THE GENERAL FORMULA

We saw that an unskilled golfer, who imagines his ball is going to
alight in a bunker, unconsciously performs just those physical
movements needful to realise his idea in the actual. In realising this
idea his Unconscious displays ingenuity and skill none the less
admirable because opposed to his desire. From this and other examples
we concluded that if the mind dwells on the idea of an accomplished
fact, a realised state, the Unconscious will produce this state. If
this is true of our spontaneous autosuggestions it is equally true of
the self-induced ones.

It follows that if we consistently think of happiness we become happy;
if we think of health we become healthy; if we think of goodness we
become good. Whatever thought we continually think, provided it is
reasonable, tends to become an actual condition of our life.

Traditionally we rely too much on the conscious mind. If a man suffers
from headaches he searches out, with the help of his physician, their
cause; discovers whether they come from his eyes, his digestion or his
nerves, and purchases the drugs best suited to repair the fault. If he
wishes to improve a bad memory he practises one of the various methods
of memory-training. If he is the victim of a pernicious habit he is
left to counter it by efforts of the will, which too often exhaust his
strength, undermine his self-respect, and only lead him deeper into the
mire. How simple in comparison is the method of Induced
Autosuggestion! He need merely think the end--a head free from pain, a
good memory, a mode of life in which his bad habit has no part, and
these states are gradually evolved without his being aware of the
operation performed by the Unconscious.

But even so, if each individual difficulty required a fresh
treatment--one for the headache, one for the memory, one for the bad
habit and so on--then the time needful to practise autosuggestion would
form a considerable part of our waking life. Happily the researches of
the Nancy School have revealed a further simplification. This is
obtained by the use of a general formula which sets before the mind the
idea of a daily improvement in every respect, mental, physical and
moral.

In the original French this formula runs as follows: "Tous les jours, a
tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux." The English version
which Coue considers most satisfactory is this: "_Day by day, in every
way, I'm getting better a