Product Description

From the author of Real Magic and the multimillion-copy bestseller Pulling Your Own Strings, positive and practical advice for breaking free from the trap of negative thinking.

If you're plagued by guilt or worry and find yourself falling unwittingly into the same old self-destructive patterns, then you have "erroneous zones" -- whole facets of your approach to life that act as barriers to your success and happiness. Dr. Wayne W. Dyer can now help you break free!

If you believe that you have no control over your feeling and reactions, Dyer reveals how much you can take charge of yourself and manage how much you let difficult situations affect you. If you spend more time worrying what others think than working on what you want and need, Dyer points the way to true self-reliance. From self-image problems to over-dependence upon others, Dyer gives you the tools you need to enjoy life to the fullest.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20452 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05
• Released on: 1993-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061091483
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
'An inspiring book on self-esteem' - NEW WOMAN 'Light, humorous and enlightening' - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

About the Author
Wayne W. Dyer is one of the most widely read authors today in the field of self-development. He is the author of many books, including such bestsellers as Your Erroneous Zones, You'll See It When You Believe It, and Real Magic.

A psychotherapist, Dyer received his doctorate in counseling psychology from Wayne State University and the University of Michigan, and has taught at many levels of education from high school through graduate study. He is the co-author of three textbooks, contributes to numerous professional journals and lectures extensively in the United States as well as abroad.

He appears regularly on radio and television shows around the country.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter OneTaking Charge
of Yourself

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

Look over your shoulder. You will notice a constant companion. For want of a better name, call him Your-Own-Death. You can fear this visitor or use him for your personal gain. The choice is up to you.

With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, "Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?" "Should I live my life as others want me to?" "Are things important to accumulate?" "Is putting it off the way to live?" Chances are your answers can be summed up in a few words: Live ... Be You ... Enjoy ... Love.

You can fear your death, ineffectually, or you can use it to help you learn to live effectively. Listen to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych as he awaits the great leveler, contemplating a past which was thoroughly dominated by others, a life in which he had given up control of himself in order to fit into a system.

"What if my whole life has been wrong?" It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible befor, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely noticeable impulses, which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend....The next time you are contemplating a decision in which you are debating whether or not to take charge of yourself, to make your own choice, ask yourself an important question, "How long am I going to be dead?" With that eternal perspective, you can now make your own choice and leave the worrying, the fears, the question of whether you can afford it and the guilt to those who are going to be alive forever.

If you don't begin taking these steps, you can anticipate living your entire life the way others say you must. Surely if your sojourn on earth is so brief, it ought at least to be pleasing to you. In a word, it's your life; do with it what you want.

Happiness and Your Own I.Q.

Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly- This vision of intelligence predicates formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self-fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual snobbery that has brought with it some demoralizing results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is a whiz at some form of scholastic discipline (math, science, a huge vocabulary, a memory for superfluous facts, a fast reader) is "intelligent." Yet mental hospitals are clogged with patients who have all of the property lettered credentials-as well as many who don't. A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it's worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful adjunct to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N.B.D. Yep-Nervous Break Down.

Perhaps you will be surprised to learn that there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Nerves don't break down. Cut someone open and look for the broken nerves. They never show up. "Intelligent" people do not have N.B.D.'s because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives. Notice I didn't say solve the problems. Rather than measuring their intelligence on their ability to solve the problem, they measure it on their capacity for maintaining themselves as happy and worthy, whether the problem gets solved Or not.

You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing dejection and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse, become inert or have an N.B.D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don't measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

Learning to take total charge of yourself will involve a whole new thinking process, one which may prove difficult because too many forces in our society conspire against individual responsibility. You must trust in your own ability to feel emotionally whatever you choose to feel at any time in your life. This is a radical notion. You've probably grown up believing that you can't control your own emotions; that anger, fear and hate, as well as love, ecstasy and joy are things that happen to you. An individual doesn't control...

Customer Reviews

How long are you going to be dead?
In YOUR ERRONEOUS ZONES, Wayne Dyer encourages his readers to ask themselves this question: "How long am I going to be dead?" Dyer suggests that taking such an "eternal perspective" will aid one in gaining a more "take charge" stance in life. Life is a risk, and we are all going to die anyway, so why not do what we want with our lives? This has been one of the most helpful self-help books I have ever found. In fact, I think it may be THE best self-help book I've ever read. This is one of the "classics," and many others have taken its lead. I believe this is Wayne Dyer's best work.

The other not-so-pretty reality of life that Dyer suggests we face is that things are not fair, and they never will be. In chapter 8, "The Justice Trap," the author writes bluntly about the fact that injustice is committed every day and that if one has enough money one can get away with it. Poor people will rot in jail, while rich people get a slap on the wrist for the same crime. It is not an "erroneous zone" (self-defeating behavior) to notice the injustices of this world; the erroneous zone is the belief that becoming incapacitated with anger, guilt, worry, or indignation, by the injustices will change anything. Many heroic people try to change the injustices, and they are to be commended. But they often fail because they are against impossible odds. Year after year, century after century, the privileged few get away with what the rest of us do not. Is it fair? No! Should we convince ourselves that it is okay? No! Should we fool ourselves into believing incapacitating ourselves with worry and anger is going to change anything? No, again. If you can do something to end an injustice, then do it. If you can't, don't feel guilty.

I also enjoyed Dyer's candor on the hypocrisy of educational institutions, and found it surprising considering that he himself is a professor. He notes that one of the greatest "erroneous zones" is the need for approval, and then he points out that schools are one of the main culprits in instilling the need for approval in people. From the moment you walk into a school, he says, you are told where to sit, how to talk, what to write, how to think, control, control, control, and then you are graded according to your willingness to hand your mind over to the authority figures. Students with high self-esteem, who are full of self-love, and who are not susceptible to guilt and worry, are systematically labeled "trouble makers" by the school faculty. The inference is clear: ridding oneself of guilt and erroneous zones often means going against the very fabric of this society.

This is a radical book! And it's been a good friend for years. I had the honor of meeting Mr. Dyer a few years back at a book signing, and he seems to live what he preaches.

Wayne Dyer Before He Got On The New Age Bandwagon
This book is one of the best books, perhaps even the best book I've ever read in terms of gaining control over one's life. It is truly empowering in the best sense of the idea. It comes down to the fact that you are a "choice making individual". No matter what the situation is that comes up you can still choose how to react to it.

To illustrate... I used to believe that I had certain tendencies (like "worrying" about all the "what ifs" for example) that were somehow out of my control. The idea of buying into the idea that some things were just "family traits" that I was helplessly born into, that "we come from a family of neurotic people who worry".

I have a particular favorite story which is on the audio tape version of the book (I can't remember if it's in the printed version of the book.... the audio seems pretty much like he's extemporizing on the principles outlined in the book). He tells of how he was in a restaurant and the manager/owner of the restaurant is getting very upset and emotional at an employee. Dr. Dyer says to the guy something like "Look at yourself, you're going to give your self a heart attack by the time your fifty" to which the gentleman replies "I am fifty two and I had a heart attack two years ago" to which Dr. Dyer says something like "Then why do you do this to yourself ? " to which the fellow says "What do you want from me.... I'm Italian !" ..... as if that was an explanation for why he was getting himself all worked up.

Wayne really helps one realize that they don't have to "buy into" feeling like they are helpless victims of their cultural background, family dynamics and, Genetic tendencies etc. While these may all seem to be the same thing there are in fact subtle differences between them.

I have recommended this book and it's audio version for countless people who have felt "out of control" of their emotions.

The ideas in this book really work if you are willing to finally let go of the mental crap in your life that is holding you back from being happier and healthier in every way. This is not to put on Rose Colored glasses, but to be able to "catch yourself" before you go into reacting the way you "always do" and really asking yourself if it is necessary.

Of course there are things in life where "worry" (for example if a loved one is ill) might be an unavoidable and compassionate emotion. But I'm talking about the sort of "worry" that is about things that "might happen". How many people spin endless tales of woe that will never come to pass.

Regarding Waynes other work, much of it has gone the way of the worst sort of New Age thought.

While I personally think that there is much New Age thinking that can be beneficial (especially in terms of having people more accepting of others rather than being narrow minded and bigotted), often it seems to be used to avoid having compassion (as in the idea that "Everything is perfect" so why help starving people).

This being said, "Erroneous Zones" is still one of those books I will always recommend and re-read (or listen to) when I find myself slipping into old mental habit patterns.

Another book along these lines that I also highly recommend is "Full Catastrophe Living" by Jon Kabot Zinn.

A great book that is still very useful after all these years....
YOUR ERRONEOUS ZONES is deservedly a bestseller. It takes the fundamental insights of cognitive therapy and makes them accessible to a large and diverse audience. The chapters of this book each pertain to important domains of human experience such as approval seeking, guilt and worry and self esteem. However, this book also goes beyond cognitive therapy concepts and adds the inspirational insights of humanistic psychology. The book concludes with a chapter on what it looks like to overcome your erroneous zones (maladaptive beliefs) and achieve self-actualization.

When I first encountered this book, I read it at least a half dozen times. There is a wealth of excellent practical advice that can be immediately applied to whatever your life situation happens to be. Dr. Dyer also has a gift for putting his ideas across in a simple, straightforward manner without a lot of jargon.

At least one writer pointed out that this book was written prior to Wayne Dyer's New Age phase. This is true and it does have a different tone from some of his later books. It is more likely to appeal to a wider audience than some of his later material which does have a stronger New Age flavor. PULLING YOUR OWN STRINGS, also from this earlier period is another excellent book and builds on the concepts developed in this one.