Your Erroneous Zones: Step-By-Step Advice for Escaping the Trap of Negative Thinking and Taking Control of Your Life

Acceptance means no complaining, and happiness means no complaining about the things over which you can do nothing.

Love is a word that has as many definitions as there are people to define it. Try this one on for size. The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Feelings are not just emotions that happen to you. Feelings are reactions you choose to have.

The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

Sören Kierkegaard wrote, “Once you label me, you negate me.” When the individual must live up to the label, the self ceases to exist. The same is true of self-labels. You could be negating yourself by identifying with your trademarks, rather than your own potential for growth.

You are not necessarily what you say. Behavior is a much better barometer of what you are than words. What you do in your present moments is the only indicator of what you are as a person.

There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry. Two carefree days, kept sacredly free from fear and apprehension. One of these days is yesterday…and the other day I do not worry about is tomorrow.

Syllogism ― Major premise: I can control my thoughts. Minor premise: My feelings come from my thoughts. Conclusion: I can control my feelings.

There are two occasions when complaining is least appreciated in the world: (1) Whenever you tell someone else that you are tired. (2) Whenever you tell someone else that you don’t feel well. If you are tired, you can exercise several options, but complaining to even one poor soul, let alone a loved one, is abusing that person. And it won’t make you less tired. The same kind of logic applies to your “not feeling well.

Once you can change your thoughts, your new feelings will begin to emerge, and you will have taken the first step on the road to your personal freedom.

A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

Your worth is determined by you, and with no need for an explanation to anyone. And your worthiness, a given, has nothing to do with your behavior and feelings. You may not like your behavior in a given instance, but that has nothing to do with your self-worth. You can choose to be worthy to yourself forever, and then get on with the task of working on your self-images.

This road will be new because you will see a given emotion as a choice rather than a condition of life.

A relationship based on love, as was said earlier, is one in which each partner allows the other to be what he chooses, with no expectations and no demands.

It is easy to be a critic, but being a doer requires effort, risk and change.

Remind yourself that what other people do is not what bothers you, it’s your reaction to it. Instead of saying “They shouldn’t do that,” say, “I wonder why I bother myself with what they are doing.

Nothing is more important than anything else. The child collecting seashells is not doing something more right or wrong than the President of General Motors making a major corporate decision. They are different. Nothing more!

There is nothing to worry about! Absolutely nothing. You can spend the rest of your life, beginning right now, worrying about the future, and no amount of your worry will change a thing. Remember that worry is defined as being immobilized in the present as a result of things that are going or not going to happen in the future. You must be careful not to confuse worrying with planning for the future.

The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn—pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a million lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics, why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics until it is time to learn to plough.”*

Self-worth cannot be verified by others. You are worthy because you say it is so. If you depend on others for your value it is other-worth.

You can paralyze yourself with perfectionistic do-your-best nonsense.

Instead of hating yourself, develop positive feelings. Learn from the error, and resolve not to repeat it but don’t associate it with your self-worth.

Give up having to have a reason for everything you do. When someone asks you why, remember that you don’t have to come up with a reasonable answer that will satisfy them. You can do what you decide just because you want to.

Guilt is the most useless of all erroneous zone behaviors. It is by far the greatest waste of emotional energy. Why? Because, by definition, you are feeling immobilized in the present over something that has already taken place, and no amount of guilt can ever change history.

Here is the guts of both self-and other-directed love. Never confuse your self-worth (which is a given) with your behavior, or the behavior of others toward you.

Guilt is not merely a concern with the past; it is a present-moment immobilization about a past event. And the degree of immobilization can run from mild upset to severe depression. If you are simply learning from your past, and vowing to avoid the repetition of some specific behavior, this is not guilt. You experience guilt only when you are prevented from taking action now as a result of having behaved in a certain way previously. Learning from your mistakes is healthy and a necessary part of growth. Guilt is unhealthy because you are ineffectively using up your energy in the present feeling hurt, upset and depressed about a historical happening. And it’s futile as well as unhealthy. No amount of guilt can ever undo anything.

Frequently avoidance of the present leads to idealization of the future... When an event does not live up to your expectations you can get out of the depression by idealizing again. Do not let this vicious circle become your life-style. Interrupt it now with some strategic present-moment fulfillment.

The ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

If your life is better, it is because you have done something constructive to make it better.

Carlos Castaneda calls a man of knowledge one who— “Lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting...He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else.... Thus a man of knowledge sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control. Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way any part of his concern.