Rewrite Your Life: Change Your Handwriting-Change Your Life! - Softcover

Sheila Kurtz is a renowned graphologist and graphotherapist. She is president and founder of the Graphology Consulting Group in New York, She has analyzed the handwriting of the famous and infamous, including Ronald Reagan and O.J. Simpson. She lectures to organizations including the CIA and the Young President's Association (YPO). In addition, she has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Leaders, and Forbes, and on Late Night with David Letterman and Dateline.

Marilyn Lester is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times and many other periodicals.

Rewrite Your Life
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WHAT REWRITE YOUR LIFE CAN DO FOR YOU

CHANGE YOUR HANDWRITING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE. THAT IS A very powerful concept, and it happens to be absolutely correct. You can use your own handwriting to alter your behavior. The method is called graphotherapy, and I've been using it for years to help clients better their lives and achieve their goals. Using my graphotherapy method, you can actually see the changes in your handwriting and feel the effects in your life.

As a certified handwriting analyst and graphotherapist, I've helped people make important discoveries about themselves. What they had in common was a desire to improve the quality of their lives and a resolve to do it on their own. I wrote this book because of these successes. Many of my graphotherapy clients have gotten satisfying results from my method--and many had previously spent a lot of money on more traditional therapies without much benefit.

I wrote Rewrite Your Life so that you can pursue your quest for personal change with me as guide, mentor, and partner. I've included the most relevant information for your needs. When you follow the steps, spending just fifteen minutes a day on the exercises, you will begin to feel the differencein yourself in as little as a month. You can achieve swift, specific personality changes, such as:
· raising self-esteem

· increasing concentration

· overcoming self-consciousness

· developing confidence

· sharpening success skills

· improving mental clarity

· beginning to eliminate fears
This book shows you how to achieve all this, and more. By the time you finish Rewrite Your Life, you'll have formed new behavior patterns through handwriting changes, creating a new knowledge base and awareness of your abilities and capabilities. Best of all, you'll have formed strong internal beliefs about your self-worth.
WHAT'S IN A NAME

Graphotherapy is an outgrowth of graphology, also known as handwriting analysis. Many practitioners prefer the term graphology to handwriting analysis because it sounds more scientific.

In the modern era, the methods of handwriting analysis have been constantly researched, refined, and updated, but in the last two decades, computers have enabled a more scientific method of analysis to be developed based on advanced statistical methods. Because of this advancement, many computer-literate practitioners use a new term, graphonomy, which describes graphology augmented by or studied through computer analysis, referring to themselves as graphonomists.
WHAT GRAPHOTHERAPY IS ABOUT

Before there was Freud, before there was Jung, and before there was any kind of formalized psychotherapy, there was handwriting analysis--probably the oldest means on record (going as far back as the ancient Greeks) for studying human personality and behavior. The reason for this is simple and logical: Written words are the symbols by which we communicate.

Handwriting as a means of recording words has its own vocabulary in form and movement. In other words, writing strokes are forms in action. These strokes are what graphologists analyze to construct a picture of personality.

To understand this concept, and set the stage for graphotherapy, let's take a brief, very basic look at what graphology is and isn't.

When we learned to write in school, we were also learning to conform to a universal pattern of communication that becomes imprinted in the subconscious mind. Yet your handwriting is as unique as you are. Just as there are no two snowflakes alike, there are no two handwritings alike, although some may seem very similar. The uniqueness of your handwriting stems from the fact that when you write, your brain selects those parts of the overall pattern that reflect your personality, omitting the parts representing traits you don't have.

With maturity and life change, handwriting also changes to include different or unused parts of the unconscious pattern.
HANDWRITING IS REALLY BRAINWRITING

You see handwriting as language, a collection of words, composed of the letters of the alphabet, that communicates meaning. However, your brain perceives handwriting not only as language, which can be written or spoken, but also as a collection of symbols, which can be apprehended only through the physical action of writing.

Just as there are exercises for the body, graphotherapy provides exercises for the mind. There is a definite, brain-- hand connection, and from a purely physiological perspective, graphotherapy can not only be explained but also shown to be highly effective.

The classic model of the brain likens it to a computer, with its predetermined, fixed circuitry. In this model, a baby is born with the brain fully defined in accordance with a master "brain blueprint" for all individuals. However, a new brain theory, advanced by Nobel laureate Dr. Gerald Edelman, speculates that the brain is actually an ecosystem that organizes itself before birth: The nerves, driven by a specific genetic imperative, arrange themselves, resulting in a unique brain circuitry that can never be predicted. After a baby is born, the brain continues to develop along the lines of its own evolutionary adaptation so that thought, memory, and consciousness develop to permit us to cope with the world.

What is the significance of this theory for graphotherapy? It means that the brain is a work in progress, and the mind of every individual is unique. Therefore, every handwriting is correspondingly unique and individual.

From a physiological point of view, the brain is part of the central nervous system. It's made up, in part, of about ten billion nerve cells, linked together and responsible for controlling all of our functioning. The billions of nerve cells receive and transmit information--electrical signals are sent from nerve cells to brain cells and to muscle cells (and vice versa), transmitted by chemicals manufactured in the brain. This two-way street makes graphotherapy possible. When you write, the signal is transmitted between your brain and your hand, through the brain stem, to the spinal column, along the nervous system, and to the muscle system, enabling you to pick up your pen and begin writing. Sending a different signal from the pen back to the brain with new instructions is graphotherapy.
THE SYMBOLS OF HANDWRITING

The individual strokes that make up letters are the symbols of handwriting.
Some typical strokes are the i dot, the t bar, loops, hooks, and the individual components of the letters themselves.
While these strokes may look like handwriting to you, to a scientist or graphologist they are the means through which handwriting can be analyzed. Scientists have developed a standard recognition system with specific meaning assigned to each stroke.

The most popular recognition approach is called model-based stroke detection. In this approach, an analyst assumes that there is a set of uncorrupted strokes that are typical to a specific writer. Once an understanding of this writing is achieved, the model can be extended to generalized script writing. The usual method that identifies strokes is an energy-based line follower, meaning that an unbroken line segment is followed until it arrives at an ambiguous region (or junction). Energy minimization is applied to obtain the ideal traversal of the segment. The energy is calculated by considering a combination of factors that involve the image and model information. Matching of the traversed stroke with the model gives an estimate of the direction and resultsin a valid classification for unambiguous strokes, so that meaning can be ascribed to each one.

Yet handwriting strokes have no meaning in and of themselves; they function as the bridge between the conscious and unconscious minds and are the means by which graphologists interpret behavior. Your brain is the generator of writing; your hand is only following instructions. The result is that handwriting is a frozen moment--an act of will caught on paper--so each symbol/stroke can be interpreted by a graphologist in much the same way that a doctor reads and interprets an electrocardiogram. The strokes that symbolize personality, and that reflect our singular natures, are incorporated in the diverse and distinct ways people write. Handwriting mirrors personality and achievement traits. Graphologists can make evaluations about characteristics that may include a person's aptness for social adjustment, attitude toward material values, depth of intellect, range of emotions, and creative capacity. They would not make evaluations about gender, race, origin of birth, age, or right- or left-handedness because these elements are not personality traits and therefore cannot be reflected in handwriting.
GRAPHOLOGY IS A SCIENCE

Graphology is a science but not an exact science. It's actually a form of psychology, one that uses the evidence of handwriting to show human individuality.

It is the nature of handwriting that you can't fake it, you can't "pull a fast one." Because of the brain-hand connection, and because a person's true personality reveals itself in handwriting, graphology has long been used in police and detection work and in forensic science. Law enforcement officials and the courts have used the services of graphologists to solve crimes and provide evidence for trials--for example, a will that someone may suspect is a forgery, or an important signature that is in dispute. These graphologists are analyzing the handwriting not as a personality assessment but to ascertain, by examining the strokes, its authenticity.Graphologists also look at and as...