What's New

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Maltz's 1960 account of the self-image as the primary determinant of performance is the foundational popular treatment of the mechanism this article describes, and its age does not reduce its relevance: the core claim that the self-image sets the ceiling on what a person will pursue and sustain, and that the self-image is updated through the mental rehearsal of the more ambitious version of oneself rather than through effort directed at the goal itself, maps precisely onto both Markus's self-schema research and Bandura's self-efficacy framework. Maltz's account of how vivid mental rehearsal of the aspirational performance updates the self-schema through the nervous system's inability to distinguish clearly imagined experience from actual experience anticipates the subsequent neuroscience of mental practice, and his practical framework for systematically exposing the self-image constraint and working with it rather than against it remains the most direct and usable account of the provisional self mechanism that Ibarra's research subsequently documented academically.