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.
The great thing about behavioural psychology and economics is that they help us to see that there are actually pretty good reasons why human beings swing from greed to fear, and why we're not really calculating machines or utility-maximisers.
Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is a good reason for it.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.
It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'
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