I have always been fascinated by the “inner game” of music or anything in my life that I want to get good at. This has led me over the years to read a ton of books, listen to all sorts of audios and videos and seek out people who can show others how to get to the top.

There are people who specialize in peak performance, success, and human potential. Their job is to  teach us how to get the same results as the people who make it to the top. To convince us that we can do much more than we think we can, and inspire us to try new ways to grow and thrive. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite success coaches, Dr Maxwell Maltz.

If you look at the success gurus of the last 50 years and trace how they got started, you will always end up going back to two sources: Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” and Maxwell Maltz’s “Psycho Cybernetics”

Since you are a musician, I assume that you are not interested in thinking or growing rich…. JUST KIDDING…

Where was I? Maxwell Maltz sold 30 million copies of his book “Psycho Cybernetics” after he published it in 1960. It is one of the most well thought out systems for reconstructing your mind and your approach to life, and has a well documented track record of amazing results. It surprises me now that more people don’t know about it today.

I know I must have been exposed to Psycho Cybernetics years ago, and I suspect that I put it in the category of “Nut-case snake oil salesmen woo-woo fruitcake psudo-science” along with Dianetics, Scientology, and other foreign sounding concepts and then promptly dismissed it. I have now changed my tune.

There is so much in this process that applies to playing music that I would like to make several posts about it, and call them the “Psycho Series” in the subject line. Just covering the key points top give you something to think about, remember, and use as you see fit.

Today I focus on one of Dr. Maltz’s main ideas: Imagination is far more powerful than will power. This is really good news for me, as I have always been a lot stronger in the imagination department than I am in will power. The trick is to use the imagination in particular ways, and that does take some will power. But the beauty of it is that you can take a small amount of will power and use it to fire up your imagination and get far more powerful results  than just using will power alone to keep flogging yourself into trying harder and longer.

So, what the hell am I talking about? Here is a concrete example:

Top body-builders like the governor of California will tell you that exercising with your mind focused is ten times more powerful than just going through the motions. What they don’t usually tell you is how they are focusing their minds, and WHAT they are focusing on. It is more than focusing on the mechanics of the exercise, although that is important to do.

What they are also doing is flashing mental movies of what they intend to accomplish, the goal successfully completed, the moment of victory. Standing on the pedistal with the goald medal, the ribbons, the moment of celebration. An ideal image of what they want to look like, realized. the deep satisfaction of being a winner. They do this while they are exercising.

This puts the zigs and zags of mistakes and corrections, the strain of practice in perspective. It inspires you to keep going by giving you a taste of the reward for the effort, and feels a lot more powerful than the rah-rah ONE MORE TIME, ONE MORE TIME will power stick prodding you on.

You develop a picture, an image of success in the most vivid form that you can – what does it look like, smell like, feel like, sound like. You do this ahead of time. You can do this in odd moments.  These moments become mental vacations during the day – waiting in line at the bank, when you first wake up, as well as planned sessions for clearing up your goals (outcomes). Once you get this image, this mental movie, memorize it and play it back in the heat of the battle of practice.

It does not have to be a huge heroic goal like winning a gold medal in the Olympics, or playing onstage with Sting. But the image has to have heart, passion, a feeling of fulfillment, some juice to it, something that fires YOU up. It could be playing happy birthday to your mother over the phone, burning through a fiddle tune at a coffee shop down the street from where you live.

I have been doing this lately while practicing the harmonica and it reminds me of being a kid. I could get lost in building a model airplane, spend hours doing all sorts of things that had my imagination on fire. I also tried this idea of imagining the victory while cleaning up my garage – whenever I started getting frustrated, I would close my eyes and see the place in order for a couple of seconds, and then the process seemed easier again.

I started working on some songs with my 16 year old daughter Julie. I am imagining us playing for a crowd, youtube, the farmers market. I am having more fun learning music than I have had in a long, long time.

I’ll write more about this when I can, but in the meantime, the book is “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz. There is also “The New Psycho-Cybernetics” which is the book I started with. The New Psycho-Cybernetics has a lot of simple exercises in it that get you going right off the bat. Both books are excellent and well worth the time to read.

Harpe Diem!