Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement Read Free Page A

total amnesiac.
    At first, the doctors thought it would be temporary. But weeks passed and no trace of her memory returned. Her husband and children visited her daily, but she did not know them. This was such an unusual case that other doctors and specialists came to visit her as well, to test her and ask her questions about her condition.
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    ■ STARTING OVER
    Eventually, she went home, her memory a complete blank. Determined to understand what had happened to her, she began reading medical textbooks and studying in the specialized area of amnesia and memory loss. She met and spoke with specialists in this field.
    Eventually she wrote a paper on her condition. Not long afterward, she was invited to address a medical convention to deliver her paper, answer questions about her amnesia, and share her experiences and ideas on neurological functioning.
    During this period, something amazing happened. She became a new person completely. All the attention in the hospital and afterward made her feel valuable, important, and truly loved by her family.
    The attention and acclaim she received from members of the medical profession built her self-esteem and self-respect even higher.
    She became a genuinely positive, confident, outgoing woman, highly articulate, well informed, and very much in demand as a speaker and authority in the medical profession.
    All memory of her negative childhood had been wiped out. Her feelings of inferiority were wiped out as well. She became a new person. She changed her thinking and changed her life.
    ■ THE BLANK SLATE
    The Scottish philosopher David Hume was the first to propose the idea of the tabula rasa or blank slate. This theory says that each person comes into the world with no thoughts or ideas at all, and everything that a person thinks and feels is learned from infancy onward. It is as though the child’s mind is a blank slate that every passing person and experience leaves a mark on. The adult becomes the sum total of everything he or she learns, feels, and experiences growing up. What the adult does and becomes later is the result of this early conditioning. As Aristotle wrote, “Whatever is impressed is expressed.”
    Perhaps the greatest breakthrough in the field of human potential in the twentieth century was the discovery of the self-concept .
    This is the idea that each person develops a bundle of beliefs regarding oneself, starting at birth. Your self-concept then becomes ccc_tracy_1_1-17.qxd 6/23/03 2:46 PM Page 3
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    the master program of your subconscious computer, determining everything you think, say, feel, and do. For this reason, all change in your outer life begins with a change in your self-concept, with a change in the way you think and feel about yourself and your world.
    The child is born with no self-concept at all. Every idea, opinion, feeling, attitude, or value you have as an adult you learned from childhood. Everything you are today is the result of an idea or impression you took in and accepted as true. When you believe something to be true, it becomes true for you, whatever the fact may be.
    “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.”
    ■ FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE LASTING
    If you were raised by parents who continually told you what a good person you were, who loved you, encouraged you, supported you, and believed in you, no matter what you did or didn’t do, you would grow up with the belief that you were a good and valuable person.
    By the age of three, this belief would lock in and become a fundamental part of the way you view yourself in relation to your world.
    Thereafter, no matter what happens to you, you would hold to this belief. It would become your reality.
    If you were raised by parents who did not know how powerful their words and behaviors could be in shaping your personality, they could very easily have used