The Power of Auto-suggestion for Building New Attitudes

In 1922, Dr. Emile Coue, a pharmacist who lived in a small brick house in Nancy, France, became world famous. He had stumbled on a remarkable cure for a variety of ills – a cure which became known as the science of auto-suggestion. News reports from that time marveled, “Week after week, people stricken with disease come to Dr. Coue and go away strengthened, on the road to recovery, sometimes instantaneously cured.”

The fame of Dr. Coue’s achievements spread throughout France, then leapfrogged to England and the United States. Thousands of people began to repeat his formula for health and happiness. Coue’s technique was deceptively simple and his honesty quite disarming. “I have never cured anyone,” he told reporters, “You can train your subconscious to radiate health and success.”

What was Dr. Coue’s attitude building technique? “Every morning, before getting up and every evening as soon as you are in bed, shut your eyes and repeat 20 times in succession, moving your lips (that is indispensable) and recounting mechanically the following phrase: ‘Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’

This sentence is so simple that its very simplicity makes it work. “In every way,” broadcasts to our subconscious that we are getting better physically, mentally, professionally, financially and any other way we can possibly imagine. “I am getting better,” regenerates our hopes for the future. I may be improved tomorrow, but the next day there will be greater and greater improvement.

Why the lips moving? Because Coue suggested that the belief in the power of auto-suggestion must come from the imagination, not the will. “Whenever the imagination and the will are in conflict, the imagination wins. The mechanical Counting and the movement of the lips occupy the conscious mind, including the will, and leave the subconscious mind open to create positive images.”

To illustrate that imagination is stronger than willpower, Dr. Coue asked people to imagine the following experiment. “Take a 30 foot plank, one foot wide and put it on the ground. Then step by step, walk across the entire length of the plank. Next, place the same plank between two large buildings, 150 feet above the ground. Then step on the same plank and carefully walk across to the other building. Chances are that you would not walk on that high plank.”

Does Dr. Coue’s autosuggestion work? Try it. It has been tested and proven right by thousands of people for the past 66 years. If Dr. Coue were alive today, he would tell you what he once told a reporter, “To become master of oneself, it is enough to think that one is becoming so. It is not in me but in yourself that you must have confidence, for it is in yourself alone that dwells the force which can make you the master. My part simply consists of teaching you to make use of that force.”