Change Your Self Image

Acquiring information itself is passive. Experiencing is active. When you "experience," something happens inside your nervous system and your mid-brain. New "engrams" and "neural" patterns are recorded in the gray matter of your brain.

Do not allow yourself to become discouraged if nothing seems to happen when you set about practicing the various techniques for changing your self-image. Instead reserve judgment and go on practicing for a minimum period of 21 days. It usually requires a minimum of about 21 days to effect any perceptible change in a mental image. Following plastic surgery it takes about 21 days for the average patient to get used to his new face. People must live in a new house for about three weeks before it begins to "seem like home." These, and may other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.

Therefore you will derive more benefit from, if you will secure your own consent to reserve critical judgment for at least three weeks. During this time do not be continually looking over your shoulder, so to speak, or trying to measure your progress. During these 21 days do not argue intellectually with the ideas presented, do not debate with yourself as to whether they will work or not. Perform the exercises, even if they seem impractical to you. persist in playing your new role, in thinking of yourself in new terms, even if you seem to yourself to be somewhat hypocritical in doing so, and even if the new self-image feels a little uncomfortable or "unnatural."

I am only asking that you reserve critical judgment and analytical argument for 21 days so that you will give yourself a fair chance to prove or disprove their validity in your own life. The building of an adequate self-image is something that should continue throughout a life-time. Admittedly you cannot accomplish a life-time of growth in three weeks' time. But, you can experience improvement within three weeks' time and sometimes the improvement is quite dramatic.