The Modeling of Human Excellence
I am certainly not saying that my life is what success is all about. Obviously, we all have different dreams and ideas of what we want to create for our lives. In addition, I'm very clear that who you know, where you go and what you own are not the true measure of personal success. To me, success is the ongoing process of striving to become more. It is the opportunity to continually grow emotionally, socially, spiritually, physiologically, intellectually, and financially while contributing in some positive way to others. The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached
It's important to remember that emotions such as depression do not happen to you. You don't "catch" depression. You create it, like every other result in your life, through specific mental and physical actions. In order to be depressed, you have to view your life in specific ways. You have to say certain things to yourself in just the right tones of voice. You have to adopt a specific posture and breathing pattern. For example, if you want to be depressed, it helps a lot if you collapse your shoulders and look down a lot. Speaking in a sad-sounding tone of voice and thinking of the worst-possible scenarios for your life also helps. If you throw your biochemistry into turmoil through poor diet or excessive alcohol or drug use and your body is creating low blood sugar and thus virtually guarantee depression
My point here is simply that it takes effort to create depression. It's hard work, and it requires taking specific types of actions. Some people have created this state so often, though, that it's easy for them to produce. If fact, often they've linked this pattern of internal communication to all kinds of external events. Some people get so many secondary gains-attention from others, sympathy, love, and so on-that they adopt this style of communication as their natural state of living. Others have lived with it so long that it actually feels comfortable. They become identified with the state. We can, however, change our mental and physical actions and thereby immediately change
You can become ecstatic by immediately adopting the point of view that creates that emotion. You can picture in your mind the kinds of things that create this feeling. You can change the tone and content of your internal dialogue with yourself. You can adopt the specific postures and breathing patterns that create that stare in your body, and voilà! You will experience ecstasy, If you want to be compassionate, you need only change your physical and mental actions to accord with those which the state of compassion requires. The same is true of love or any other emotion
You might think of the process of producing emotional states by managing your internal communication as being similar to a director's job. To produce the precise results he wants, the director of a movie manipulates what you see and hear. If he wants you to be scared, he might turn up the sound and splash some special effects on the screen at just the right moment. If he wants you to be inspired, he'll arrange the music, the lighting, and everything else on the screen to produce that effect. A director can produce a tragedy or a comedy out of the same event, depending upon what he decides to put on the screen. You can do the same things with the screen of your mind. You can direct your mental activity, which is the underpinning of all physical action, with the same skill and power. You can turn up the light and sound of the positive messages in your brain, and you can din the picture and sounds of negative one
