they are then accepted by your subconscious mind where they are recorded as instructions for future behavior.

  When I was growing up, I was told that I would never amount to much, that I was a big disappointment to my parents. Not meaning to, they judged me by impossibly high standards. Not understanding that children are little learning organisms who make mistakes continually, they demanded behavior of me, their first child, that I wasn’t capable of delivering.

  When I had my own children, I resolved not to do to them what was done to me. Instead, I tell them every day that I love them and that I think they are the best kids in the world. When we are driving together, I talk to Barbara as if they weren’t in the backseat and tell her how lucky we are to have such wonderful children. Privately, I whisper to each of them, “You’re the best in the West!”

  Even when I have to reprimand them, I start by saying, “I love you very much, but you mustn’t do that because you could get hurt,” or whatever is necessary.

  Parents criticize with the intention of helping the child, of improving the child’s performance. But because destructive criticism lowers the child’s self-esteem and weakens the self-concept, the child’s overall performance actually declines. The child’s self-confidence diminishes. The likelihood of the child’s making mistakes increases. If the child is criticized too often, or if the criticisms are taken too emotionally, the child will become anxious and afraid and will begin to avoid doing those things altogether.

  In the worst case, the child will become hypersensitive and will be insecure and afraid of trying anything new. When the child grows up, he or she will be extremely emotional about criticism of any kind and will react angrily and defensively to any suggestion of disapproval from a spouse, boss, friend or coworker.

  Everyone has areas where they are hypersensitive, usually in the parts of their lives where they have the greatest emotional investment, such as their families or careers. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to develop a certain objectivity or detachment about criticism in these key areas. Learn to stand back and evaluate the opinions of others unemotionally. It’s not easy, but it saves a lot of wear and tear on your system. This ability to avoid being overly affected by the criticism of others is a key quality of the self-actualizing person.

  THE DESTROYER OF HAPPINESS

  The second factor that predisposes you to negative emotions is a lack of love. The most traumatic experience a child can endure is the withdrawal of love by one or both of his parents. When parents react to the child with anger and disapproval, the child is terrified. He or she feels anxious and fearful and flails around emotionally. Because the child needs his or her parents’ love so much, when it’s withheld for any reason, he or she begins to wither inside. If the love is withheld indefinitely, or given unpredictably, it causes severe personality problems that erupt in anger and negativity in adult life.

  If you did not receive a sufficient quality and quantity of love during your formative years (and most people did not), you seek it all your life. You will continually feel an emotional deficiency, a longing, an insecurity, that you will strive to satisfy or compensate for. You will look for unconditional love in your relationships and you’ll feel tense and uneasy if love is interrupted or withheld. Just as early calcium deficiency causes rickets in children, which shows up as bowed legs in the adult, a deficiency of love in childhood is manifested in negative emotions when you grow up.

  THREE CONDITIONS

  For you, or anyone, to feel completely loved as a child, three conditions must exist. An absence of any one of these three will appear in adolescence and adulthood in the form of insecurity, negative emotions and destructive behavior.

  The first condition for healthy emotional development is that your parents must love themselves. Your parents cannot give you more love than they have for themselves. If your mother or father doesn’t like himself or herself very much, he or she will have little love to give to you. The rule is that high self-concept parents raise high self-concept children, while low-concept parents raise low self-concept children. As within, so without. The self-concepts of the children become mirrors of the self-concepts of their parents.

  Your parents gave you all the love they had to give. They didn’t withhold any. They just didn’t have any more to give in the first place. There wasn’t anything you could have done to get any more than you got. You got all there was.

  The second condition that must be fulfilled for a child to feel fully loved is that his or her parents must love each other. Children learn about love by experiencing it directly and by observing it taking place in their families. It has been said that the kindest thing that a man can do for his children is to love their mother, and the reverse is also true. When children grow up in a household in which the mother and father love each other in a way the children can see and experience, they are far more likely to
grow up with feelings of security and self-confidence.

  You learn how to have your own adult relationship with a member of the opposite sex by observing such a relationship in your own family. If you grew up in a household in which you didn’t experience it, you can spend the first few years of your adulthood learning how to get along with another person by trial and error. Many first marriages today are “practice marriages,” in which individuals learn how to be married. They learn what it is they want or don’t want in a marriage partner and how to make a relationship work.

  The third condition that must exist for a child to feel fully loved is that the parents must love the child. This is one of the most sensitive subjects that an adult ever has to deal with. The fact is that many of our parents did not love us. They wanted to, and they intended to, and they planned to, but they never really got around to it. Perhaps they didn’t have the time, or the emotional energy, or the interest, or perhaps they had unresolved conflicts with their parents or with their spouses that made loving us impossible.

  Many parents do not like their children very much. Sometimes this is because they start off with the idea that the role of the child is to fulfill their expectations. If the child has a personality of his or her own, the parents often take this as a personal affront. They respond by criticizing the child or withdrawing their love. If they do this for long enough, it eventually becomes a habit. Parents then get into the habit of criticizing and tolerating their children instead of loving and cherishing them.

  It is important for you to know that whether or not your parents loved you, you are still a valuable and worthwhile person. Your parents’ love or lack of love says nothing about your inherent possibilities. Parents are what they are. They do the best they can. At the very least, they got you here and gave you a chance at life. Accepting that one or both of your parents may not have loved you, or may not have loved you enough, is an important step to full maturity.

  Most adults were brought up in homes in which they were the victims of destructive criticism, and they suffered a lack of love in some way. If this was your experience, you were too young to know why this was happening. You merely internalized the message that “for some reason, my mommy and daddy criticize me and don’t love me. Since they know me better than anyone else, it must be because of something I’ve done.”

  Destructive criticism and lack of love, in combination, create the negative emotion of guilt. Guilt is the major emotional problem of the twentieth century. It is the root cause of most mental illness, unhappiness and almost all other negative emotions. A child who feels guilty feels that he or she is not worth very much, that he or she is, in fact, worthless. Destructive criticism and lack of love instill in the child’s subconscious mind the feeling of worthlessness.

  Guilt is used on people deliberately for two reasons: punishment and control. Using guilt on another person as a form of emotional punishment is extremely effective. It is an essential part of negative religious teachings. It is used by many parents to make their children feel bad, to make them feel worthless and insignificant.

  Guilt is also used as a tool of control or manipulation. If you can make a person feel guilty, you can control their emotions and their behavior. If you can make them feel guilty enough, you can get them to do things for you that they might not do in the absence of those guilty feelings.

  Mothers are often skilled at the use of guilt. I used to say that my mother had a black belt in guilt and gave courses at the local YMCA. My mother learned to use guilt as a tool of interaction from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on back through the generations. Fathers are often skillful at using guilt as well.

  ADULT MANIFESTATIONS OF GUILT

  If you were raised under the influences that produce feelings of guilt, you will experience this guilt in several different ways.

  The first and most common manifestation of guilt is feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and undeservingness. You feel that you do not deserve good things to happen to you. In fact, if several good things happen to you in a row, you will become extremely uncomfortable. You will feel out of your comfort zone of deservingness, and you will probably start engaging in self-sabotaging behavior to stop the good things from happening.

  The truth is that you deserve all the good things that come to you when you keep your mind focused on what you want and keep it off what you don’t want.

  These feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and undeservingness are often expressed in the words, “I’m not good enough.” Some psychologists refer to this as the “fear of success.” The fear of success is simply another way of saying that, because of your deep down feelings of unworthiness, any achievement that contradicts your self-limiting beliefs makes you feel uncomfortable.

  Very often, people will work extremely hard for the success they desire. They will put in long hours and make great sacrifices. However, just as they almost reach their goal, something will go wrong. They will act consciously or unconsciously to kick the chair out from under themselves.

  The salesman on his way to close the deal of a lifetime gets into an automobile accident. The lawyer on the way to the signing of a big contract leaves his briefcase in the taxi with the only copy of the contract locked inside. Many people turn to alcohol, drugs or extramarital affairs in an attempt to escape from the discomfort of succeeding in spite of their inner feelings of unworthiness.

  The second adult manifestation of guilt is destructive self-criticism and self-defeating behavior. If one is criticized while one is growing up, one soon learns to criticize oneself, and continues it through life. You often hear people say things like, “I’m always late,” or “I’m terrible with numbers,” or “I’m not very good at this.” They are continually reinforcing negative ideas that may have little or no basis in fact. They are repeating what they’ve been told about themselves, and in so doing, making it their reality.

  Your subconscious mind accepts whatever you say about yourself as true. When you constantly criticize yourself, your subconscious mind accepts your words as commands. Your subsequent words and actions will then fit a pattern consistent with your self-criticism. You will behave on the outside the way you talk to yourself on the inside.

  The third way you demonstrate that you’ve been raised with feelings of guilt is that you are easily manipulated by guilt. You are an easy mark for the irritation or impatience that others use to manipulate your behavior. Even people you don’t know can pull your “guilt-strings” and make you feel uncomfortable or even acquiesce to their demands. You become like a puppet, and the guilt-thrower becomes the puppeteer.

  Virtually all charitable solicitations are based on the skillful use of guilt to manipulate your emotions, to make you feel that you are undeserving of your standard of living and your accomplishments.

  Taxi drivers, waitresses and flight attendants use guilt on you to control your behavior. I know, for example, that you lose a pint of water per hour through dehydration when you fly. I therefore drink a lot of water in the air. I continually ask for refills to my water glass.

  Most stewardesses resent this. They know all about dehydration and they are schooled to drink fluids continually when they fly. But they don’t want the extra work of refilling your water glass. So instead of asking, “Can I get you anything else,” they ask, “Will that be all?”

  If you ask for more water, they sigh heavily, as if you just asked them to carry a hundred-pound suitcase, and go off to get it for you. When they bring it back, they tend to be abrupt and disapproving, as if this will cow you into submission so they can go back to the galley and continue reading their magazines.

  You need to be aware of how commonly guilt is used as a tool to influence you. You will see it everywhere.

  The poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”

  The fourth manifestation of guilt is using guilt and blame with others. If you were raised as a victim of guilt, being constantly criticized and bl
amed, you will grow up and use guilt as a way of communicating with others. Many parents use guilt exclusively to get their children to do what they want. Many bosses rely on guilt as their primary method of control.

  The fifth manifestation of guilt, and perhaps the most common, is the development of the “victim complex.” The individual feels like a victim and talks like a victim. The person with deep feelings of guilt is always making excuses or apologizing. He or she is always saying, in effect, “I’m sorry.” In addition, he or she uses “victim language,” ways of speaking that are really pleas of “not guilty.”

  Perhaps the most common forms of victim language you hear are phrases like “I can’t” or “I have to,” or combination phrases such as “I have to, but I can’t; I can’t, but I have to.”

  Another form of victim language is the word “trying.” Whenever people say “I’ll try,” they are apologizing for failure in advance. They are telegraphing their belief that they are going to fail in whatever it is they are saying they will try to do. And you intuitively know that these words are signals for upcoming failure.

  If you went to a lawyer and you asked him to defend you in a lawsuit, and he examined your case and replied by saying, “Well, I’ll sure try,” how would you feel?

  If you went to a doctor with a life-threatening condition, and you said to the doctor, “I sure hope you can help me,” and the doctor said, “Well, I’ll try,” it would be time for you to get a second opinion.

  The words “I’ll try” mean “I’m going to fail at this, and I want you to know in advance so that you can’t come back to me later and say that I didn’t give you any warning. If you do come back I can remind you that I only said that I would try.”