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https://youtu.be/U5Lg87Q_coUWe will never elevate our lives beyond our self-image. We are already great. We are already enough. We don’t need to change our real self. Changing our self-image will unleash our goal seeking potential. We can activate our automatic success system that is built in all of us. Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a renowned plastic surgeon, turned his focus to the psychology of achievement. He discovered that we can activate an auto pilot wiring us to achieve a great life. He wrote a book published in 1960: “Psycho-Cybernetics.”  Cybernetics describes a mechanical auto pilot, self correcting system. Dr. Maltz married this with our own internal goal seeking system. 

In my latest podcast, I talk about the Fifth Habit from the best selling book by Steven Covey, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Christmas In New York
We had a fabulous time on our first Christmas trip to New York in three years. With everything we have seen on the news about crime in the city, we were concerned about returning this year. All was great, and the city looked very safe. We didn’t see any homeless or transients on the street. We didn’t see anyone soliciting on the trains or subway stations. We saw many families and women traveling alone on the subway trains. We saw three Broadway shows. Fiddler on the Roof, The Music Man with Hugh Jackman, and Into the Woods. The weather was perfect, cold enough to feel like Christmas but warm enough to walk to restaurants and shows. Friends from Brooklyn took the train into the city and met us for dinner and a walk to Rockefeller Center to see the tree.

The best thing I learned from Steven Covey’s book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”, was to first seek to understand then be understood. He gave an example of a man riding a train. In the train car was a man and his two young children. The two young children were running up and down the aisle of the train car yelling and playing loudly. The man with them was not paying attention and didn’t take control of them. The other man in the train car said to the man that he should take control of his children. The man said, yes I should, your right, we just came back from their mothers funeral and they don’t really understand how to handle it, and neither do I, I’m sorry. 

The lesson is, we never know what someone else is going through. And we should keep this in mind before we judge them, or challenge their behavior. I read this from Covey’s book over fifteen years ago, and I still keep this lesson in mind as I negotiate my day with people who I may initially take as acting out of line. 

Memento Mori is a latin phrase meaning ‘remember you will die’. It’s origin is often attributed to the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers. In reading Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca,  I have read the phrase often. Initially this seemed quite depressing to me. But the stoics said they kept this thought in their mind, not in a morbid way, but as a reminder to live life to the fullest now, since time on earth is limited. Before knowing that this was part of a philosophy, I have often used the thought in living with a passionate attitude. When I think of friends and family who are now gone, I think how lucky I am to still be living. Instead of getting down, I try to honor the fact that I’m still alive and have the opportunity to take advantage of every day that is given as a gift. So I’ve come to grow fonder of the phrase. Not a bad idea to ‘Memento More!’.