فصل 14

Chapter FOURTEEN

How to Get That Winning Feeling

Your automatic Creative Mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend on its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than you ever could by conscious thought. You supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the “means whereby.” If your muscles need to perform some motion to bring about the end result, your automatic mechanism will guide them much more accurately and delicately than you could by “taking thought.” If you need ideas, your automatic mechanism will supply them.

Think in Terms of Possibilities

But to accomplish this, you must supply the goal. And to supply a goal capable of activating your Creative Mechanism, you must think of the end result in terms of a present possibility. The possibility of the goal must be seen so clearly that it becomes “real” to your brain and nervous system. So real, in fact, that the same feelings are evoked as would be present if the goal were already achieved.

This is not so difficult or as mystical as it may first appear. You and I do it every day of our lives. What, for example, is worry about? It’s about possible unfavorable future results, accompanied by feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, or perhaps humiliation. For all practical purposes we experience the very same emotions in advance that would be appropriate if we had already failed. We picture failure to ourselves, not vaguely, or in general terms, but vividly and in great detail. We repeat the failure images over and over again to ourselves. We go back in memory and dredge up memory images of past failures.

Remember what has been emphasized earlier: Our brain and nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real experience, and one that is vividly imagined. Our automatic Creative Mechanism always acts and reacts appropriately to the environment, circumstance, or situation. The only information concerning the environment, circumstance, or situation available to it is what you believe to be true concerning it.

Your Nervous System Can’t Tell Real Failure from Imagined Failure

Thus, if we dwell upon failure, and continually picture failure to ourselves in such vivid detail that it becomes real to our nervous system, we will experience the feelings that go with failure.

On the other hand, if we keep our positive goal in mind, and picture it to ourselves so vividly as to make it “real,” and think of it in terms of an accomplished fact, we will also experience winning feelings: self-confidence, courage, and faith that the outcome will be desirable.

We cannot consciously peek into our Creative Mechanism and see whether it is geared for success or failure. But we can determine its present “set” by our feelings. When it is “set for success” we experience that “winning feeling.” Setting Your Machinery for Success

If there is one simple secret to the operation of your unconscious Creative Mechanism, it is this: call up, capture, evoke the feeling of success. When you feel successful and self-confident, you will act successfully. When the feeling is strong, you can literally do no wrong.

The “winning feeling” itself does not cause you to operate successfully, but is more in the nature of a sign or symptom that you are geared for success. It is more like a thermometer, which does not cause the heat in the room but measures it. However, we can use this thermometer in a very practical way. Remember: When you experience that winning feeling, your internal machinery is set for success.

Too much effort to consciously bring about spontaneity is likely to destroy spontaneous action. It is much easier and more effective to simply define your goal or end result. Picture it to yourself clearly and vividly. Then simply capture the feeling you would experience if the desirable goal were already an accomplished fact. Then you are acting spontaneously and creatively. Then you are using the powers of your subconscious mind. Then your internal machinery is geared for success: to guide you in making the correct muscular motions and adjustments; to supply you with creative ideas, and to do whatever else is necessary in order to make the goal an accomplished fact.

How That Winning Feeling Won a Golf Tournament

Dr. Cary Middlecoff, writing in Esquire magazine, said that the “Winning Feeling” is the real secret of championship golf. “Four days before I hit my first drive in the Masters . . . I had a feeling I was sure to win that tournament,” he said. “I felt that every move I made in getting to the top of my backswing put my muscles in perfect position to hit the ball exactly as I wanted to. And in putting, too, that marvelous feeling came to me. I knew I hadn’t changed my grip any, and my feet were in the usual position. But there was something about the way I felt that gave me a line to the cup just as clearly as if it had been tattooed on my brain. With that feeling all I had to do was swing the clubs and let nature take its course.” Middlecoff went on to say that the winning feeling is “everybody’s secret of good golf,” that when you have it, the ball even bounces right for you, and that it seems to control that elusive element called luck.

Don Larsen, the only man in history to pitch a perfect game in the World Series, said that the night before, he “had the crazy feeling” that he would pitch perfectly the next day.

In the 1950s, sports pages all over the country headlined the sensational play of Johnny Menger, the diminutive halfback from Georgia Tech, in a postseason bowl game. “I had the feeling when I got up that morning I was going to have a good day,” said Menger.

Getting the “winning feeling” is not just about “winning” a game or an event. It’s also about how you feel when you’re at your best and remembering that feeling so you can repeat it again and again. Whenever you can remember the feeling as well as what you did to create it, you have access to the experience again and again.

“This May Be Tough, but It Can Be Licked”

There is truly magic in this “winning feeling.” It can seemingly cancel out obstacles and impossibilities. It can use errors and mistakes to accomplish success. J. C. Penney tells how he heard his father say on his deathbed, “I know Jim will make it.” From that time onward, Penney felt that he would succeed somehow, although he had no tangible assets, no money, no education. The chain of J. C. Penney stores was built upon many impossible circumstances and discouraging moments. Whenever Penney would get discouraged, however, he would remember the prediction of his father, and he would “feel” that somehow he could whip the problem facing him.

After making a fortune, he lost it all at an age when most men have long since been retired. He found himself penniless, past his prime, and with little tangible evidence to furnish reason for hope. But again he remembered the words of his father, and soon recaptured the winning feeling, which had now become habitual with him. He rebuilt his fortune, and in a few years was operating more stores than ever.

Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser has said, “When a tough, challenging job is to be done, I look for a person who possesses an enthusiasm and optimism for life, who makes a zestful confident attack on his daily problems, one who shows courage and imagination, who pins down his buoyant spirit with careful planning and hard work, but says, ‘This may be tough, but it can be licked.’” How That Winning Feeling Made Les Giblin Successful

Les Giblin, author of How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People, read the first draft of this chapter, then told me how imagination coupled with that winning feeling had worked like magic in his own career.

Les had been a successful salesman and sales manager for years. He had done some public relations work, and had gained some degree of reputation as an expert in the field of human relations. He liked his work but he wanted to broaden his field. His big interest was people, and after years of study, both theoretical and practical, he thought he had some answers to the problems people often have with other people. He wanted to lecture on human relations. However, his one big obstacle was lack of experience in public speaking. Les told me: One night, I was lying in bed thinking of my one big desire. The only experience I had had as a public speaker was addressing small groups of my own salesmen in sales meetings, and a little experience I had had in the Army when I served part-time as an instructor. The very thought of getting up before a big audience scared the wits out of me. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing it successfully. Yet, I could talk to my own salesmen with the greatest of ease. I had been able to talk to groups of soldiers without any trouble. Lying there in bed, I recaptured in memory the feeling of success and confidence I had had in talking to these small groups. I remembered all the little incidental details that had accompanied my feeling of poise. Then, in my imagination I pictured myself standing before a huge audience and making a talk on human relations—and at the same time having the same feeling of poise and self-confidence I had had with smaller groups. I pictured to myself in detail just how I would stand. I could feel the pressure of my feet on the floor, I could see the expressions on the people’s faces, and I could hear their applause. I saw myself making a talk successfully—going over with a bang.

Something seemed to click in my mind. I felt elated. Right at that moment I felt that I could do it. I had welded the feeling of confidence and success from the past to the picture in my imagination of my career in the future. My feeling of success was so real that I knew right then I could do it. I got what you call ‘that winning feeling’ and it has never deserted me. Although there seemed to be no door open to me at the time, and the dream seemed impossible, in less than three years’ time I saw my dream come true—almost in exact detail as I had imagined it and felt it. Because of the fact that I was relatively unknown and because of my lack of experience, no major booking agency wanted me. This didn’t deter me. I booked myself, and still do. I have more opportunities for speaking engagements than I can fill.

Today, Les Giblin is remembered as an authority on human relations. His book How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People has become a classic in the field. And it all started with a picture in his imagination and “that winning feeling.” How Science Explains That Winning Feeling

The science of cybernetics throws new light on just how the winning feeling operates. We have previously shown how electronic servo-mechanisms make use of stored data, comparable to human memory, to “remember” successful actions and repeat them.

Skill learning is largely a matter of trial-and-error practice until a number of “hits,” or successful actions, have registered in memory.

Cybernetic scientists have built what they call an “electronic mouse” that can learn its way through a maze. The first time through the mouse makes numerous errors. It constantly bumps into walls and obstructions. But each time it bumps into an obstruction, it turns 90 degrees and tries again. If it runs into another wall, it makes another turn, and goes forward again. Eventually, after many, many errors, stops, and turns, the mouse gets through the open space in the maze. The electronic mouse, however, “remembers” the turns that were successful, and the next time through, these successful motions are reproduced or “played back” and the mouse goes through the open space quickly and efficiently.

The object of practice is to make repeated trials, constantly correcting errors, until a “hit” is scored. When a successful pattern of action is performed, the entire action pattern from beginning to end is not only stored in what we call conscious memory, but in our very nerves and tissues. Folk language can be very intuitive and descriptive. When we say, “I had a feeling in my bones that I could do it,” we are not far from wrong. When Dr. Cary Middlecoff says, “There was something about the way I felt that gave me a line to the cup just as clearly as if it had been tattooed on my brain,” he is, perhaps unknowingly, very aptly describing the latest scientific concept of just what happens in the human mind when we learn, remember, or imagine.

How Your Brain Records Success and Failure

Such experts in the field of brain physiology as Dr. John C. Eccles and Sir Charles Sherrington explained that the human cortex is composed of some 10 billion neurons, each with numerous axons (feelers or “extension wires”) that form synapses (electrical connections) between the neurons. When we think, remember, or imagine, these neurons discharge an electrical current that can be measured. When we learn something, or experience something, a pattern of neurons forming a “chain” (or tattooing of a pattern) is set up in brain tissue. This “pattern” is not in the nature of a physical “groove” or “track” but more in the nature of an “electrical track”—the arrangement and electrical connections between various neurons being somewhat similar to a magnetic pattern recorded on tape. The same neuron may thus be a part of any number of separate and distinct patterns, making the human brain’s capacity to learn and remember almost limitless.

These patterns, or “engrams,” are stored away in brain tissue for future use, and are reactivated, or “replayed” whenever we remember a past experience.

In an article titled “The Physiology of Imagination,” printed in Scientific American, Dr. Eccles said, “The profusion of interconnections among the cells of the gray matter is beyond all imagination; it is ultimately so comprehensive that the whole cortex can be thought of as one great unit of integrated activity. If we now persist in regarding the brain as a machine, then we must say that it is by far the most complicated machine in existence. We are tempted to say that it is infinitely more complicated than the most complex man-made machines, the electrical computers.” In short, science confirms that there is a “tattooing,” or action pattern, of engrams in your brain for every successful action you have ever performed in the past. And if you can somehow furnish the spark to bring that action pattern into life, or “replay” it, it will execute itself, and all you’ll have to do is “swing the clubs” and “let nature take its course.” When you reactivate successful action patterns out of the past, you also reactivate the feeling-tone, or “winning feeling,” that accompanied them. By the same token, if you can recapture “that winning feeling,” you also evoke all the “winning actions” that accompanied it.

Build Success Patterns into Your Gray Matter

Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard (1869–1909), made a speech on what he called the “Habit of Success.” Many failures in elementary schools, he said, were due to the fact that students were not given, at the very beginning, a sufficient amount of work at which they could succeed, and thus never had an opportunity to develop the “Atmosphere of Success,” or what we call “the winning feeling.” The student, he said, who had never experienced success early in his school life, had no chance to develop the “habit of success”—the habitual feeling of faith and confidence in undertaking new work. He urged that teachers arrange work in the early grades so as to insure that the student experienced success. The work should be well within the ability of the student, yet interesting enough to arouse enthusiasm and motivation. These small successes, said Dr. Eliot, would give the student the “feel of success,” which would be a valuable ally in all future undertakings.

We can acquire the “habit of success”; we can build into our gray matter patterns and feelings of success at any time and at any age by following Dr. Eliot’s advice to teachers. If we are habitually frustrated by failure, we are very apt to acquire habitual “feelings of failure,” which color all new undertakings. But by arranging things so that we can succeed in little things, we can build an atmosphere of success that will carry over into larger undertakings. We can gradually undertake more difficult tasks and, after succeeding in them, be in a position to undertake something even more challenging. Success is literally built upon success, and there is much truth in the saying “Nothing succeeds like success.” Gradualness Is the Secret

Weight lifters start with weights they can lift and gradually increase the weights over a period of time. Good fight managers start a new boxer off with easy opponents and gradually pit him against more experienced fighters. We can apply the same general principles in almost any field of endeavor. The principle is merely to start with an “opponent” over which you can succeed, and gradually take on more and more difficult tasks.

Pavlov, on his deathbed, was asked to give one last bit of advice to his students on how to succeed. His answer was “Passion and gradualness.” Even in those areas where we have already developed a high degree of skill, it sometimes helps to “drop back,” lower our sights a bit, and practice with a feeling of ease. This is especially true when one reaches a “sticking point” in progress, where effort for additional progress is unavailing. Continually straining to go beyond the “sticking point” is likely to develop undesirable “feeling habits” of strain, difficulty, effort. Under such conditions weight lifters reduce the amount of weight on the bar, and practice “easy lifting” for a while. A boxer, who shows signs of going stale, is pitted against a number of easier opponents. Albert Tangora, for many years the World Champion Speed Typist, used to practice “typing slow”—at half normal speed—whenever he reached a plateau where further increase in speed seemed impossible. I know a prominent salesman who uses the same principle to get himself out of a sales slump. He stops trying to make big sales, stops trying to sell “tough customers,” and concentrates on making small sales to customers he has come to know as “pushovers.” How to Play Back Your Own Built-In Success Patterns

Everyone has at some time or another been successful in the past. It does not have to have been a big success. It might have been something as unimportant as standing up to the school bully and beating him; winning a race in grammar school; winning the sack race at the office picnic; winning out over a teenage rival for the affections of a girlfriend. Or it might be the memory of a successful sale; your most successful business deal; or winning first prize for the best cake at the county fair. What you succeeded in is not as important as the feeling of success that attended it. All that is needed is some experience where you succeeded in doing what you wanted to, in achieving what you set out to achieve, something that brought you some feeling of satisfaction.

Go back in memory and relive those successful experiences. In your imagination revive the entire picture in as much detail as you can. In your mind’s eye “see” not only the main event, but all the little incidental things that accompanied your success. What sounds were there? What about your environment? What else was happening around you at the time? What objects were present? What time of year was it? Were you cold or hot? And so forth. The more detailed you can make it, the better. If you can remember in sufficient detail just what happened when you were successful at some time in the past, you will find yourself feeling just as you felt then. Try to particularly remember your feelings at the time. If you can remember your feelings from the past, they will be reactivated in the present. You will find yourself feeling self-confident, because self-confidence is built upon memories of past successes.

Now, after arousing this “general feeling of success,” give your thoughts to the important sale, conference, speech, business deal, golf tournament, or whatever that you wish to succeed in now. Use your Creative Imagination to picture to yourself just how you would act and just how you would feel if you had already succeeded.

Positive and Constructive Worry

Mentally, begin to play with the idea of complete and inevitable success. Don’t force yourself. Don’t attempt to coerce your mind. Don’t try to use effort or willpower to bring about the desired conviction. Just do what you do when you worry, only “worry” about a positive goal and a desirable outcome, rather than about a negative goal and an undesirable outcome.

Don’t begin by trying to force yourself to have absolute faith in the desired success. This is too big a bite for you to mentally digest—at first. Use “gradualness.” Begin to think about the desired end result as you do when you worry about the future. When you worry, you do not attempt to convince yourself that the outcome will be undesirable. Instead, you begin gradually. You usually begin with a “suppose.” “Just suppose such and such a thing happens,” you mentally say to yourself. You repeat this idea over and over to yourself. You “play with it.” Next comes the idea of “possibility.” “Well, after all,” you say, “such a thing is possible.” It could happen. And then comes mental imagery. You begin to picture to yourself all the various negative possibilities. You play these imaginative pictures over and over to yourself—adding small details and refinements. As the pictures become more and more “real” to you, appropriate feelings begin to manifest themselves, just as if the imagined outcome had already happened. And this is the way that fear and anxiety develop.

How to Cultivate Faith and Courage

Faith and courage are developed in exactly the same way. Only your goals are different. If you are going to spend time in worry, why not worry constructively? Begin by outlining and defining to yourself the most desirable possible outcome. Begin with your “suppose.” “Suppose the best possible outcome did actually come about?” Next, remind yourself that after all this could happen. Not that it will happen, at this stage, but only that it could. Remind yourself that, after all, such a good and desirable outcome is possible.

You can mentally accept and digest these gradual doses of optimism and faith. After having thought of the desired end result as a definite “possibility,” begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself. As your mental images become more detailed, as they are repeated over and over again—you will find that once more appropriate feelings are beginning to manifest themselves, just as if the favorable outcome had already happened. This time the appropriate feelings will be those of faith, self-confidence, courage—or all wrapped up into one package, “that winning feeling.” Don’t Take Counsel of Your Fears

General George Patton, the hell-for-leather, “Old Blood and Guts” general of World War II fame, was once asked if he ever experienced fear before a battle. Yes, he said, he often experienced fear just before an important engagement and sometimes during a battle, but, he added, “I never take counsel of my fears.” If you do experience negative failure feelings—fear and anxiety—before an important undertaking, as everyone does from time to time, it should not be taken as a “sure sign” that you will fail. It all depends on how you react to them, and what attitude you take toward them. If you listen to them, obey them, and “take counsel” of them, you will probably perform badly. But this need not be true.

First of all, it is important to understand that failure feelings—fear, anxiety, lack of self-confidence—do not spring from some heavenly oracle. They are not written in the stars. They are not holy gospel. Nor are they intimations of a set and decided “fate” that means that failure is decreed and decided. They originate from your own mind. They are indicative only of attitudes of mind within you—not of external facts that are rigged against you. They mean only that you are underestimating your own abilities, overestimating and exaggerating the nature of the difficulty before you, and that you are reactivating memories of past failures rather than memories of past successes. That is all that they mean and all that they signify. They do not pertain to or represent the truth concerning future events, but only your own mental attitude about the future event.

Knowing this, you are free to accept or reject these negative failure feelings; to obey them and take counsel of them, or to ignore their advice and go ahead. Moreover, you are in a position to use them for your own benefit.

Accept Negative Feelings as a Challenge

If we react to negative feelings aggressively and positively, they become challenges, which will automatically arouse more power and more ability within us. The idea of difficulty, threat, menace, arouses additional strength within us if we react to it aggressively rather than passively. In the last chapter, we saw that a certain amount of “excitement”—if interpreted correctly and employed correctly—helps, rather than hinders, performance.

It all depends on the individual and his attitudes, whether negative feelings are used as assets or liabilities. One striking example of this is the experience of Dr. J. B. Rhine, who founded Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory. Dr. Rhine said that ordinarily negative suggestions, distractions, or expressions of disbelief on the part of onlookers will have a decided adverse effect upon a subject’s scoring when he is trying to “guess” the order of cards in a special deck, or is being tested in any other way for telepathic ability. Praise, encouragement, or “pulling for” the subject nearly always causes him to score better. Discouragement and negative suggestions can almost always be counted on to send the test scoring down immediately and dramatically. However, occasionally, a subject will take such negative suggestions as “challenges,” and perform even better. For example, a subject by the name of Pearce consistently scored well above pure chance (five correct “calls” out of a deck of 25 cards). Dr. Rhine decided to try challenging Pearce to do even better. He was challenged before each trial with a wager that he would not get the next card right. “It was evident during the run that Pearce was being stirred up to a high pitch of intensity. The bet was simply a convenient way of leading him on to throw himself into the test with enthusiasm,” said Dr. Rhine. Pearce called all 25 cards correctly!

Lillian, a nine-year-old, did better than average when nothing was at stake and she had nothing to worry about if she failed. She was then placed in a minor “pressure situation” by being offered 50 cents if she called all cards in the deck correctly. As she went through the test her lips moved constantly as if she was talking to herself. She called all 25 cards correctly. When she was asked what she had been saying to herself, she revealed her aggressive, positive attitude to the threat by saying, “I was wishing all the time that I could get twenty-five.” React Aggressively to Your Own Negative “Advice”

Everyone has known individuals who can be discouraged and defeated by the advice from others that “you can’t do it.” On the other hand there are people who rise to the occasion and become more determined than ever to succeed when given the same advice. An associate of Henry J. Kaiser’s said, “If you don’t want Henry to do a thing, you had better not make the mistake of telling him it can’t be done or that he can’t do it—for he will then do it or bust.” It is not only possible, but entirely practicable, to react in the same aggressive, positive manner to the “negative advice” of our own feelings as we can and should when the negative advice comes from others.

Overcome Evil with Good

Feelings cannot be directly controlled by willpower. They cannot be voluntarily made to order, or turned on and off like a faucet. If they cannot be commanded, however, they can be wooed. If they cannot be controlled by a direct act of will, they can be controlled indirectly.

A “bad” feeling is not dispelled by conscious effort or willpower. It can be dispelled, however, by another feeling. If we cannot drive out a negative feeling by making a frontal assault upon it, we can accomplish the same result by substituting a positive feeling. Remember that feeling follows imagery. Feeling coincides with, and is appropriate to, what our nervous system accepts as “real” or the “truth about environment.” Whenever we find ourselves experiencing undesirable feeling-tones, we should not concentrate on the undesirable feeling, even to the extent of driving it out. Instead, we should immediately concentrate on positive imagery—on filling the mind with wholesome, positive, desirable images, imaginations, and memories. If we do this, the negative feelings take care of themselves. They simply evaporate. We develop new feeling-tones appropriate to the new imagery.

If, on the other hand, we concentrate only on “driving out,” or attacking, worry thoughts, we necessarily must concentrate on negatives. And even if we are successful in driving out one worry thought, one is—or even several new ones are—likely to rush in since the general mental atmosphere is still negative. Jesus warned us about sweeping the mind clean of one demon, only to have seven new ones move in if we left the house empty. He also advised us not to resist evil, but to overcome evil with good.

The Substitution Method of Curing Worry

Psychologist Dr. Matthew Chappell recommended exactly the same thing in his book How to Control Worry. We are worriers because we practice worrying until we become adept at it, said Dr. Chappell. We habitually indulge in negative imagery out of the past, and in anticipating the future. This worry creates tension. The worrier then makes an “effort” to stop worrying, and is caught in a vicious cycle. Effort increases tension. Tension provides a “worrying atmosphere.” The only cure for worry, he said, is to make a habit out of immediately substituting pleasant, wholesome, mental images for unpleasant “worry images.” Each time the subject finds himself worrying, he is to use this as a “signal” to immediately fill the mind with pleasant mental pictures out of the past or with anticipating pleasant future experiences. In time worry will defeat itself because it becomes a stimulus for practicing anti-worry. Dr. Chappell continued: The worrier’s job is not to overcome some particular source of worry, but to change mental habits. As long as the mind is “set” or geared in a passive, defeatist, I-hope-nothing-happens sort of attitude, there will always be something to worry about.

David Seabury, founder of the Centralist School of Psychology, said that the best piece of advice his father ever gave him was to practice positive mental imagery—immediately and “on cue,” so to speak— whenever he became aware of negative feelings. Negative feelings literally defeated themselves by becoming a sort of “bell” that set off a conditioned reflex to arouse positive states of mind.

When I was a medical student I remember being called upon by the professor to orally answer questions on the subject of pathology. Somehow, I was filled with fear and anxiety when I stood up to face the other students, and I couldn’t answer the questions properly. Yet, on other occasions, when I looked into the microscope at a slide and answered the typewritten questions before me, I was a different person. I was relaxed, confident, and sure of myself because I knew my subject. I had that “winning feeling” and did very well.

As the semester progressed, I took stock of myself, and when I stood up to answer questions I pretended I didn’t see an audience but was looking through a microscope. I was relaxed, and substituted that “winning feeling” for the negative feeling when quizzed orally. At the end of the semester I did very well in both oral and written examinations.

The negative feeling had finally become a sort of “bell” that created a conditioned reflex to arouse that “winning feeling.” Today, I lecture and speak with ease at any gathering in any part of the world, because I am relaxed and know what I am talking about when I do speak. More than that, I bring others into the conversation and make them feel relaxed, too.

Throughout 25 years of practice as a plastic surgeon, I operated on soldiers mutilated on the battlefield; children born with disfigurements; men, women, and children injured in accidents at home, on the highway, and in industry. These unfortunate people felt that they could never have that “winning feeling.” Yet, by rehabilitating them and making them look normal, I helped them substitute for their negative feelings one of hope in the future.

In giving them another chance at capturing that “winning feeling,” I myself became skillful in the art of having that same feeling. In helping them improve their self-image I improved my own. All of us must do the same with our inner scars, our negative feelings, if we want to get more living out of life.

The Choice Is Up to You

Within you is a vast mental storehouse of past experiences and feelings—both failures and successes. Like inactive recordings on tape, these experiences and feelings are recorded on the neural engrams of your gray matter. There are recordings of stories with happy endings, and recordings of stories with unhappy endings. One is as true as the other. One is as real as the other. The choice is up to you as to which you select for playback.

Another interesting scientific finding about these engrams is that they can be changed or modified, somewhat as a tape recording may be changed, by “dubbing in” additional material, or replacing an old recording by recording over it.

Drs. Eccles and Sherrington tell us that the engrams in the human brain tend to change slightly each time they are “played back.” They take on some of the tone and temper of our present mood, thinking, and attitudes toward them. Also, each individual neuron may become a part of perhaps 100 separate and distinct patterns—much as an individual tree in an orchard may form a part of a square, a rectangle, a triangle, and any number of larger squares, etc. The neuron in the original engram, of which it was a part, takes on some of the characteristics of subsequent engrams of which it becomes a part, and in so doing, changes somewhat the original engram. This is not only very interesting, but encouraging. It gives us reason to believe that adverse and unhappy childhood experiences, “traumas,” etc., are not as permanent and as fatal as some earlier psychologists would have had us believe. We now know that not only does the past influence the present, but that the present clearly influences the past. In other words, we are not doomed or damned by the past. Because we did have unhappy childhood experiences and traumas that left engrams behind does not mean that we are at the mercy of these engrams, or that our patterns of behavior are “set,” predetermined and unchangeable. Our present thinking, our present mental habits, our attitudes toward past experiences, and our attitudes toward the future—all have an influence upon old recorded engrams. The old can be changed, modified, replaced, by our present thinking.

Old Recordings Can Be Changed

Another interesting finding is that the more a given engram is activated, or “replayed,” the more potent it becomes. Eccles and Sherrington tell us that the permanence of engrams is derived from synaptic efficacy (the efficiency and ease of connections between the individual neurons that make up the chain) and, further, that synaptic efficiency improves with use and diminishes with disuse. Here again, we have good scientific ground for forgetting and ignoring those unhappy experiences from the past and concentrating on the happy and pleasant. By so doing we strengthen those engrams having to do with success and happiness and weaken those having to do with failure and unhappiness.

These concepts have developed not from wild speculation, a weird mumbo-jumbo about mentally constructed straw men such as the “id,” “superego,” and the like, but from sound scientific research into brain physiology. They are based on observable facts and phenomena, not fanciful theories. They go a long way toward restoring the dignity of man as a responsible child of God, able to cope with his past and plan his future, as opposed to the image of man as helpless victim of his past experiences.

The new concept does carry a responsibility, however. No longer can you derive sickly comfort from blaming your parents, society, your early experiences, or the injustices of “others” for your present troubles. These things may and should help you understand how you got where you are. Blaming them, or even yourself, for the past mistakes, however, will not solve your problem, or improve your present or your future. There is no merit in blaming yourself. The past explains how you got here. But where you go from here is your responsibility. The choice is yours. Like a broken phonograph, you can keep on playing the same old “broken record” of the past; reliving past injustices; pitying yourself for past mistakes—all of which reactivates failure patterns and failure feelings that color your present and your future.

Or, if you choose, you can put on a new record, and reactivate success patterns and “that winning feeling,” which help you do better in the present and promise a more enjoyable future.

When your phonograph is playing music you don’t like, you do not try to force it to do better. You do not use effort or willpower. You do not bang the phonograph around. You do not try to change the music itself. You merely change the record being played and the music takes care of itself. Use the same technique on the “music” that comes out of your own internal machine. Don’t pit your will directly against the music. As long as the same mental imagery (the cause) occupies your attention, no amount of effort will change the music (the result). Instead, try putting a new record on. Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves.