The Words We Live By by Brian Burrell

Author:Brian Burrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Put all of your eggs in one basket and —WATCH THAT BASKET

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Every generation has its slogans. Some of them defy time and tastes and manage to stay around for a while. “Time is money” and “Hitch your wagon to a star” have held up well. There have been other, lesser mottoes that dazzled the public imagination for a time, but soon burned out. One such motto swept through the United States in the 1920s, and although it may still sound familiar to some ears, the story behind it is mostly forgotten. Yet it was the first self-help mantra and the forerunner of flash-in-the-pan mottoes that have come to the fore in subsequent generations, which makes its story worth retelling.

EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY I A M GETTING BETTER AND BETTER

In the summer of 1923 an unpretentious Frenchman named Emile Coué visited the United States to promote a technique which had caused a sensation in France and in London. The former apothecary’s trip to America occasioned an outpouring of emotion that finds its modern counterpart in the receptions given to rock stars and popes, and the press turned out in force.

Coué gave his name to Couéism—a term that had entered the American language long before the man himself set foot off the boat. Millions of Americans were reciting his soothing self-help motto as part of a method he called “autosuggestion,” a form of healing in which the conscious mind sells an idea to the unconscious mind, which converts it to reality. A cultural phenomenon of the mid 1920s, Coué’s motto— Every day in every way I am getting better and better —inspired a surprising outpouring of serious criticism in the press; surprising because of how silly it sounds today. Yet Couéism was all the rage, and even if the diminutive Frenchman is not remembered, his motto still rings a bell.

To be fair, Coué’s motto needs to be considered in the context of his method, for which he made only modest claims. The authorized translation of his book, prepared for his U.S. visit, gives the core of his method as a simple prescription:

Every morning before getting up and every evening as soon as you are in bed, shut your eyes and repeat twenty times in succession, moving your lips (this is indispensable) and counting mechanically on a long string with twenty knots the following phrase: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” Do not think of anything in particular, as the words, “in every way,” apply to everything.

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