Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Maxwell MaltzRead
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.
Interpretation
Self-image significantly influences personality and behavior; altering it can lead to foundational changes.
Maxwell Maltz's quote emphasizes the importance of self-image in shaping who we are and how we act. He suggests that by transforming our self-perception, we can fundamentally change our personality traits and behaviors, indicating that the way we see ourselves directly impacts our interactions with the world.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-brake on.
Of all the traps and pitfalls in life, self-disesteem is the deadliest, and the hardest to overcome: for it is a pit designed and dug by our own hands, summed up in the phrase, 'It's no use - I can't do it.'
Your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an imagined experience and a 'real' experience. In either case, it reacts automatically to information which you give to it from your forebrain. Your nervous system reacts appropriately to what you THINK or IMAGINE to be 'true.
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible.
What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live - with your self-respect alive and growing.
Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.
Fortunately I experienced Max Wertheimer's teaching in Berlin and collaborated for over a decade with Wolfgang Köhler. I need not emphasize my debts to these outstanding personalities. The fundamental ideas of Gestalt theory are the foundation of all our investigations in the field of the will, of affection, and of the personality.
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