"I am bad at public speaking." Maybe. Or maybe you had three uncomfortable experiences and turned them into a permanent biography. "I'm terrible with money." Perhaps your current habits support that conclusion. But is it a description of present behavior or a fixed identity? Maxwell Maltz built Psycho-Cybernetics around the possibility that this distinction changes more than we realize. Maltz was a plastic surgeon. He noticed that changing someone's appearance did not always change how that person saw themselves. The exterior could be different while the old internal picture survived. That observation led him toward the concept of self-image . The Internal Description Everyone carries some story about who they are. Confident. Awkward. Disciplined. Lazy. Creative. Bad with numbers. Good with people. The story may contain truth. It may also contain conclusions that have outlived the events that created them. A shy teenager can become a capable adult while...