DISCIPLINE AND
CONTROL
HOW TO STAY CALM
AND PRODUCTIVE
UNDER PRESSURE
TOM MILLER, Ph.D.
PART ONE
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Preface
Since the workbook is used quite extensively in the seminar, this presented a problem with the numbering sequence.
We have addressed this by using a numbering and lettering system that we hope you will find easy to follow. Any
page that is part of the original workbook is either a number or a combination of a number and letter (11, 11A).
Any lettered page (A, B, C) is an addition to the original seminar workbook and contains necessary and illustrative
information.
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Program Overview
2. Meaning/interpretation
3. Feeling
4. Behavioral response
What you will know at the end of the program that you
did not know before
After this program, you will know, now and for all time, that events,
whatever they may be, do not cause the reactions you experience. You do!
Less than 1 percent of 1 percent of all the people in the world understand this essential point.
Who causes you to feel the way you feel? You do!
No one has the power to determine your emotional and behavioral reactions but you.
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Program Keys
Premises
Anything that can be learned can be unlearned.
The way you feel is always and only created, controlled and
maintained by the interpretations made in your mind.
The way you feel and behave is never caused by the way
others treat you or the events that happen to you.
Dont worry. Youll catch on.
Program concepts
1. Rider
The neo-cortex of the brain.
The conscious center that hears what you are thinking
and can intellectually control your behavior which
is just the first step in the change process.
The Rider
2. Horse
The lymbic system of the brain.
Stores and uses learned, not-conscious information and actions, and
controls your feelings.
The Horse
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Your Horse
Important facts to
know about your horse
Whenever your horse runs into something new, it codes it as wrong.
You can have opposing thoughts in your horse and rider (conscious
and unconscious) at the exact same time.
You will always get the emotional reactions that are logical for the
way your horse is talking.
The way your horse talks to you determines how you feel.
Your horse knows all the right phrases to drop your pants.
Behavior change
In learning how to get your rider to control your horse and eventually get the horse to eat the new learning, you
had better keep in mind your objectives:
Time
Tone
Face
Pass the new interpretation from the rider to the horse so that the
behavior and the emotions become automatic.
By the time you finish this program, you will finally know how to
break your horse.
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Your Horse
During the course of this program you will hear this over and over. And you will, no doubt, be asking yourself,
What the heck is this all about? So, here it is.
Essentially, by attempting to substitute the gesture pictured above for the word up in any sentence in which it
would normally be, and then noting how difficult that substitution is, you can understand how hard it is for your
rider to overcome your horses habits, no matter how often this new behavior is reinforced and, in the case of Tom,
how loud that reinforcement is.
Reasonably upset
Overly upset
We have to suffer the results of the lies our horses tell us.
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Awfulizing
Program assumptions
In order to understand this system, it is essential to realize that what is said is exactly what is meant.
Here are two fundamental assumptions:
1. 100 percent = All
2. Negative = Bad
The logical deduction: Bad (negative) things that can happen to me range from .001 degrees of badness up to the
maximum 100 percent. They cannot go over 100 percent.
2.
3.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. Frequent
* The only restriction is that those bad events cannot happen physically to your body.
Transforming awfulizing:
the Johnny Carson Scale
As a reasonable person, you may be asking yourself, What in the world does Johnny Carson have to do with this
scale business? During the monologue. Johnny would invariably bring the audience in on a joke by saying some-
thing such as, Boy, it was hot in California today. The audience responded, How hot was it?
When something negative happens to you, ask yourself, How bad is it?
If you have a sensible scale to measure how bad things are, then you can decide that some event (A) is
approximately a certain percentage bad. After you train your horse to use the scale, it will automatically give
you a response thats logical for the percentage. Then, because you wont be over- or underreacting, your behavior
will be reasonable for the situation.
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I Cant Stand It-itis
( / / )
Signature Date
Demandingness
A key point
Every time you get yourself overly upset, you are DEMANDING something. Please read, remember and sign the
following:
I, being of sound mind and body, do fully realize and admit that I do not, havent ever and wont ever RUN THE
UNIVERSE.
( / / )
Signature Date
Demanding words and phrases are only used to describe reality. Things should have happened because they have
happened.
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Notes
CONTROL
HOW TO STAY CALM
AND PRODUCTIVE
UNDER PRESSURE
PART TWO
Self-Esteem
Self-esteem
A system that attempts to measure your value as a person or your self-worth.
The clothesline
To examine the system of self-esteem, imagine there is a room, divided in half by a fat cable; it looks and works like
one of those old-fashioned clotheslines with pulleys on each end. The two parts of the room represent the two parts
of the self-esteem system.
2. What you think of the behaviors or traits you do. This is called the doing side of the room.
Traits are things such as brave, clean and thrifty.
Behaviors are more specific, such as how fast you run the hundred, or how well you cook eggs.
The wires
In this room, there are also many thinner wires running from side to side, adding additional areas of division.
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Self-Esteem
The kegs
In your room of self-esteem, each wire has a miniature beer keg on it. The keg looks like this from the side and
this from the front, and has a hole drilled through the middle . . This allows the keg to slide along the wire.
0 25 50 75 100
5
0 25 50 75 100
Action step
1. Pick five people you know and write their names by the letters.
2. Pick five of your behavior traits and write them by the numbers.
0 25 50 75 100
5
0 25 50 75 100
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Self-Esteem
Starting with the people side of the room, take Wire A and ask yourself, On the average, how much do I think this
person cares about me? If the answer is a lot put the Person A keg somewhere in the 90s. Keep
repeating this process for the remainder of your people wires and draw
in the appropriate keg positions.
0 25 50 75 100
5
0 25 50 75 100
0 25 50 75 100
5
0 25 50 75 100
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Self-Esteem
The equation
T.V. + D.T. = T.
0 25 50 75 100
0 25 50 75 100
Tunnel vision
Seeing only that which is directly in front of our noses. With so much pressure and emphasis on what happens there,
it is easy for your nose to get bent. Tunnel vision is caused by your horse putting the blinders on.
Dichotomous thinking
This is thinking in all-or-nothing terms. Things are either very good or very bad; all black or all white. In dichoto-
mous thinking, there is nothing in between and no shades of gray. If you think this way, then in the example, Person
As keg does not stop at 45, it keeps right on going all the way down to zero. And your self-esteem goes right along
with it.
This is a literal translation of putting yourself down! This is what you get when you allow yourself to be drawn in
by tunnel vision and dichotomous thinking. You may have been wondering what the T stood for in the equation at
the top of Page 10.
0 25 50 75 100
0 25 50 75 100
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Emotions
Emotions
Your horse has the ability to bring out these powerful, and extremely negative, emotions in you with a simple flick
of the hoof:
Hurt
Inadequate
Depressed
Anxious
Guilty
Remember, dont trust your feelings. Be hard-nosed, literal, precise and accurate.
0 25 50 75 100
T
S
R
Q
P
O
N
M
L
K
J
I
H
G
F
E
D
C
B
A
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
0 25 50 75 100
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Notes
CONTROL
HOW TO STAY CALM
AND PRODUCTIVE
UNDER PRESSURE
PART THREE
Self-Acceptance
You either are, or you are not. To be are not is to be dead, in which case the rest of this program will
be of very little interest to you.
Upstairs room
Your self
Downstairs room
Your self is now sealed in the upstairs room. There is a physical separation. Your self cannot be affected
by what happens in the room below. There is no longer any dependent relationship between:
1. How much you think other people think/care about you
2. How well you do on your behavior/trait wires
The key
The key to understanding and embracing this is simply knowing the
difference between a want and a need.
Need (must): something without which you will die.
Want: everything else
A reasonable goal in life is to try to get as many of your kegs as close to 100 as you can. The fun in life is the
challenge in achieving small, continual steps of improvement.
Why?
The higher the kegs go, the closer you will get to your five major goals in life:
1.Survival
The ABCs
In Albert Elliss construct, any event can be broken down into:
A = activating event
B= beliefs
C = consequences
Cl = feelings
C2 = reaction
In the story about the flowers, the way the female feels is determined by what she thinks the males motivation is. As
Tom has shown, the males motivation can be one of several things:
He could be expressing his affection.
How can any one event cause two radically different emotional and behavioral reaction patterns?
It cant.
Your horse interprets the event and tells you how to feel.
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The Yellow Brick Road
learning relearning
curve curve
W Y
Z
X
The broken line is the learning curve. It has no previous learning in front of it. The curve begins at W and ends
at X. Point X means that you are an expert at a particular action or behavior in your horse.
The dotted lines (X to Y to Z) are the relearning curves. XYZ is the process of changing an existing habit into a
new, different, desired habit.
Point Z is the goal. This is where and when your horse will automatically give you the new responses that your
rider has been relearning.
This means you have to fight and win the war with your horse.
A play example
To change your response to a specific situation, you can put the events into a screenplay format and then begin
the rewrite.
A = (whatever the situation)
B=
Cl = the feeling you dont like
C2 = the behavior you dont like
Determining the lines in your screenplay is the same as figuring out what B is. You will see that some of the lines
(thoughts) make sense and some of the lines make non-sense. Your horse is unable to tell the difference.
Play #l Play #2
A = the situation Da = the same situation
B = sense + non-sense Db = sense + sense
Cl = emotions you dont like El = more desirable emotions
C2 = behaviors you dont like E2 = more desirable behaviors
The first task is to get both plays written out on paper. Practice and understanding of the ABCs in this program is
very important. At this stage of your practice, it is only important that your rider believes that what is said about and
in Play #2 makes excellent theoretical and practical sense.
On the relearning curve, you are entrenched at Point X. You are an expert at Play #1. Going from X to Y involves:
5. Writing the old sense and the new sense into Play #2
6. Intellectually believing the new sense is much more sensible than the non-sense you started with
7. Deciding what emotional responses the new combination of thinking would cause and writing them in El
8. Deciding and writing out what you would like your new behavior to be if your emotions were those written in El
This is the first half of the change process, going from X to Y and gaining the knowledge. Now comes the second half.
30 seconds a day
In the chair
Under the covers
4. Imagery practice/rehearsal
A. Picture Da (the event you want to change your reaction to)
B. Flash symbolic/funny image to flip your horse
C. Picture Spock and Clint
D. Think Db (the new way youre going to think)
E. Feel yourself feel El (your new desired emotion)
F. See yourself do E2 (your new, desired behavior)
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The Yellow Brick Road
Getting to Z
With each real-life practice, the anxiety your horse automatically pumps out gets less and less. As you continue with
this practice, youll produce the reaction you desire in faster time, eventually bringing your horse under control and
having your horse eat the new behavior.
W Y
X Z