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Psycho-Cybernetics is based on the theory that your mind functions according to cybernetic principles—you can program your mind to achieve success and happiness in the same way that you’d program a machine to achieve the results that you want. Maxwell Maltz suggests a number of methods to help you raise awareness of your current self-image, build your self-confidence, and increase your ability to achieve success.

This guide separates Maltz’s ideas and techniques into two distinct parts: Part 1 discusses the theory behind Psycho-Cybernetics, and Part 2 presents the actionable material that Maltz weaves throughout his book. We also compare and contrast each key concept with up-to-date psychological research and self-improvement methods, and we expand on Maltz’s prescriptive style with actionable ideas from other authors and psychologists.

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  • Anxiety: You think about how much work you have to do (trigger), and you immediately feel worried and overwhelmed (response).

  • Addictions: You experience a particular feeling (trigger), and you feel overwhelmed by a craving for a particular substance (response).

Clinical hypnotherapy treats these problems by helping you to:

  • Identify the root cause of your problem: Why you respond to triggers in the way you do.

  • Reprogram the way your mind responds to triggers: Replaces your negative response with a positive response.

Clinical hypnotists put you in a relaxed, trance-like state so that they can bypass your conscious mind and offer suggestions directly to your subconscious mind—while you're in this state, your conscious mind doesn’t actively “resist” these new suggestions. Successful hypnotherapy sessions create new trigger and response relationships in your mind. For example:

  • Arachnophobia: You see a spider (trigger), and you feel calm (new response).

  • Anxiety: You think about how much work you have to do (trigger), and you’re able to think clearly and prioritize your work (new response).

  • Addictions: You experience a particular feeling (trigger), and you’re able to seek a positive outlet for your emotions (response).

The theme, as the book suggests, is that your brain behaves according to trigger-response pairs that it believes to be true but aren’t actually valid. With training, you can rewire them.

Your Self-Image Impacts Your Behavior

When it comes to achieving goals, humans and machines differ in one essential way: humans rely on their self-image to interpret the feedback they receive from their environment. Their interpretation of feedback impacts the way they approach their goals and doesn’t always lead to success.

Maltz argues that your self-image determines how you perceive your environment and how you read signals to interpret feedback. In other words, your self-image determines how you engage in and perceive every social interaction and experience throughout your life.

Feedback Loops Reinforce Your Behavior

Maltz argues that the self-image is continually reinforced by what he calls “feedback loops”—how feedback reinforces learned behavior and programming—and draws parallels with how cybernetic machines incorporate feedback to operate successfully.

Machines process feedback so that they can achieve their goal. Once they achieve the goal, they store their successful feedback (memory of successful attempts) and discard their negative feedback (memory of mistakes). Their memory of successful attempts creates a feedback loop that allows them to “learn” quickly and operate efficiently and successfully.

However, unlike a machine, humans rely on their self-images to interpret feedback to their behavior. Your self-image decides whether to release negative feedback so that you operate successfully (behave in a way that results in success), or to remember and reinforce negative feedback so that you operate inefficiently (behave in a way that creates failure). If your self-image decides to focus on negative feedback, this can lead to programming that causes you to reinforce negative patterns of behavior that work against what you want to achieve.

  • For example, imagine someone who was bullied as a child and failed to receive support. This person identified with feeling victimized and isolated, and this impacted her self-image. She now finds it difficult to trust others and form close relationships—she expresses this difficulty in various ways, from aloofness to hostility. As a result, her behavior keeps people at a distance. She interprets their distance as proof that others don’t want to connect with her, and she remains acutely aware of how they make her feel (victimized and isolated). She uses this interpretation as proof that she should continue to protect herself from social interactions.

Even though she wants to connect with others (her goal) her self-image causes her to interpret all feedback as negative, stops her from moving towards what she wants, and perpetuates her self-isolation.

Your interpretation of your environment justifies your self-image and how you continue to act—how you continue to act further reinforces your interpretation of your environment, and so on. So, if you want to achieve success and happiness—according to the goals you’ve consciously set for yourself—you need to ensure that your self-image aligns with what you want. This way, you’ll be able to interpret and act on feedback in a way that moves you toward your goals.

How Unconscious Biases Reinforce Feedback Loops

While you may believe that your perceptions and reactions to your environment are entirely logical, you may be under the influence of unconscious biases that reinforce patterns of behavior that you would rather not engage in.

Research shows that your dominant personality traits and patterns of behavior are influenced by cognitive biases. These biases are the result of your brain’s attempt to make quick judgments based on your past experiences, and they shape the way you think about and perceive your environment.

There are many different types of cognitive biases, and each of them influences your perceptions in different ways. In the example above, the person’s experience suggests that her behavior is influenced by Confirmation Bias—the tendency to pay more attention to the information that confirms and reinforces her opinion (people don’t like her).

She doesn’t want to have this belief—her past experiences led her to form this belief. However, the confirmation bias shapes her perception so that she can only notice and interpret interactions and experiences that reinforce this belief. As a result, she continues to act defensively because her bias ensures that she continues to mistrust others.

Part 3: Use Your Imagination to Create Success

Maltz argues that since your self-image is a result of hypnotization and imagination, you can use your imagination to “dehypnotize” yourself and improve your self-image. The more you improve your self-image, the more you improve the way you’re programmed to act. The first step to reprogramming your self-image is becoming conscious of whether you’re using your imagination constructively (to create positive thoughts and feelings) or deconstructively (to create negative thoughts and feelings).

If you’re using your imagination deconstructively, Maltz argues that you need to make a conscious effort to instead use it to form a clear mental picture of yourself as successful—this will allow you to practice feeling successful, and will ultimately improve your approach to life. To replace existing negative beliefs with new successful beliefs, you need to create equally strong impressions in your mind—when you create positive feelings of excitement and desire regularly enough, they’ll outweigh your negative feelings, and your self-image will improve.

(Shortform note: Maltz argues that you must imagine positive feelings that outweigh your negative feelings so that they can create a strong enough impression to replace your unwanted beliefs. However, when you’re in a state of anxiety or fear, it’s not so easy to jump to a positive thought. This is because your thoughts and your state of mind reinforce one another to create an internal feedback loop that’s difficult to break out of: Your thoughts determine your state of mind and your state of mind determines your thoughts. Abraham Hicks suggests a useful technique to help you reframe your negative thoughts into positive ones.)

Five Self-Image Alignment Methods

Maltz describes five methods you can use to direct your imagination towards thoughts and feelings of success related to specific goals and the improvement of your self-image.

Method 1: Prove That Change is Possible

Maltz suggests that you choose a habit that you perform daily—one that’s not tied to your self-image, such as brushing your teeth or putting your shoes on—and commit to doing it differently. Every time you make the effort to change this particular habit, affirm to yourself that if you can break this habit, you can also break any negative thought patterns by replacing them with successful thought patterns. For example, if you normally put your right shoe on first, start making the conscious effort to put your left shoe on first. Use the act of putting your shoes on differently to remind yourself that you can choose to think differently.

(Shortform note: Maltz suggests that you focus on changing a current habit to reinforce your commitment to change your self-image. But he doesn’t provide advice on how to successfully change this habit. Since this is the first step to improve your self-image, it’s necessary to set yourself up to succeed—the more you succeed, the more motivation you’ll have to move forward with the process. According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, habits are linked to four stages: cue, craving, response, and reward—if you ensure that each of the four stages reinforces the habits you wish to change, you’ll be more likely to succeed.)

Method 2: Relax Your Way to Success

Maltz argues that practicing physical relaxation will enable you to consciously control your imagination and, subsequently, your self-image. When your mind is relaxed, it’s more receptive to positive suggestions. This is because negative thoughts create tension in the body—this tension makes it difficult for your mind to accept new ideas or possibilities. On the other hand, when you’re in a state of relaxation, negative thoughts tend to disappear. Relaxing your mind and body will create space for your positive suggestions to thrive.

(Shortform note: In addition to creating tension that blocks your mind from accepting new thoughts and ideas, negative and stressful thoughts impact your ability to think about what you’re experiencing. This is because, when you feel stress, your amygdala acts as if you’re in danger: It ensures that you respond automatically to threats by inhibiting the thinking part of your brain (the hippocampus). In other words, stress and tension stop you from thinking objectively and lead you to act in irrational ways.)

Method 3: Imagine Your Successful Personality

Maltz suggests that you use your imagination to think about the person you want to be and to recall your successful memories. He argues that each time you create or recall successful feelings, your subconscious will record them and imprint them into your self-image. These successful feelings will accumulate in your self-image and you’ll gradually find yourself naturally feeling and acting more successfully.

(Shortform note: While visualizing success can lead you to act in successful ways, in Ego Is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday claims that it can also confuse your mind and create the opposite effect: When your mind believes that you’ve already achieved something, you feel that you’ve made progress despite not having taken any measurable steps toward achieving your goal. This feeling of progress feels good, but it’s based on a false sense of achievement that may cause you to lose sight of the actions you need to take to move forward.)

Method 4: Focus on a Goal

Maltz argues that you need to find a reason to change your self-image before you can develop the skills to change it. In other words, you should know what results you hope to achieve with an improved self-image. Without a clear reason, you’re unlikely to find the motivation you need to make the required changes. So, if you want to change your self-image so that you can feel more inner peace, think about why you want this—what you’ll get, or what improvements you hope to see in your life once you make this change. For example, will you get along better with your family, or feel more productive at work?

Once you’ve thought of something that your successful self would want to achieve, break it down and think of the first step that you can realistically achieve—Maltz argues that it’s important to develop the habit of success early on so that you can gradually build up your self-confidence to achieve more demanding goals.

How To Overcome Your Mind’s Resistance to Change

Maltz argues that your habits are a result of your current self-image. If you want to create new habits to support a more positive self-image, you need to take small achievable steps to develop the habit of success. This is because the bigger the change you want to make, the more your mind is going to resist it—your mind’s job is to protect you. If it believes that you’re attempting to do things that will cause it harm, it will resist every attempt that you make with feelings of fear or inhibition.

So how can you get past this resistance so that you can achieve what you want? In The Kaizen Way, Psychologist Rober Maurer claims that you’re more likely to make successful changes if you take very small but regular steps toward the large goal you intend to achieve. This is because small changes are more likely to bypass your brain’s instinctive reaction to resist new behavioral changes. Each time you take another step, you’ll demonstrate to your brain that you’re safe, and you’ll eventually succeed without fear or resistance.

Method 5: Choose Happiness Now

Maltz argues that genuine success and wellbeing come from cultivating and developing the habit of happiness in your life. Further, he claims that your mental attitude influences the way that your body heals: Happy people are generally healthier and more resilient to physical setbacks because they expect to get well and have a reason to get well.

On the other hand, unhappy people suffer from poor health and wellbeing because they don’t have a reason to get better—they don’t have anything to look forward to. Studies have shown results that support his idea that negative attitudes are bad for your health. For example, stressed out and unhappy people often suffer from ulcers and high blood pressure, they’re more likely to develop addictive behaviors and less likely to engage in healthy routines.

(Shortform note: Multiple research experiments confirm Maltz’s claim that mental attitudes impact health. Studies on the impact of negative mental states (depression, stress, anxiety) on health confirm that negative attitudes are bad for your health. Prolonged negativity affects your hormones, immune system, sleep, brain, and digestion. These researchers suggest that you can reduce your levels of stress and negativity by undertaking a daily ritual such as meditation, therapy, or physical exercise.)

An Active Mind Is a Happy Mind: The realization that success comes from cultivating happiness led Maltz to think about what makes people feel happy. Maltz argues that your mind is designed to achieve goals. You’re more likely to feel interested and engaged in your life when you give your mind goals to pursue. The more you pursue satisfying goals, the more you have to look forward to and engage with. This makes you want to look after your health and your wellbeing. As a result, you're more inclined to feel happy.

(Shortform note: Like Maltz, the author of Flow argues that people are more likely to feel happy when they focus all of their attention on completing tasks and achieving goals. He claims that the more you direct your focus to achieve a goal, the more absorbed you feel in what you’re doing. This sense of absorption makes it difficult for your mind to wander and get distracted by negative thoughts, and trains your mind to feel satisfied and happy—your mind gets used to experiencing satisfaction and this feeling impacts your overall mood and behavior.)

Part 4: Release Your Limitations

Maltz argues that the more you free yourself from responding to and identifying with negative thoughts—by deliberately creating successful feedback loops like a machine—the more likely you are to develop a happy and successful state of mind. He prescribes three methods you can use to replace existing negative thoughts and feelings with positive thoughts and feelings, and redirect yourself towards achieving successful outcomes.

Method 1: Turn Challenges into Opportunities to Improve Your Self-Image

A challenge is any situation that takes you out of your comfort zone. It’s important to see this type of situation as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Maltz argues that someone with a negative self-image often confuses challenges (opportunities to advance) with crises (life-threatening situations) because they perceive threats to be bigger than they are. They find excuses to avoid challenges, and they waste time and energy worrying or evading discomforting situations. On the other hand, people with a positive self-image recognize the difference between an actual crisis and a challenge. They proactively seek ways to overcome challenges, and they spend their time visualizing and planning how to make the best out of every situation.

(Shortform note: In her book Mindset, Carol S. Dweck explains the two mindsets used to describe a person’s attitude to challenges and setbacks: Growth mindset (people see challenges as an opportunity to learn) and fixed mindset (people see challenges as proof of their inability to achieve success). Dweck argues that even if you have a tendency toward a fixed mindset, you can develop a growth mindset through conscious awareness and effort. Many of the methods Maltz prescribes complement Dweck’s argument that you can improve the way you approach and overcome the challenges in your life.)

Prepare to Move Past Your Comfort Zone

Maltz suggests that you plan ahead for challenges as much as you can by taking the time to investigate your fears. To move past your fears, ask yourself questions to uncover what exactly you’re afraid of and then use your answers to better prepare yourself for this challenge—use your imagination to overwrite your fearful thoughts by visualizing yourself responding to situations calmly and competently.

(Shortform note: Like Maltz, Tim Ferriss suggests that you should investigate your fears. He argues that focusing on your worst-case scenarios will empower you to approach any challenge. This is because you’re more likely to hold back from taking action when your fears are unknown—vague possibilities that could happen. The more you think about the unknown, the more powerless you feel to overcome your fears. But when you define the actual worst-case scenario, you give your mind something specific and productive to work on.)

Method 2: Practice Reflecting Only on the Facts

Maltz argues that your negative feelings (anxiety, discomfort, lack of self-confidence) are not an indication of reality, just how you feel about reality—and those feelings are a result of your habitual thought process. That is, if you habitually think negative thoughts, you’ll often misunderstand events and draw false conclusions that keep you stuck in a negative feedback loop. When you feel negative thoughts, feelings, or memories surface, choose to replace them with rational thoughts that encourage positive beliefs.

(Shortform note: Similar to Maltz’s method, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) focuses on asking questions to assess the rationality of uncomfortable thoughts and to explore other perspectives. This process helps you to examine and challenge uncomfortable thoughts so that you can find alternative ways to think about your triggers. The more you question the validity of your uncomfortable thoughts, the less likely you are to accept them as truth and allow them to rule your emotions.)

Method 3: Forgive and Forget

Maltz argues that an unwillingness or failure to forgive past mistakes and traumas holds people back from experiencing success in their lives—they form “emotional scars” to protect themselves from future hurts and humiliations. Instead of protecting them, these scars only prevent them from experiencing new things and keep them trapped in a negative mental state..

Forgiveness, on the other hand, heals these emotional scars and allows you to move forward with your life. You need to accept that we all make mistakes and it’s okay—no one’s perfect. Holding onto blame only holds you back from success. Forgiving yourself and others for past mistakes will liberate you and allow you to focus on where you want to go.

(Shortform note: In How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie expands upon the idea that you should “forgive and forget” past hurts so that you can move forward and embrace success and happiness. He claims that holding onto past grievances takes away your power because it prevents you from focusing on what you want. These negative feelings can also harm your physical health and produce effects such as high blood pressure and insomnia. Carnegie’s suggestions for releasing grievances, or “emotional scars,” include looking for the good in every situation, and focusing on something you’re passionate about.)

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Here's a preview of the rest of Shortform's Psycho-Cybernetics PDF summary:

PDF Summary Shortform Introduction

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Connect with Matt Furey:

The Book’s Publication

Publisher: Penguin Random House

This guide is based on the 2015 edition of Psycho-Cybernetics released by Matt Furey. Previous adaptations released since Maltz's death in 1975 include:

PDF Summary Part 1: Principles of Psycho-Cybernetics | Chapter 1: What Is Psycho-Cybernetics?

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Through further research of this discrepancy, Maltz discovered that patients who responded positively to surgery (with a rise in self-esteem) correctly identified their flaws as the cause of their low self-esteem. On the other hand, the patients who failed to change often had expectations that were not satisfied by the surgery—they incorrectly identified their flaws as the cause of their low self-esteem and lack of success.

(Shortform note: Throughout the book, Maltz refers to “confidence” and “success” as interchangeable terms—he infers that the more confident you are, the more successful you are.)

Don’t Rely on Cosmetic Surgery to Improve Your Self-Esteem

Psychological problems related to how people view their bodies are increasingly common. For example, a poll from the Mental Health Foundation revealed that one in eight UK adults are so self-conscious about their body image that they have suicidal thoughts. The charity identified social media’s representation of the “idealized body image” as a cause of this distress.

Consequently,...

PDF Summary Chapter 2: Your Self-Image Defines Your Experience

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  • How your self-image develops
  • How your self-image impacts your programming and, consequently your progress toward achieving your conscious goals

What Is Your Self-Image?

Like a machine, your brain has recorded every experience you’ve had up until this moment—every failure, success, and interaction. Your self-image is a reflection of how you’ve identified with and felt about these experiences. Your self-image defines who you are, how you express yourself, and how you act in any given situation.

For example, consider an experience such as falling over. You could either say to yourself, “I fell over” (a fact that won’t have an impact on your self-image), or you could say to yourself, “I’m a klutz!” (the way you identified with the experience, which will have an impact on your self-image, and the way that you express yourself—for example, you may act overly cautious as a result of this identification).

Your Self-Image Impacts Your Self-Esteem

Research developments in the area of self-identity indicate that[ our self-image is just one of four interrelated components that inform our opinions of...

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PDF Summary Chapter 3: Positive Self-Image Versus Negative Self-Image

... Positive Personality (Good Self-Image) Negative Personality (Bad Self-Image) </tr> You’re goal-oriented: You have a clear idea of what makes you happy and focus on what you want. You keep moving forward and are driven by a desire to become more and achieve more. You’re overly sensitive to setbacks: You let errors and minor failures define your emotional state. You act like a victim of life. You’re open: You communicate well with others because you’re willing to think about their perspectives and why they think and feel the way that they do. You’re willing to admit your mistakes and errors. You’re accusatory: Your frustration leads to aggression that you misdirect towards yourself or others. You lash out because you’re not resolving your problems. You’re willing to take risks: You’re willing to take risks and face new challenges. You confront your problems. You’re insecure: You never feel...

PDF Summary Part 2: Applying the Principles | Chapter 4: Use Your Imagination to Create Success

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  • For example, you have a job interview coming up. You start to worry about all of the bad things that could happen. The more you think about these bad things, the more anxious you feel. You create such a strong impression in your mind associating your anxious feelings with the job interview. The result is that as soon as you think of your job interview, your mind immediately imagines a negative outcome—your subconscious expects you to feel anxious and uncomfortable at this job interview. To reverse this, you need to create a strong positive impression in your mind so that your subconscious expects you to feel confident and successful at this job interview.

How to Shift Your Negative Thoughts to Positive Thoughts

Maltz argues that you must imagine positive feelings that outweigh your negative feelings so that they can create a strong enough impression to replace your unwanted beliefs. However, when you’re in a state of anxiety or fear, it’s not so easy to jump to a positive thought. This is because your thoughts and your state of mind reinforce one...

PDF Summary Chapter 5: Align Your Self-Image With What You Want

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Five Self-Image Alignment Methods

Maltz describes five methods you can use to direct your imagination towards thoughts and feelings of success related to specific goals and the improvement of your self-image.

Method 1: Prove That Change Is Possible

Maltz suggests that you choose a habit that you perform daily—one that’s not tied to your self-image, such as brushing your teeth or putting your shoes on—and commit to doing it differently over the course of the 21 days. Every time you make the effort to change this particular habit, affirm to yourself that if you can break this habit, you can also break any negative thought patterns by replacing them with successful thought patterns. For example, if you normally put your right shoe on first, start making the conscious effort to put your left shoe on first. Use the act of putting your shoes on differently to remind yourself that you can choose to think differently.

Successful Habit Formation

Maltz suggests that you focus on changing a current habit to reinforce your commitment to change your self-image. But he doesn’t provide advice on how to successfully change this habit. Since this is the first step...

PDF Summary Chapter 6: Release Your Limitations

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Maltz argues that when you feel stressed or anxious—such as when you see a challenge as a crisis—you’re less able to think clearly, find solutions, or react appropriately. Your anxiety literally shuts down your brain and your ability to deal with situations.

According to Maltz, positive personalities recognize the difference between an actual crisis and a challenge. In contrast to the negative personality’s tendency to freeze up, they proactively seek ways to overcome challenges, and they spend their time visualizing and planning how to make the best out of every situation.

Positive people are more relaxed: Maltz claims that the more relaxed you are, the more effective you are at dealing with pressure—you’re more able to think clearly and react appropriately and spontaneously to situations that come up. Consequently, if you visualize yourself responding to challenges while in a relaxed state, you’ll be more able to respond to real challenges as and when they come up.

Growth Mindset Versus Fixed Mindset

In her book Mindset, Carol S. Dweck discusses the difference between “growth mindset” and...

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