chapter 6 self mastery complexes
SUCCESS THROUGH
SELF-MASTERY BY
BERNARD L. CALMUS
This monthly e-course is brought to you by Moya Mulvay
Chapter 6
HOW TO OVERCOME YOUR COMPLEX
Twenty-four Steps to Mastery—How to recognize your complexes
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
2
Twenty-four Steps to Mastery
WE ARE all made up of complexes of some sort or other; but some of them predominate to such an extent that they are continually pulling us back. A complex is a deterrent. It is negative. All the things it does for you are negative, for it makes you self-conscious and unhappy.
self-conscious. One implies confidence, the knowledge of yourself in relation to others; the other implies the exact opposite, because it is the knowledge of other people's relationship to you. To be fully conscious of yourself is to be alert to your own powers', to be self-conscious is to be over-conscious of the powers of others to yourself. The difference is not so subtle that it cannot be understood; while to realize it is to put your finger on the real significance of a complex. It is the complex which makes you self-conscious; it is the selfconsciousness which pulls you back. If you are self-conscious you are embarrassed, and embarrassment is a mental suffering which shows itself www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
All the things it does for you are negative, for it makes you self-conscious and unhappy.
There is a difference between being conscious of yourself and being
3
in blushing, stammering and “stage-fright”. It is just as possible to have “stage-fright” in the presence of one person as it is to have it in the presence of several. Having stage-fright is a symptom. It is the paralysis of all the potentialities within yourself, so that you feel inferior. It is sometimes good to remember that, just as we all have the same potentialities for greatness, so we all have the same roots of stage-fright.
The difference between a confident person and a selfconscious one is the fact that the first has learned to overcome the potentialities for stage-fright. It is good to remember that the other person is, initially, as nervous as yourself, even if he can conceal it better than you can. This knowledge, held on tightly by you, will reassert your ego. Meet him on his own level; get out of yourself in order to visualize his feelings, and you will approach him with sympathy rather than with a feeling of self-pity. Complexes are the concentration of self, used in the wrong way. It is not pity that you want for yourself, nor even sympathy; this is weakness. It is the strength of confidence you want, which is the enemy of weakness in any form. www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
4
Before we go on to analyze complexes, all of which can be summed up as Inferiority or Superiority Complexes, let us go over a few rules to remember in beginning the fight to overcome them. 1.
A complex reveals self-consciousness.
2.
Self-consciousness is a concentration on one's self in the wrong way.
3.
Self-consciousness is a distrust of one's self.
4.
To distrust one's self is to give up the fight before one even begins.
5.
Not even to start the fight is to admit weakness.
6.
Weakness is a deterrent to the best in you.
7.
A complex, then, can only be a negative quality.
8.
Anything negative in the mind must be uprooted.
9.
The negative can only be vanquished by the positive.
10.
The positive, then, can only be the extreme opposite of self-consciousness.
11.
The opposite of self-consciousness is to feel for the other person, not for yourself.
12.
To visualize the other person is to draw you out of “yourself”.
13.
It is impossible to concentrate on one's weaknesses when one is thinking of someone else.
14.
To think of the other person's feelings is to radiate sympathy.
15.
To radiate sympathy is to give out magnetism.
16.
Magnetism is an electric fervor charged with confidence.
17.
Under the composure of the other person may be a nervousness greater than www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
5
yours. 18.
Seek to put him at ease, and you will feel at ease yourself.
19.
Having put him at ease, the feeling will reveal itself in the atmosphere, which will be friendly, sincere and radiant.
20.
Having achieved this, the atmosphere will radiate ease back to you.
21.
This radiation back and forth will give the other person confidence in you.
22.
Realizing this, you will react with self-confidence.
23.
From now on, there will be a constant back-and-forth of feeling which will bring accord.
24.
Having achieved this, you can concentrate on the business in hand.
These twenty-four steps to self-confidence are vitally important. The preliminary talk before you get down to business is necessary for the success of the business. It may seem “small-talk”—about the weather, about business in general, about anything. Be interested in your conversation, and the other person will not be squirming at the “waste of time”.
Above
all,
“wasting time”.
never
be
CONSCIOUS
of
This merely increases the degree of
your self-consciousness and; is negative. All the most successful people are those who indulge in preliminary “skirmishing” before they get down to business. It is only when your opponent is trying to take you off your guard that he forces www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
6
Refuse to perpetuate a complex for ANYONE.
business down your throat immediately. Be conscious of this fact, and you can never be the victim of another person. Insist on your preliminary skirmishing, which need only take a few moments, and he will realize your potentialities. Refuse to perpetuate a complex for
ANYONE.
This rule applies to
employers, to business associates, to friends, to lovers, and to husbands and wives when they are preparing to discuss plans. The rules apply in each case, though the content of the conversational “skirmish” may of course be different. Don't get out a formula for your conversation. Let that be spontaneous. Have an idea of what you want to say, of course; but try to get the other person interested in your subject, whatever it is you do talk about, until you learn to know what his pet topic is. However, remember that conversation, like personality, is two-dimensional. There is a give and take. You give, he takes; you
take, he gives. He will be as anxious to please you as you are to please him. If he isn't, then you may be sure that he has a complex and, conscious of this fact, you know that you can get your will. That is the tragedy of a complex. It reveals itself so surely to an acute person that you are at his complete mercy; for he can play on your complex and keep on making www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
7
you give yourself away by your feeling small. A good personality is one which can never become victimized through selfinsufficiency. Once you are master of yourself, you are master of your complexes. With them poisoning your life you are master of nothing. Now let us try to recognize a complex when we see one, whether in ourselves or in others. I may have seemed to have put the cart before the horse by showing you how to overcome your complexes before I have shown you how to recognize them; but I have done this deliberately, in order to show you that complexes are not really so hard to get rid of once you know how. To show you a number of complexes and first depress you is, in my opinion, bad psychology, though I know it is done. To make your enthusiasm
alive so that you feel confident in yourself is the first and very essential step to mastering your complex.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
8
How to Recognize Your Complexes
To recognize your complex is to recognize yourself; to recognize yourself is to know yourself. A complex cannot exist outside of
YOU;
existing within you, it can be mastered only by
YOU.
the
INFERIORITY
Complex, familiar to most people, and the
SUPERIORITY
Complex, familiar to few. All other complexes are offshoots of these two. If you feel yourself inferior to others, it is because you have become too conscious of failing inside yourself; often you will deliberately deceive yourself and others by developing symptoms of obstinacy and self-will. The dreadful feeling of impotence forces you to thrust yourself forward even when you really don't want to do so at all. You are forced into difficult positions. The person who suffers from an inferiority complex is the victim of himself rather than his own master. He is driven on by the misuse of his vital powers, uncontrolled, therefore uncontrollable.
The person who suffers from an inferiority complex is the victim of himself rather than his own master.
There are two main complexes. There is
Because he is afraid of people, he will try to overbeat them. As it is not sympathy he is giving them, he is perpetuating his feelings of inferiority by making his inner self too conscious of his failings. www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
9
Now remember that failings are there to be corrected, and they can only be corrected by yourself, NO ONE IS SUPERIOR TO YOU WHILE YOU ARE IN
CONTROL OF YOURSELF. Power is a vital spark that is in all of us. It is power which gives us mastery over our drives. If you have failings, it is better to search for them, master them, and find your mental balance, than to drive them into yourself and into the Unconscious by a deliberate deceit.
You can only find yourself within yourself
You can deceive your Conscious, but never your Unconscious. You can pretend to others, but never to yourself. You can set out to fascinate the opposite sex because you are not sure of yourself, but you can never achieve the ultimate satisfaction of conquest, because you are not
TRUE.
The sufferer from an inferiority complex is an actor. He looks within himself, sees a distasteful picture, and thereafter searches for himself in the outer world. You can only find yourself within yourself, INSIDE YOU.
THE TRUE PICTURE OF YOURSELF
is
To avert your eyes satisfies the weaknesses within you, not the
strengths. To look within yourself is to cure yourself. If you are naturally an introvert, a
person who can really find satisfaction within yourself, don't force yourself to become an extrovert, a person who looks in the world for your pleasures.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
10
To reverse your natural self is not to cure yourself. To take your natural self and graft it gradually on the outside world is to find the Happy Mean and be a perfectly balanced personality. This process alone rids you of your inferiority complexes. See yourself fully and truly;
previous chapters; strengthen your failings by exposing them to deliberate thought, and reshaping them for their potentialities of strength, and you can face the world without the overweening conceit which is at the same time deceit of yourself and the world. The person who suffers from a Superiority Complex is one who does genuinely think that he is so superior to his fellow-beings that he refuses to learn anything more. Whereas the inferiority complex lets loose
conceit
and
obstinacy,
the
superiority
complex
makes
for
shallowness and a dogmatic attitude. The potentialities here have overbalanced so as to become awry: the potential strengths have become weaknesses. If you suffer from a Superiority Complex, realize the fact
AT ONCE;
otherwise you will not take in what you are trying to learn.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
The person who suffers from a Superiority Complex is one who does genuinely think that he is so superior to his fellow-beings that he refuses to learn anything
use the process of self-analysis taught in the
11
Remember that whereas one can be mentally self-sufficient in the acquisition of poise, one cannot be self-sufficient in the worldly sense.
mix
with
people
and,
One has to
mixing
with
people, one has to LEARN from them as well as to teach—though
the Superiority Complex, seemingly all-complete, cannot
be “bothered” to teach anyone. Allow yourself to be penetrated by your fellow creatures. To close your mental self to the good influences around you is to become a victim to the evil influences within you. Just as you give out, you take in. To give nothing out, and to take nothing in, is to mummify yourself. A mummified creature is not a human being. You are as completely the victim of yourself as the person who is vanquished by his inferiority complex. RECOGNISE YOUR COMPLEX AND RECOGNISE YOURSELF.
To close your mental self to the good influences around you is to become a victim to the evil influences within you.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
12
Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful. Mark Victor Hansen
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
13
SELF-MASTERY BY
BERNARD L. CALMUS
This monthly e-course is brought to you by Moya Mulvay
Chapter 6
HOW TO OVERCOME YOUR COMPLEX
Twenty-four Steps to Mastery—How to recognize your complexes
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
2
Twenty-four Steps to Mastery
WE ARE all made up of complexes of some sort or other; but some of them predominate to such an extent that they are continually pulling us back. A complex is a deterrent. It is negative. All the things it does for you are negative, for it makes you self-conscious and unhappy.
self-conscious. One implies confidence, the knowledge of yourself in relation to others; the other implies the exact opposite, because it is the knowledge of other people's relationship to you. To be fully conscious of yourself is to be alert to your own powers', to be self-conscious is to be over-conscious of the powers of others to yourself. The difference is not so subtle that it cannot be understood; while to realize it is to put your finger on the real significance of a complex. It is the complex which makes you self-conscious; it is the selfconsciousness which pulls you back. If you are self-conscious you are embarrassed, and embarrassment is a mental suffering which shows itself www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
All the things it does for you are negative, for it makes you self-conscious and unhappy.
There is a difference between being conscious of yourself and being
3
in blushing, stammering and “stage-fright”. It is just as possible to have “stage-fright” in the presence of one person as it is to have it in the presence of several. Having stage-fright is a symptom. It is the paralysis of all the potentialities within yourself, so that you feel inferior. It is sometimes good to remember that, just as we all have the same potentialities for greatness, so we all have the same roots of stage-fright.
The difference between a confident person and a selfconscious one is the fact that the first has learned to overcome the potentialities for stage-fright. It is good to remember that the other person is, initially, as nervous as yourself, even if he can conceal it better than you can. This knowledge, held on tightly by you, will reassert your ego. Meet him on his own level; get out of yourself in order to visualize his feelings, and you will approach him with sympathy rather than with a feeling of self-pity. Complexes are the concentration of self, used in the wrong way. It is not pity that you want for yourself, nor even sympathy; this is weakness. It is the strength of confidence you want, which is the enemy of weakness in any form. www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
4
Before we go on to analyze complexes, all of which can be summed up as Inferiority or Superiority Complexes, let us go over a few rules to remember in beginning the fight to overcome them. 1.
A complex reveals self-consciousness.
2.
Self-consciousness is a concentration on one's self in the wrong way.
3.
Self-consciousness is a distrust of one's self.
4.
To distrust one's self is to give up the fight before one even begins.
5.
Not even to start the fight is to admit weakness.
6.
Weakness is a deterrent to the best in you.
7.
A complex, then, can only be a negative quality.
8.
Anything negative in the mind must be uprooted.
9.
The negative can only be vanquished by the positive.
10.
The positive, then, can only be the extreme opposite of self-consciousness.
11.
The opposite of self-consciousness is to feel for the other person, not for yourself.
12.
To visualize the other person is to draw you out of “yourself”.
13.
It is impossible to concentrate on one's weaknesses when one is thinking of someone else.
14.
To think of the other person's feelings is to radiate sympathy.
15.
To radiate sympathy is to give out magnetism.
16.
Magnetism is an electric fervor charged with confidence.
17.
Under the composure of the other person may be a nervousness greater than www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
5
yours. 18.
Seek to put him at ease, and you will feel at ease yourself.
19.
Having put him at ease, the feeling will reveal itself in the atmosphere, which will be friendly, sincere and radiant.
20.
Having achieved this, the atmosphere will radiate ease back to you.
21.
This radiation back and forth will give the other person confidence in you.
22.
Realizing this, you will react with self-confidence.
23.
From now on, there will be a constant back-and-forth of feeling which will bring accord.
24.
Having achieved this, you can concentrate on the business in hand.
These twenty-four steps to self-confidence are vitally important. The preliminary talk before you get down to business is necessary for the success of the business. It may seem “small-talk”—about the weather, about business in general, about anything. Be interested in your conversation, and the other person will not be squirming at the “waste of time”.
Above
all,
“wasting time”.
never
be
CONSCIOUS
of
This merely increases the degree of
your self-consciousness and; is negative. All the most successful people are those who indulge in preliminary “skirmishing” before they get down to business. It is only when your opponent is trying to take you off your guard that he forces www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
6
Refuse to perpetuate a complex for ANYONE.
business down your throat immediately. Be conscious of this fact, and you can never be the victim of another person. Insist on your preliminary skirmishing, which need only take a few moments, and he will realize your potentialities. Refuse to perpetuate a complex for
ANYONE.
This rule applies to
employers, to business associates, to friends, to lovers, and to husbands and wives when they are preparing to discuss plans. The rules apply in each case, though the content of the conversational “skirmish” may of course be different. Don't get out a formula for your conversation. Let that be spontaneous. Have an idea of what you want to say, of course; but try to get the other person interested in your subject, whatever it is you do talk about, until you learn to know what his pet topic is. However, remember that conversation, like personality, is two-dimensional. There is a give and take. You give, he takes; you
take, he gives. He will be as anxious to please you as you are to please him. If he isn't, then you may be sure that he has a complex and, conscious of this fact, you know that you can get your will. That is the tragedy of a complex. It reveals itself so surely to an acute person that you are at his complete mercy; for he can play on your complex and keep on making www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
7
you give yourself away by your feeling small. A good personality is one which can never become victimized through selfinsufficiency. Once you are master of yourself, you are master of your complexes. With them poisoning your life you are master of nothing. Now let us try to recognize a complex when we see one, whether in ourselves or in others. I may have seemed to have put the cart before the horse by showing you how to overcome your complexes before I have shown you how to recognize them; but I have done this deliberately, in order to show you that complexes are not really so hard to get rid of once you know how. To show you a number of complexes and first depress you is, in my opinion, bad psychology, though I know it is done. To make your enthusiasm
alive so that you feel confident in yourself is the first and very essential step to mastering your complex.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
8
How to Recognize Your Complexes
To recognize your complex is to recognize yourself; to recognize yourself is to know yourself. A complex cannot exist outside of
YOU;
existing within you, it can be mastered only by
YOU.
the
INFERIORITY
Complex, familiar to most people, and the
SUPERIORITY
Complex, familiar to few. All other complexes are offshoots of these two. If you feel yourself inferior to others, it is because you have become too conscious of failing inside yourself; often you will deliberately deceive yourself and others by developing symptoms of obstinacy and self-will. The dreadful feeling of impotence forces you to thrust yourself forward even when you really don't want to do so at all. You are forced into difficult positions. The person who suffers from an inferiority complex is the victim of himself rather than his own master. He is driven on by the misuse of his vital powers, uncontrolled, therefore uncontrollable.
The person who suffers from an inferiority complex is the victim of himself rather than his own master.
There are two main complexes. There is
Because he is afraid of people, he will try to overbeat them. As it is not sympathy he is giving them, he is perpetuating his feelings of inferiority by making his inner self too conscious of his failings. www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
9
Now remember that failings are there to be corrected, and they can only be corrected by yourself, NO ONE IS SUPERIOR TO YOU WHILE YOU ARE IN
CONTROL OF YOURSELF. Power is a vital spark that is in all of us. It is power which gives us mastery over our drives. If you have failings, it is better to search for them, master them, and find your mental balance, than to drive them into yourself and into the Unconscious by a deliberate deceit.
You can only find yourself within yourself
You can deceive your Conscious, but never your Unconscious. You can pretend to others, but never to yourself. You can set out to fascinate the opposite sex because you are not sure of yourself, but you can never achieve the ultimate satisfaction of conquest, because you are not
TRUE.
The sufferer from an inferiority complex is an actor. He looks within himself, sees a distasteful picture, and thereafter searches for himself in the outer world. You can only find yourself within yourself, INSIDE YOU.
THE TRUE PICTURE OF YOURSELF
is
To avert your eyes satisfies the weaknesses within you, not the
strengths. To look within yourself is to cure yourself. If you are naturally an introvert, a
person who can really find satisfaction within yourself, don't force yourself to become an extrovert, a person who looks in the world for your pleasures.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
10
To reverse your natural self is not to cure yourself. To take your natural self and graft it gradually on the outside world is to find the Happy Mean and be a perfectly balanced personality. This process alone rids you of your inferiority complexes. See yourself fully and truly;
previous chapters; strengthen your failings by exposing them to deliberate thought, and reshaping them for their potentialities of strength, and you can face the world without the overweening conceit which is at the same time deceit of yourself and the world. The person who suffers from a Superiority Complex is one who does genuinely think that he is so superior to his fellow-beings that he refuses to learn anything more. Whereas the inferiority complex lets loose
conceit
and
obstinacy,
the
superiority
complex
makes
for
shallowness and a dogmatic attitude. The potentialities here have overbalanced so as to become awry: the potential strengths have become weaknesses. If you suffer from a Superiority Complex, realize the fact
AT ONCE;
otherwise you will not take in what you are trying to learn.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
The person who suffers from a Superiority Complex is one who does genuinely think that he is so superior to his fellow-beings that he refuses to learn anything
use the process of self-analysis taught in the
11
Remember that whereas one can be mentally self-sufficient in the acquisition of poise, one cannot be self-sufficient in the worldly sense.
mix
with
people
and,
One has to
mixing
with
people, one has to LEARN from them as well as to teach—though
the Superiority Complex, seemingly all-complete, cannot
be “bothered” to teach anyone. Allow yourself to be penetrated by your fellow creatures. To close your mental self to the good influences around you is to become a victim to the evil influences within you. Just as you give out, you take in. To give nothing out, and to take nothing in, is to mummify yourself. A mummified creature is not a human being. You are as completely the victim of yourself as the person who is vanquished by his inferiority complex. RECOGNISE YOUR COMPLEX AND RECOGNISE YOURSELF.
To close your mental self to the good influences around you is to become a victim to the evil influences within you.
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
12
Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful. Mark Victor Hansen
www.inspirational-quotes-and-thoughts.com
13
