Ok, I tried something . . . strange, and it really seemed to work (quoting from an online article here):
In the early 1980s, a man named Scott had heard of a process called affirmations from a friend. The process he learnt was simple.
Visualize what you want and write it down fifteen times in a row, once a day, until you obtain it.
Scott was told that the process did not require any faith or positive thinking for it to work. Even more interesting was the suggestion that the technique would influence the environment directly and not just make you more focused on your goals. In other words, it would spawn amazing coincidences to move you towards your goals. The coincidences could be things that were seemingly unconnected to you and beyond your control.
Scott was very left-brained and logical in his thinking. He had his doubts about the process but figured that there was no harm in trying.
Within a few weeks, coincidences started to happen to me, wrote Scott. Amazing coincidences, strings of them. I won't mention the specific goal I was working on, as it was a private matter, but within a few months the goal was accomplished exactly as I had written it.
Armed with this confidence in the power of affirmations Scott decided to apply it to a more challenging goal - getting into the highly competitive Berkeley MBA program.The problem was that he had already taken the entrance exam, the G.M.A.T, and only hit the seventy-seventh percentile score. He knew he needed to be above the ninetieth percentile to at least have a chance of being accepted.
Scott picked the outlandish target of ninety-four as his goal and again applied the affirmation technique.
Despite not being able to go much higher than the seventy-seventh percentile in the practice exams Scott was surprised to learn that he did indeed hit the ninety-fourth percentile for the G.M.A.T - just as he had written in his affirmations. He graduated with his Berkeley MBA in 1986.
A few years later he tried pursuing a more serious goal, that of being a syndicated cartoonist. He knew the odds of his cartoon submission being accepted by a major newspaper were roughly 1 in 10,000.
He beat those odds and his cartoon was accepted. He was soon earning a decent living with his cartoon strip but he wanted to achieve something bigger.He decided he wanted the most successful comic strip on the planet. Scott felt that the best measure of "most successful" would be number of books sold.
In June 1996 his book The Dilbert Principle hit the number-one spot on the hardcover nonfiction list of the New York Times.
Reporters often ask me if I am surprised at the success of the Dilbert comic strip. I definitely would be so, if not for my bizarre experience with affirmations. As it was, I expected it., he writes in his book The Dilbert Future.
How To Believe
So, what the hell, I tried it. I wrote down something I really wanted in rehearsal, something I felt was missing, i.e., a sense of the reality of the world of the play, and something Morgan Freedman had said: Acting is just pretending except that you really really pretend . . .
Though I had been doing this exercise nightly, before sleep, I had really forgotten all about it, until tonight, and then something happened: during rehearsal, some reason, tonight, I really listened as if I was hearing everything being said to me for the first time (while no one was off book, I was quite familiar with the scene) & I believed, i.e., I just accepted the other person, what they were saying, how they really looked right there, right now, under those harsh room lights, among the broken chairs -- I denied none of it: I just accepted we were having a war council (i.e., Charles & Joan before Orleans), I just accepted everything: people just showed up for rehearsal, and I just let myself see everything, the other as they were, the room as it was, and I just accepted that this is Tremouille, Dunois, this is how they sound, how they look, how they act, this is where we are, right now, and then . . . I believed every word they said and I believed everything they did . . .
. . . I just accepted them as they were, and then everything was "real."
