Transforming Your Self by Steve Andreas
This book's subtitle is "Becoming who you want to be," and that is a big promise.
Yet I believe this book is one of the most effective self-help books written.
It ranks up there with PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS by Maxwell Maltz.
There're thousands of books, programs, CDs, DVDs, speakers and live seminars that claim they can help you improve yourself.
Many people have read and gone to some.
Some people are self-improvement junkies who keep buying book after book and attending seminar after seminar.
Sometimes they follow the advice for a few days, weeks and even months, but eventually go back to being their old selves.
This book consists largely of a transcript of a seminar the author gave to show people how to transform their self-concept.
That is, to teach them how to transform themselves into the people they want to be.
After teaching them, he led them through the process so they learned by doing.
To mind, and I guess I'm as much a self-improvement junkie as many others, this book contains valuable lessons that anybody who's willing to sit down and do what the author says can use to transform themselves into a different person.
He starts out explaining about self-concepts, and how it's different from your self-esteem.
If your self-concept matches your values, then you have high self-esteem, because if you approve of yourself.
So your self-esteem is your evaluation of your self-concept.
What Andreas found when he began investigating self-concepts years ago, was that they have a structure.
If you're not familiar with NLP this may seem odd, but if you think about it, it's really not.
Your five senses -- though primarily sight, sound and feeling -- are how you perceive the world and think.
They're also how you think about yourself and your qualities.
Are you smart or stupid? Fat or skinny? Kind or mean? A winner or a loser? You form sensory impressions of those things.
They may be pictures, or sounds or feelings or some combination.
They have some physical location around you.
Andreas guides you to find the structure of qualities you know for sure that you possess.
Then to find the current structure of qualities you'd like to possess but don't yet.
Then simply has you change the structure of the qualities you want to possess to how you structure qualities you are sure you do possess.
That may sound complicated, and it's not our normal way of thinking about how we think about ourselves, but it works.
Not by hypnosis or razzle dazzle speeches or impractical repetition or visualization (which I believe does work by causing you to experience in your imagination that trait you want to have and thereby add it to the structure of what you know to be true about yourself).
I've been using it, and it helps me.
It works.
If you're already the person you want to be every day, you don't need this book.
But if you have even one less than desirable trait, grab it while you can.
Yet I believe this book is one of the most effective self-help books written.
It ranks up there with PSYCHO-CYBERNETICS by Maxwell Maltz.
There're thousands of books, programs, CDs, DVDs, speakers and live seminars that claim they can help you improve yourself.
Many people have read and gone to some.
Some people are self-improvement junkies who keep buying book after book and attending seminar after seminar.
Sometimes they follow the advice for a few days, weeks and even months, but eventually go back to being their old selves.
This book consists largely of a transcript of a seminar the author gave to show people how to transform their self-concept.
That is, to teach them how to transform themselves into the people they want to be.
After teaching them, he led them through the process so they learned by doing.
To mind, and I guess I'm as much a self-improvement junkie as many others, this book contains valuable lessons that anybody who's willing to sit down and do what the author says can use to transform themselves into a different person.
He starts out explaining about self-concepts, and how it's different from your self-esteem.
If your self-concept matches your values, then you have high self-esteem, because if you approve of yourself.
So your self-esteem is your evaluation of your self-concept.
What Andreas found when he began investigating self-concepts years ago, was that they have a structure.
If you're not familiar with NLP this may seem odd, but if you think about it, it's really not.
Your five senses -- though primarily sight, sound and feeling -- are how you perceive the world and think.
They're also how you think about yourself and your qualities.
Are you smart or stupid? Fat or skinny? Kind or mean? A winner or a loser? You form sensory impressions of those things.
They may be pictures, or sounds or feelings or some combination.
They have some physical location around you.
Andreas guides you to find the structure of qualities you know for sure that you possess.
Then to find the current structure of qualities you'd like to possess but don't yet.
Then simply has you change the structure of the qualities you want to possess to how you structure qualities you are sure you do possess.
That may sound complicated, and it's not our normal way of thinking about how we think about ourselves, but it works.
Not by hypnosis or razzle dazzle speeches or impractical repetition or visualization (which I believe does work by causing you to experience in your imagination that trait you want to have and thereby add it to the structure of what you know to be true about yourself).
I've been using it, and it helps me.
It works.
If you're already the person you want to be every day, you don't need this book.
But if you have even one less than desirable trait, grab it while you can.
