Dear %$firstname$%,

Psycho Series #2 -The Power of No

I have been reading and re-reading a book that has sold over 30 million copies since 1960 without any major advertising campaigns. The title of this book is Psycho Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz. The title of the book is not the reason for it’s success. It’s success is from people reading the book and finally understanding some things about how to use their minds, getting excited, and then telling their friends about it.

I introduced this book  in an earlier post. Here is the link:  https://rsleigh.com/the-psycho-series-1/

In that post, I talked about one idea from Psycho Cybernetics: Imagination is more powerful than will power.

Today I will go into another idea explored in Psycho Cybernetics – the incredible power of relaxing.

This will relate to playing the harmonica, promise.

Psycho Cybernetics is  a method of communicating with your subconscious mind and programming it to cooperate with you. Maxwell Maltz describes the results of this process in a simple way: “Once difficult, now easy”.

We all know this in a vague sort of way – “It’s like riding a bicycle” describes this process well. But the more I learn about why this happens the more awesome it gets for me. Consider these facts about the differences between the conscious and subconscious minds ( I abbreviate Conscious Mind – CM and Subconscious mind -SM )

Speed of impulses(how fast information travels) CM 120 – 140 MPH  / SM – over 100,000 MPH

Bits of information processed per second        CM -2,000  /  SM – 400 Billion

Control of perception and behavior    CM  2 – 4%  /  SM  96 – 98%

Memory horizon     CM    up to 20 seconds    /   SM    Forever

To put it mildly, the subconscious mind has a bit more power than the conscious mind. But there is one thing the subconscious mind cannot do: set goals.

The subconscious mind operates only as a servant, and will faithfully continue the habits it already has until we find a way to replace or install new ones. Practice is using our conscious mind to install new habits into the subconscious mind until the subconscious mind accepts them. Then we don’t have to think about them anymore.

If you can pick one thing to practice and hang in there till you create the habit of doing it perfectly before going on to the next thing to practice, you make much more progress than if you practice a lot of things but none of them long enough to form really strong habits. Every new habit that you install gets the incredible power of the subconscious mind working for you, 24/7 – once difficult, now easy…

Repetition builds strong habits, but regular review drives the habits deeper and deeper. You may know how to ride a bicycle, but you can always get better at it.

One of the most powerful habits I have discovered for my own practice of the harmonica is what I call strategic relaxation.

Strategic relaxing is cutting off energy to all thoughts and muscles that don’t help you to do what you want to do.

You can’t do this unless you have a clear practice goal. Once you have a clear goal you say YES to it and NO to everything else. This is strategic relaxing. This is the power of No.

I have been building breathing habits for years now in my harmonica practice. I have had to learn how to say no to countless muscles that I didn’t even know existed in order to get my throat to open up and make enough space for the tone I want.

I have been learning how my diaphragm and abdominal muscles and inter-coastal muscles and a lot of other muscles are either working for me or against me as I play the harmonica. So I use train rhythms and other breathing exercises as a way of focusing on one muscle or muscle group at a time to form new habits around how I want these muscles to work for me.

And I still have a long way to go.

One way of organizing my practice is through teachers, and not just harmonica teachers. I have worked with chiropractors, done Rolfing, Yoga, worked with the Alexander Technique, vocal coaches, and other body-mind disciplines. I am convinced that when David Barret became a black belt in Karate that it made him a better harmonica player. These are all ways of learning strategic relaxing.

To wrap it up for today, Relaxing is a powerful tool when you use it right. There are some great exercises in Psycho Cybernetics on how to work with relaxation as a mind-body discipline.

But for now, relax and harpe diem!