After two decades as a pioneer in plastic surgery, Dr. Maxwell Maltz put away the scalpel.
Adjusting their noses. Lips. Jaws. Eyes. Boobs. Seeing patients show up repeatedly, Maltz came to a powerful realization.
He could nip and tuck time and time again, but if his patients didn’t change the way they perceived themselves, their self-image, nothing would change.
As he wrote, “If the scalpel was magic, why did some people who acquired new faces go right on wearing their old personalities?”
In his revolutionary book, Psycho-Cybernetics—which has sold 30+ million copies and displays cover art gifted to him by Salvador Dali—Maltz highlights an often over-looked aspect of success and happiness.
Posing the question, “Why are the rich and powerful unhappy?” Maltz writes, “To really live, that is to find life reasonably satisfying, you must have an adequate and realistic self-image that you can live with. You must find yourself acceptable to you.”
And while this is a powerful prescription in itself, Maltz goes much further, laying out a mechanism for achieving any goal.
“In short, the goals you attempt to convey to this mechanism are filtered through the self-image,” wrote Maltz, “and if they are inconsistent with the self-image, they are rejected or modified.”
Maltz concluded that, not only must you be able to visualize your goals being achieved, you must develop the self-image of you being the person achieving them.
Take, for instance, an Olympic decathlete with her sights set on gold.
Not only must she be able to visualize an athlete winning gold, but she must imagine herself as the athlete standing in the center podium for all the world to see.
She’s not just seeing gold being won. She is building her self-image as the one winning gold.
An obese man with an enormous tush and a healthy goal must first build a healthy self-image, and the same is true for any goal.
Not only must you be able to visualize your goal happening, you must first see yourself as the person that is making it happen.