reading

Other books by Shad Helmstetter, Ph.D.

The Power of Neuroplasticity

365 Days of Positive Self-talk

365 Days of Positive Self-talk for Weight-Loss

365 Days of Positive Self-talk for Finding Your Purpose

For information on listening to self-talk programs

by Dr. Shad Helmstetter, or streaming self-talk audio sessions directly to your listening device, go to www.selftalkstore.com or www.selftalkplus.com.

What To Say When You Talk To Your Self

New Revised Edition

ISBN: 9780997086102

Introduction to the New Revised Edition

New discoveries in the field of neuroscience that made the first edition of this book possible, have expanded—or rather exploded—into every area of our culture. The concept of positive self-talk has grown from a breakthrough in the field of personal growth, to a much broader and more enlightened understanding of the brain’s role in human behavior, and how it works in the lives of every one of us.

Today, most people understand that we get programmed from birth on––that our brains are literally wired for success or failure––and that we end up living out those programs, for better or for worse. But many people still struggle to get rid of the old programs that are negative or are holding them back, and aren’t sure how to do it. Research in neuroscience has shown us how the brain gets programmed, and people want to know how they can use that knowledge to change their programming, and improve their lives.

In that quest, this new edition will guide you well. The complete story of self-talk, how we get programmed and what to do about it, is all here, updated, and ready to help.

You’ll notice that from time to time I will restate, in different ways, points that are especially important for you to retain. This is based on the rule of neuroplasticity which has shown that our brains become wired with new information––strongest and fastest––with repetition. When you notice any point that is repeated, it’s there to help you wire it in, and it’s a point you’ll want to keep.

Presenting this new edition also gives me the opportunity to thank the many tens of thousands of my readers, who have read this book in many languages around the world, and who have made positive self-talk a part of their everyday lives. If what is magic today becomes the science of tomorrow, then what was the “magic of self-talk,” just a few years ago, has now become the burgeoning science of a whole new way of life.

Shad Helmstetter, Ph.D.

February, 2018

www.shadhelmstetter.com

CHAPTER ONE

Looking for a Better Way

You are everything that is,

Your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true.

You are everything you choose to be.

You are as unlimited as the endless universe.

Life, for most of us, should be pretty good.

We have all heard what life is supposed to offer: endless opportunities, the fulfillment of our dreams, and a chance to live each day in a way that brings happiness and success. Most of us want and need at least a successful job or career, a good family life, and reasonable financial security. We expect that from life. We know deep inside that we deserve our fair share and we have every right to attain it.

Have you ever wondered, then, why things don’t work out the way they should? Why do we not get from life many of the things we would like to have—and know we should? Why do some people seem to be “lucky,” while the great majority of the rest of us seem not to be?

Why are some people, day to day, happier, more productive, more fulfilled than others? What makes the difference? Is it kismet, a kind of fate, which in some mysterious way charts our destiny and leaves little of the steering of our course through life up to us?

Is the control of our lives in our hands or isn’t it? And if we can, or should, control our lives, what goes wrong? What holds us back? If we truly would like to do better, be the way we really would like to be, and be happier and more successful every day in every area of living, what is the wall that stands in our way?

AN UNLIMITED LIFE OF

PRACTICAL POTENTIAL

Imagine living a life which did not give in to the barriers and the battlements, the hassles and the hurdles of everyday living. Imagine a life filled with the vitality of achievement and the enrichment of daily self-fulfillment. To me, for a long time, that kind of life sounded like an impractical dream, a cardboard box filled up with daydreams and wishes. To live a life of hope, promise, expectation, and achievement was to live the life of someone who lived only in the pages of a book.

When I was quite young, I had a soaring imagination. Long before I learned what we could not do, I dreamed of doing what I knew we could. I remember, as a young boy, lying on my back in the cool, soft grass late at night, my mind sinking into the depths of the crystal-clear stars that blanketed the summer sky above me. I could reach out and touch those stars. I could imagine any dream and see it come true.

It was only later that my dreams gave way to more practical considerations. Star-filled heavens, dew-soaked grass, and princely dreams of imaginary kingdoms bowed to more rational requirements. As I began to pursue my education in earnest, I began to learn what we could not do. In time, I became more intent on studying the laws and the limits of man, than on learning the far-reaching extremities of mankind’s potential.

I learned all of the “shoulds,” “musts,” and “cannots.” I was told that it was bad to have your head in the clouds and it was good to have your feet on the ground. So I extracted my head from the magical excitement of the universe and got down to business learning about the more practical matters of survival and acceptance. From time to time I had the nagging suspicion that there was more to all of this than was meeting the eye—I just couldn’t see it yet.

It was years before I decided it was time to stop and look at the stars again. But I did. The result of that one small decision changed my direction and my life.

By the time I stopped and sank once again, upwards, into the stars, I had completed a twenty-year odyssey which took me from the backroads of a farmland village to the towering offices of New York’s Madison Avenue; from a quiet countryside of wheat fields to the negotiating tables of three-piece-suited attorneys and well-groomed marketers. My odyssey took me to snow-covered Midwestern college campuses, and to palm-lined streets of western universities.

Somewhere, during that time, I began to wonder and dream again, as I had as a young boy years before. What if we could? I wondered. What if we could find what’s stopping us and turn it around? What if there is an answer and no one else has looked in the right place? What if any of us, at any time, could reach up and touch the stars?

I began the first part of my search by studying something called “human behavior.” That’s something you can get a degree in without ever really figuring it out. It is also something that older people seem to know more about than younger people. No matter how many educational degrees my professors could profess, I suspected that some of the grayed and silver-haired older people I knew had figured out what human behavior was all about long before we were taught courses in the subject.

I next studied something called motivational marketing. That teaches us what makes people do what they do even when they don’t want to do it. When I completed my course work, it was my final opinion that you can never really get anyone to do anything they don’t want to do unless you use force. I decided that in most of the world, “force” is called advertising.

In time I found myself walking the hallways of academic psychology. It is a good field and it deserves our attention and respect. A lot of people have lived richer lives because someone who cared took the time to listen.

Yet despite all the good people I encountered and the useful information I learned along the way, nowhere in my studies of business, religion, motivation or psychology had I found a concrete solution to the question of how the average individual could touch all the stars in his or her heaven and still keep both feet on solid ground.

Eventually, I recognized that if I was going to find what I was looking for, I would have to set a new course and search in a different direction. To find the specific answer I sought, I would have to embark upon a journey of my own.

I knew there had to be a better way, something that was obvious perhaps, something that might have been overlooked. I believed that mastering one’s future must surely start with managing one’s “self.” And if we could accomplish that, we could manage and master at least a part of what we call “life.”

As I continued to study the inner workings of the human mind, I decided to look further into the brain itself. And it was there that, in time, I found many answers—and one simple, undeniable solution that would shed life-changing new light on why we, as humans, fail to live out so much of our incredible potential … and what we can finally do to change that.

CHAPTER TWO

The “Answers”

There is always an answer, of course. There are countless self-help “answers,” which any of us can find in any bookstore or seminar classroom. If we are to believe what we read on the dust jackets of self-help best-sellers, or hear from dynamic speakers on stage, all any of us has to do is read the right book or attend the right program and, beginning tomorrow, we will be able to change what we would like to change, live better, and find the achievement each of us is seeking.

For many years, I studied the philosophies of success, analyzed the lists of instructions—the “how-to’s” of making more money, being a better manager, losing weight, overcoming depression, getting a better job, setting goals, living with others, managing time, or just generally “being more successful.” I tried the success techniques for myself and talked to dozens of others from many walks of life who had done the same. I talked at length with many of the leaders of the success industry—corporations whose business it is to sell us success.

I talked to the customers who attended the seminars, bought the books, or listened to the audio tools and watched the videos. I talked to the employees of the companies who were in the business of selling success formulas, to learn if they, too, applied the principles which their companies promoted. To learn what really “worked,” and what did not, I immersed myself in the world of success, examining every facet of that fascinating field from the inside out. I consulted with the leaders of the industry. I examined their methods, their systems, and their “solutions.”

And in all that time of studying so much of the field of “success,” I found a consistent promise—the promise of our success, waiting just around the corner.

But as I read those books, studied the seminar concepts, and examined the best of the best motivational tools and techniques available, I realized that promise was, ultimately, unfulfilled.

I saw that even the best-selling success solutions were able to create lasting changes in only a handful of the tens of thousands of people who tried them. They would work for a time, and then the average individual would revert to his old ways. After the first excitement of the brand-new self-belief wore off, the dreams soon gave way to the realities of everyday living.

Have you ever attended a function or a meeting in which someone gave a rousing motivational talk? Have you ever read a book that caught your attention as being life-changing, gotten excited and motivated to put the ideas into practice, only to have the book wind up forgotten on a dusty bookshelf next to other great ideas like it?

Have you ever been inspired to change, to achieve something important, and then stopped? Where did the inspiration and the motivation go—and why didn’t it last?

If there are so many answers to our questions about what to do to make life better, why have so many people failed at making these great ideas work? Or if they worked for a time, what makes them stop working?

It became obvious to me after all my research that within the information on how to lead a better life, how to find more happiness and personal fulfillment, something vital was missing. It was something so essential, so important to the whole process of achieving success that, without it, the solutions wouldn’t work—at least, not for any length of time.

The problem is not with the books. The problem is not with the seminars or with the motivational talks. There are a lot of personal growth concepts and techniques that are wonderful. They could work—and they should. There has to be a good reason why the help they give us isn’t permanent.

After studying the success ideas and solutions that could work for us, I began to recognize that there was also something working against us.

FINDING A SOLUTION THAT LASTS

I was quite young when I first heard the Biblical passage which reads, “As a man thinketh, so is he.” I recall shaking my head, thinking that could not be. How could we possibly be what we think? After all, isn’t our physical self one thing, and our private thought another?

Little did I (or most of us then) understand that the Biblical passage had hit the nail of truth squarely on the head. It would be years later, however, after much research, and following the discoveries through which modern-day neuroscientists had begun to unlock the secrets of the human mind, that I would come to know just how correct––how scientifically correct––that Biblical passage had been.

After you examine the philosophies, the theories, and the practiced methods of influencing human behavior, you’ll find, as I did, that it gets down to the simplicity of one small but powerful fact: You will become what you think about most; your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming––what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself.

At the time I first recognized that this one simple clue could lead to a breakthrough in individual attitude and performance, most of what we thought we understood about the human brain was little more than speculation. Medical researchers and neuroscientists had not yet explored or mapped the mazes of the brain to the extent which they have today. Few of the brain’s complex electrochemical mysteries were fully understood.

But today, as research continues, the marvelous human brain is yielding up more and more of its secrets. Each day more progress is made, and researchers have learned to anticipate an unending drama of new discoveries.

An understanding of that simple function of our own personal computer—the human brain—is what has been missing from most of the books and most of our motivational talks.

The answer to the problem turned out to be the result of something that had been almost entirely overlooked: We are trying to force the brain to do something that it has not been programmed to do. We want to create success with “rules of success,” but that’s not how the brain works; that’s not how the brain is wired.

The reason why some people accomplish nearly any task more easily than others, achieve their goals more readily, and live their lives more fully, is this: Those who appear to be “luckier” than the rest have actually only gotten better mental programming to begin with, or have learned how to erase their old negative programming and replace it with something better.

In the last few decades, we have learned more about the workings of the human brain than was known throughout all history prior to that time. We now know that by an incredibly complex physiological mechanism, a joint effort of body, brain, and “mind,” we become the living result of our own thoughts.

It is no longer a success theory; it is a simple, but powerful, fact. Neither luck nor desire has the slightest thing to do with it. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. The brain simply believes what you tell it most. And what you tell it about you, it will create. It has no choice.

Through scientific discovery in the field of neuroscience—research into how the brain works to affect every moment of our day-to-day lives—we have proved the relationship between our own programming (how we are mentally “wired”) and our success or failure in any endeavor we undertake, from something as important as a lifetime goal to something as small as what we do in a single day.

Have you ever considered just how much of what you do––how you act, how successful you are––is dependent on the conditioning, the programming you received from others, and on the conditioning you subsequently accepted and kept giving yourself?

It is virtually impossible for any of us to do anything, no matter how insignificant, without being affected by that programming. Every step you take, move you make, and word you say is affected.

It follows that if every action you take, of any kind, is affected by prior programming, then the end results of your actions are equally affected––in short, how successful you will be at anything is inexorably tied directly to the words and beliefs about yourself that you have stored in your subconscious mind. And what is stored there, for most of us, was decided for us by someone else.

The human brain, that incredibly powerful personal biochemical computer that each of us has, is capable of doing for you anything reasonable that you’d like it to do. But you have to know how to treat it; you have to know how to wire it in the right way. If you do it right, and give it the right directions, it will do the right thing—it will work for you in the right way.

But if you give your mental computer the wrong directions, it will act on those wrong directions; it will continue to respond to the negative programming that you and the rest of the world have been giving it. You have literally been wiring your brain in the wrong way, physically—without even being aware of it.

THE 148,000 “NO’S”

I’ll give you an example of some of the negative programming most of us have received, the kind of programming that, along the way, eventually got hard-wired into the physical structure of our mental computers. And those seemingly harmless words build up inside our subconscious minds, word by word and thought by thought, eventually creating a brick wall of failure we often don’t see, much less know how to fix. Here’s how it works.

During the first eighteen years of our lives, if we grew up in fairly average, reasonably positive homes, we were told “No” or what we could not do, or what would not work, more than 148,000 times. If you were more fortunate, you may have been told “No” only 100,000 times, or 50,000 times––however many, it was considerably more negative programming than any of us needs.

Meanwhile, during the same period, the first eighteen years of your life, how often do you suppose you were told what you can do or what you can accomplish in life? A few thousand times? A few hundred? During my speaking engagements to groups across the country and around the world, I have had people tell me they could not remember being told what they could accomplish in life more than three or four times!

Whatever the number, for most of us the “Yes’s” we received simply didn’t balance out the “No’s.” The occasional words of “belief” were just that—occasional––and they were far outweighed by our daily doses of “Cannot’s.”

This negative programming that we all received (and still receive) has come to us quite unintentionally: It has come to us from our parents, who wanted to protect us; it has come to us from our brothers and sisters, from our teachers, our schoolmates, our associates at work, our life-mates, advertising of all kinds, the morning paper and the six o’clock television news and the Internet.

Leading behavioral researchers have told us that as much as seventy-seven percent of everything we think is negative, counterproductive, and works against us. At the same time, researchers have said that as much as seventy-five percent of all illnesses are self-induced. It’s no wonder. What if the researchers are correct? That means that as much as seventy-five percent or more of our programming is the wrong kind.

Until recently, no one understood well enough the human mind—how the human brain gets wired and rewired—and that this programming and wiring process goes on throughout our entire lives. The result was that without knowing what they were doing, and with us not recognizing the immense effect this “casual” programming was having on us, without anyone being aware of it, everything and everyone around us has been programming us. And they have been programming us in the wrong way.

THE POWER OF REPETITION

Unfortunately, most of the programming we received was the wrong kind of programming, but we took it to heart––and our brains wired it in. Year after year, word by word, our life scripts were etched by others. Layer by layer, nearly indelibly, our self-images were created.

In time, we ourselves joined in. We began to believe that what we were being told by others––and what we were telling ourselves––was true. No matter how innocently given or subtly implied, we began hearing the same words and thoughts repeatedly; hundreds, even thousands of times we were told, or we told ourselves, what we could not do, could not accomplish. Repetition is a convincing argument. Eventually we believed what others told us and what we told ourselves most; we began to live out the picture of ourselves we had created in our minds.

In time, we became what we most believed about ourselves. And in so doing, we created that wall of failure and self-doubt, which for most of us will stand invisibly but powerfully between us and our unlimited future for as long as our old programming remains in force. Unless the programming we received is erased or replaced with different programming, it will stay with us permanently and affect and direct everything we do for the rest of our lives.

Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case.

WHAT COULD YOUR FUTURE HOLD?

Because of the important breakthroughs in neuroscience, we are no longer at the mercy of our old programs and old conditioning that was never true about us in the first place. We can begin to truly live out the unlimited potential each of us was born with, because we now understand how to rewire the brain, by taking control of the day-to-day, verbal programming process.

Think for a moment what you might do differently tomorrow if you were someone else––someone whose programming was different from yours. Or what might you do differently if you had been brought up with a completely different, more positive set of attitudes and beliefs and feelings from those which you may have now––attitudes and beliefs and feelings which, in every case, would assure you of having an abundance of self-belief, enthusiasm, and achievement?

If you had just the right kind of successful new mental programs, would you be doing the same thing for a living that you are doing now? Would you be doing your job in exactly the same way? What about your personal life? Would you change anything, improve anything? Would you have reached any more goals than you have reached? Would you have more money in the bank or any more financial security than you have now? What about your day-to-day life––would it be less frustrating and more rewarding? And, with different preparation or conditioning, what could your future hold? Would it be the same as your future holds for you today, or would it be better?

What if each and every day, from the time you were a small child, you had been given an extra helping of self-confidence, double the amount of determination, and twice the amount of belief in the outcome? Can you imagine what tasks you might accomplish more easily, what problems you would overcome, or what goals you could reach? After all, success, ultimately, is up to the individual. It isn’t the pen––it’s the writer; it isn’t the road––it’s the runner that counts.

Whatever age you are now, however many successes or failures you’ve had along the way, what if you could now change that old mental programming? What if you could rewire your brain? And what if you could do it in such a way that you could affect and improve your attitudes and your behavior quickly––not through years of difficult study or training, but easily and simply, anytime you chose to do so?

That is exactly what the brain will do.

We now know precisely how to change our old programming, and how to replace it with specific, word-for-word new programs. Those new programs, in time, lead to better brain wiring … which, in turn, leads to happier and more successful lives for all of us.

Our new understanding of the brain’s neuroplasticity––its ability to rewire itself throughout our entire lifetimes––is the understanding that can now help us make a vital change in the programming we accept from others, and what we say when we talk to ourselves. And when you decide to apply that new understanding to your everyday life in a simple, dedicated way, the unfilled promise at the end of your success journey can, at last, be realized.

CHAPTER THREE

Creating Positive Change That Lasts

Here is a short summary of the rules of success that have been given to us over the years. Each of these ideas is designed to help you create positive changes in your life. We’ve learned that if you want to be successful, you should:

Believe In Yourself

Keep Your Priorities Straight

Take Responsibility For Yourself

Create Your Own Future

Meditate Daily

Practice Mindfulness

Focus On What You Want

Attract What You Desire

Learn To Visualize The Outcome Of Your Goals

Never Let Anyone Control Your Destiny For You

Be Creative

Think Big

Control Stress

Be Aggressive And Assertive

Think Positively

Chart Your Own Course

Set Specific Goals And Review Them Often

Spend Some Time Each Day Improving Your Mind

Review Your Results And Readjust As Necessary

Be Tolerant

Do Everything With Love

Don’t Hate

Have Courage

Recognize That Most Of What We Believe About Life

Is An Illusion

Be Honest

Work Hard

Believe Money Is Good And It Will Come To You

Have Faith

If You Agree To Do It, Enjoy It

Be Strong

Show Affection

Manage Your Time

Dress Right

Learn To Sell Yourself

Take Time Off

Believe In A “Higher Self”

Eat Right

Live Prudently

Seek The Aid Of Others Who Are In Sympathy With Your Goals

Give Assistance To Others

Keep Motivated

Be Optimistic

Trust Others And Be Worthy Of Trust

Recognize That Success Is More Than Money

Be Kind

See The “Big Picture”

Take Care Of The Details

Get Organized

Don’t Procrastinate

Stay In Control

Keep Fit

See Problems As “Opportunities”

Learn Everything You Can About Your Job

Don’t Be Afraid Of Success

Be Generous To Others

Believe In God

Reach A Little Higher Than You Thought You Could

Set Your Sights

Take Action

Never Give Up

This list of self-improvement teachings suggests that we’ve been given most of the keys to success. If you follow those rules, you should create positive change, and by doing that, become successful.

Our new understanding of the brain’s neuroplasticity, however, tells us that in order for these rules to work––or for these changes we want to become permanent changes––there are three essential ingredients that will ensure that the ideas will become a permanent part of you.

1. The first ingredient is: in order to work, and keep working, the new idea (or message) has to become physically wired into your brain. Unless the new messages or directions are actually wired into your brain’s neural networks, even the best of the ideas will work only temporarily.

2. The second ingredient for creating lasting, positive mental changes is: understanding how your brain gets wired, and the role you play in the wiring process. An understanding of how your brain gets programmed puts you in direct control of the process of creating the change and making it last.

3. The third ingredient for creating positive personal change––which always begins with mental change––is: a new, word-far-word set of directions, new programming to both your conscious and subconscious minds. That means a specific “programming vocabulary” which is worded in a specific way, that anyone can use at any time, to replace the old negative programming with positive, productive new directions.

The only solution that includes all three of the essential ingredients that create lasting change in the brain, is “self-talk.”

Think for a moment of some of the things you would like to accomplish or achieve in your life––or even smaller things you would like to change about your life right now. Your objective could be to earn more income, have a better family life, improve your skills, do better in school, do better at work––anything at all.

Whatever means you choose to make the change, unless you first begin to change your old programming, the years of conditioning that keep you doing it the old way, the likely outcome is that what you want to accomplish will not work––or will not last.

When you use any of the personal growth ideas and concepts that are available to you, the practice of self-talk—the practice of consciously and actively rewiring your brain with a more successful, new picture of yourself––is the ingredient that rewires your brain and changes your future. But bear in mind that as you do this, it is essential to program in the right new self-talk.

Whatever you put into your mind, in one way or another, is what you will get back out, in one way or another.

CHAPTER FOUR

New Discoveries

During the last few years, neuroscientists have learned that much of what we had suspected about the human brain is true: the brain operates very much like a personal computer. It’s not that simple, of course. For one thing, the brain is still many times more powerful, in some respects, than the most powerful computers we have yet created. Even though the adult human brain weighs only about sixteen hundred grams, about three pounds, and looks more like a lump of gray cauliflower than a desktop computer, the brain functions in some important ways much like the man-made computers that are patterned after it.