Brigid O’Shaughnessy [Mary Astor]: Help me.

Sam Spade [Humphrey Bogart]: You won’t need much of anybody’s help. You’re good. Chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get in your voice when you say things like ‘Be generous, Mr. Spade.’

Brigid O’Shaughnessy: I deserve that. But the lie was in the way I said it, not at all in what I said. It’s my own fault if you can’t believe me now.

Sam Spade: Ah, now you are dangerous.

In The Maltese Falcon (1941), Brigid is a serial liar, though she does it with much charm.

Like some politicians, for instance.

Telling lies to others to gain power, money or whatever is one thing. But what about the dangerous lies we tell ourselves?

Psychologist Abraham Maslow helped define the field of personal development and the concept of self-actualization - defined, he notes, as “ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, or vocation), as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person’s own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person.”

He said healthy, self-actualizing people are defined by characteristics including “Superior perception of reality” and “Increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature.”

[From his book and article Toward a Psychology of Being.]

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One of the strongest values of positive psychology and related applications such as executive coaching is encouraging people to appreciate strengths and capabilities, not just uncover dysfunctions and disorders.

Writer Marcus Buckingham finds “the strengths movement is everywhere: the corporate world, the worlds of public service, of economics, of education, of faith, of charity — it has affected them all.

“It works better than any other perspective. The radical idea at the core of the strengths movement is that excellence is not the opposite of failure, and that, as such, you will learn little about excellence from studying failure.

“This seems like an obvious idea until you realize that, before the strengths movement began, virtually all business and academic inquiry was built on the opposite idea: namely, that a deep understanding of failure leads to an equally deep understanding of excellence.

“That’s why we studied unhappy customers to learn about the happy ones, employees’ weaknesses to learn how to make them excel, sickness to learn about health, divorce to learn about marriage, and sadness to learn about joy.

“What has become evident in virtually every field of human endeavor is that failure and success are not opposites, they are merely different, and so they must be studied separately.”

From book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance by Marcus Buckingham.

Yee-Ming Tan, who provides executive coaching services and leadership development training to senior executives, says in her new Positive Psychology News Daily article that the power “is not in the identification of strengths but in the integration and the shift that come afterwards.

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In his new book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, Steve Pavlina quotes writer Henry Miller:

“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly.  Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

“What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”

Pavlina writes:

Truth is the first principle of personal development. We primarily grow as human beings by discovering new truths about ourselves and our reality. You’ll certainly learn some important lessons no matter how you live, but you can accelerate your growth tremendously by consciously seeking truth and deliberately turning away from falsehood and denial.

More on Personal Growth Information

Hale Dwoskin is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being, is a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council, and CEO of Sedona Training Associates.

He writes in an article about trying to use a form of positive thinking:

When I was in my early 20s, I was extremely shy. I couldn’t approach women, I had no idea how to properly introduce myself to strangers, let alone make small talk.

I’d heard that positive affirmations and “happy thoughts” could bury my fears and help me build the confidence I needed. I was certain that if I told myself I was great in a crowd, I would be great in a crowd.

So, for months on end, I walked around all day long repeating over and over in my head, “I am highly pleasing to myself in the presence of other people.”

In the meantime, I forgot to stop repeating and start living. Instead of propelling my social life into the next dimension, my record-player thoughts played again and again in my head and I felt completely ridiculous!

Positive thinking takes an immense amount of effort and, for most people, it doesn’t even work! It only covers the negative thoughts with positive ones and can still leave you crying on the inside. Remove them by letting go of your limiting thoughts, feelings and beliefs and your thinking, feeling and life experience will be a thousand times more positive.

More in his article Why “Positive Thinking” Actually Fails… and What to Do Instead.

[Photo: Michael Cera in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.]

For more on shyness, see the Highly Sensitive site.

“During Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray would go to rushes. I remember asking Fred, ‘How was I?’ ‘I don’t know about you - but I was wonderful!’ Such a true remark. Actors only look at themselves.” Barbara Stanwyck

Certainly there are people living with narcissistic personality disorder - in entertainment and other fields - who could benefit from therapy. Not to mention the benefit to other people. Although if it is at the level of a true disorder, it can be difficult to treat.

But what about the “ordinary” variety of narcissism that so many people have, including high ability and talented artists?

Dennis Palumbo is a writer and licensed psychotherapist, specializing in creative issues. He says, “You do have to have a certain amount of grandiosity to be a writer or director or movie star. You do have to have a certain amount of narcissism.

“In defense of people in the entertainment industry, I would argue that the narcissism that’s necessary to say, ‘Gee, give me $150 million because I want to direct this movie,’ isn’t that different from the narcissism that says, ‘Give me $150 million; I want to be your president.’

“I mean, most achieving people have a very large amount of narcissism and grandiosity.

“And Goethe said that writing, for example, is so difficult, you need the hubris to believe that the world cannot live without what you’re doing. ‘Cause it’s so hard to do!”

Continued in his article: Creative people in Hollywood - which includes other issues, including self esteem and insecurities in entertainment careers.

See links at the bottom of article for related articles and pages.

Excerpts from The Islanders - A Fable

The insular society became more and more complex, and we can look at only a few of its outstanding features. Its literature was a rich one. In addition to cultural compositions, there were numerous books which explained the values and achievements of the nation….

There was also a system of allegorical fiction, which portrayed how terrible life might have been, had society not arranged itself in the present reassuring pattern….

Since the skills of boatbuilding had no obvious application within this society, the effort could easily be considered absurd. Boats were not needed—there was nowhere to go. The island was not a prison. But it was a cage with invisible bars, more effective than obvious ones ever could be….

The stirring consciousness of escape potential was not very discriminating… A vague concept of navigation cannot become useful without orientation….

Bizarre versions of swimming or shipbuilding often crowded out possibilities of real progress.

Continued: The Islanders - A Fable, from book The Sufis, by Idries Shah.