"You are where you are today because of the actions you took up until now. If you're not
achieving what you desire, take a look at what you're doing. Are you pushing against a door that just won't open? Unless you
stop what you're doing and try something different, you will never get inside the building. There's a lesson to be learned
here, and until you learn it, you are only wasting time and precious energy.
So how do you start developing new, effective actions and keep going until you reach your
destination? I've been involved in many discussions about whether people get better results in self-improvement when they:
¨ Think themselves into new ways of behaving,
or when they
¨ Behave themselves into new ways of thinking.
The two concepts are actually very much interrelated. Your thoughts drive your behavior,
yet sometimes experimenting and testing the waters with your actions is what convinces you that a new way might work after
all.
Your learned habits of thought-your secret messages-influence your actions. You react in
certain ways to certain cues automatically, without consciously thinking about them, because of the way you were conditioned.
Imagine you are in a movie theater watching a suspense film. The heroine is alone in her house, it's nighttime, and a thunderstorm
is brewing. The lighting is dim, and you can see the silhouettes of trees blowing violently outside the windows. The background
violin music transitions from smooth and mellow to jagged and screechy-and it gets faster and louder. Then as the heroine
walks down the hall toward a concealed doorway, you spontaneously shout, "Don't go in there!"
The actress can't hear you. You know it's only a movie, and that it's not real. In the plot,
nothing has actually happened yet-but your pulse is racing, your tension is growing, and you call out to her anyway. The effects
in the film work on your emotions and your behavior, because at some point, you learned what they are supposed to mean. You
know that dark and stormy means threat and evil in the movies. Even though the villain can't pop out of the screen and get
you, you react with jumps or shrieks of fear just the same.
To think your way into new actions, you must interfere with your automatic pattern of stimulus
and response by consciously choosing a different, more effective action to use the next time a similar situation
arises. "
