Goal Setting and Goal Getting success depends to a huge degree on your self-image. By learning to recognise, modify and manage your self-image – you can change your life and boost your success when it comes to following through on your promises to yourself to achieve your goals.
So let’s take a look at this vital piece of the goal success puzzle.
A brilliant plastic surgeon in the sixties, Dr Maxwell Maltz, has most influenced what we know on achieving goals due to SELF IMAGE. His findings revolutionized thousands of lives and influenced the self-help psychology of today concerning the power of self-image to change our likelihood for goal success. Maltz’ best-selling classic: Psycho-Cybernetics was updated as “The New Pscycho-Cybernetics” in recent years by marketing genius Dan S. Kennedy. He writes:
If you have failed before with creative mental picturing, visualization and “acting as if” – the reason is most likely this was because you attempted applying the techniques with conflict about your self image.
This explains why so many people stumble and give up on their goals and dreams declaring that the Law of Attraction or positive thinking “does not work”.
In Maltz’ words:
Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries within us a mental blueprint of picture of ourselves. It may be vague or ill-defined to our conscious gaze…It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. Most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failure, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. From all of these we mentally construct a self (or picture of a self). Once an idea or a belief about ourselves goes into this picture it becomes “truth,” as far as we personally are concerned.
We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true.The self-image then controls what you can and cannot accomplish, what is difficult or easy for you, even how others respond to you just as certainly and scientifically as a thermostat controls the temperature in your home.
Specifically, all your actions, feelings, behavior, even your abilities, are always consistent with this self-image. Note the word always. You will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. More important, you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts to willpower. (This is why trying to achieve something difficult with teeth gritted is a losing battle. Willpower is not the answer. Self-image management is.)
This came home to me last year when I set myself the toughest goal I had yet to tackle in many years of goal success in other areas of my life. I decided the single most important goal I could achieve to extend my quality of life in the longterm – and bring down my high Blood Pressure in the short-term – was to lose at least 50 lbs.
Eight months later I am thrilled to say I have indeed shed 50 lbs – though I have a 10lbs more to go.
Looking back, I can see that I came to an AHA moment when I realised that I could not imagine myself thin ever again…no matter how I tried, I simply could not. My self-image, going back to childhood, was of a person who was attractive and accomplished, bright and successful – despite her larger than life size. In the end, I had to download a FAT-TO-THIN picture I found on the internet of a body in a bikini going from overweight to slim – and keep telling myself “this is me..fat to slim…fat to slim” imprinting it on my brain repeatedly using EFT-Matrix Reimprinting in which I am skilled.
The results have been fantastic!
You could say my self-image has dramatically changed – and the way to ensure I stay my new thinner self is to keep that new self-image fixed forever!
As Maxwell Maltz says:
You cannot long outperform or escape your self-image. If you do escape briefly, you’ll be “snapped back” like a rubber band, extended between two fingers, coming loose from one.
Ultimately the key to goal setting and goal success lies in understanding this vital truth.
