Chapter 61 - Five Words to Freedom

In the early 1940’s, Raymond Corsini was a psychologist at Auburn prison in upstate New York. One day a prisoner who was about to be released came by Corsini’s office to thank him for all he had done. The prisoner said that, thanks to Corsini, he was a changed man. He had stopped fraternizing with the hard-core inmates and gotten his high school diploma. He had reestablished contact with his family, taken a correspondence course in drafting, and even had job waiting for him on the outside. He felt like a new person and the world looked like a different place to him now; even the air smelled different.

Raymond Corsini couldn’t remember ever having seen the man. All the files showed was that they had met briefly, some two years prior when the doctor had given the inmate an IQ test. When Corsini suggested that the man had him confused with someone else, the prisoner said with conviction, “It was you alright, and I will never forget what you said to me which changed my life.” Slack jawed, Corsini asked what he had said that made such a resounding difference. The prisoner replied, “You told me I had a high IQ.”

How could the five simple words “You have a high IQ” have such a profound effect on a person? Obviously, iron bars and concrete walls weren’t the only prison that the inmate at Auburn was trapped in. The inmate was also a prisoner of the Mind’s Second Rule. Until he heard Corsini’s offhand remark, the convict was also locked away in an inner cage built of harsh concepts and disparaging ideas concerning his intellectual capacity. His “impressions” about poor grades, the cutting criticisms from his family and his teachers, and the experience of being shunned for thinking differently than others, merged together and became fixed concepts held in his deeper mind. While these concepts were often hidden from his conscious awareness and were as far from reality as the Easter Bunny, they still formed the navigational precepts that guided this person’s life.

Sure, he liked to read Noble Laureate Sinclair Lewis while his friends were enchanted with the action/adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And yes, he enjoyed the symphony and chess while his pals listened to popular tunes and played checkers; but until that day in Ray Corsini’s office, all the inmate knew was that he was crazy and stupid and that insanity and low intelligence were a bad combination. Five words, spoken at the right time, forever changed the prisoner’s navigational precepts and set his life on a different course.

What information creates, information can change. However, lasting change and growth can only take place when high-powered information penetrates your inner realm of fixed concepts and transforms them. The Second Rule teaches you how to reach this arena of imbedded beliefs and create a personal revolution.