july

creating and destroying; flying cars, roc.camera, july.rocks

Yesterday @july posted about the abundance mindset, and it's effects on being outcome based. These topics are dismissed by many due to their nature. Unaccountable and largely not cognitive or effortful, 'mindset' and 'positive thinking' are indeed pretty easy to dismiss. What's the point in thinking about these things, they're not real. It's not tangible. I totally get this. And for what it's worth I don't believe that positive thinking or any other type of thinking has some 'magical universal attraction' property blah blah blah. That's bullshit.

BUT.

I write code and sometimes stories. jakeacasey.com

Weirdly enough I've read most of these books. Master Key System, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret. What I find most interesting about these books is that they still even exist. That people still talk about them and still read them. 

Right now I'm reading "Psycho-Cybernetics". In psycho-cybernetics (amazing title, right?) the author Maxwell Maltz begins with several chapters on the idea of self-image and self concept. 

He believes that it's impossible to effectively take actions that are incongruent with your self-image. When you believe you are bad at math, you are bad at math. When you believe you are physically deformed, you act as though you are physically deformed (regardless of the actual state of your body).

This may seem like a simple concept, but it's really quite fundamental-- because your beliefs are hardly ever consciously determined. They're often just developed from a random set of experiences. They could be good, bad, a mix, whatever, but most people rarely think about 'what' or 'how' they think about anything. He's also making a point here to say that your beliefs about reality can be wrong. You can believe things about yourself or reality with very little evidence, or no evidence at all.

And that got me thinking. This is basically the exact same idea as "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, except coming at it from the other direction. Let's say that we have a spectrum. And on that spectrum are three things. Goals, your self image, and actions.

Atomic Habits is arguing that we make tiny changes to the actions we take every day until we believe that we are the person we want to be. James Clear talks about the ultimate change being the 'ego' change. Going from "I work out sometimes" to "I am a fit person". It becomes a fundamental shift when an action is repeated enough times that we believe that action is a part of us, as opposed to a one off occurrence. This means that the change has been integrated into our identity and it basically will take care of itself from then on. Not "I don't smoke" but "I am not a smoker." In this case we are drawing our self image towards our goals by repeated action. When they meet on the spectrum, we've basically changed our identity, and our beliefs about ourselves are now congruent with our actions-- which I think would generally lead to 'success'? Whatever that means in your current case. I guess it just means behavior change.

Psycho-cybernetics is saying that if we change our beliefs about ourselves (our self image, our identity) that our actions will actually automatically follow and be appropriate and congruent with our self image. Think about that. It's like they're both working on the same problem, but from different directions. In this case we're moving our self image until it is congruent with our goals, and our actions will follow. Naturally of course, because it's hard to act incongruently with our beliefs about ourselves. 

Now I don't know if that's true, because I haven't really tried it myself. For the atomic habits version, I've definitely tried it though. And that does work.

Anyway, I just found this rather interesting.

In this book Maltz proposes some methods of attempting to change your self image with repeated goal setting and what boils down to positive visualization and thinking. This allows you to 'hand over these tasks to the servo mechanism' IE the subconscious goal achieving mechanism. Now I'm not sure I believe all that-- I haven't spent a lot of time on it and I'm only halfway through the book. But a lot of it does make some sense. 

I think the big piece here is this idea that you cannot effectively act, if those actions are incongruent with your beliefs about yourself. That bit makes sense to me.