AN AMAZING DISCOVERY ABOUT CREATING A NEW PERSONALITY. HOW BILL CHANGED. WHAT GRAPHO ANALYSIS SAYS ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

"Grapho analysts tell us about our weak points but no one tells us how to correct them. If we can change our writing will it change us? Will we be able to overcome our weak points if we change our writing?"

Thousands of men and women in all walks of life have asked me, and asked other professional grapho analysts, this question. Twenty-five years ago it seemed like an impossible order, but it was worthy of consideration, exploration and experimentation. Would it be possible, I asked myself, to work in reverse, changing first the writing with the hope of changing the writer's character ? Now the answer can be given very surely with a certain­ty that you can change your character if you follow certain rules. At the same time there is need for a word of warning.

Do not try to change your entire writing with any idea of changing your character traits all at once. It takes time to build a character. You began in your crib, and you have been creating your personality which is, after all, your character ever since. If you suddenly change your writing, making sharp pointed inverted "v's" for your "m's" and "n's", and start crossing your t-bars with heavy speeding strokes, and start making heavy down strokes on your "g’s" "y's", and "j's", all at one time in order to speed up your thinking ability, strengthen your purpose and build en­thusiasm, and also become more determined you may easily be headed for a psychiatric ward. It takes months of careful guidance under the supervision of a professional grapho analyst to make any great number of changes and they must be made slowly.

• CHANGING HANDWRITING WILL CHANGE PERSONALITY

However, there is one trait that you can build for yourself without running into any serious danger. If you are one of those shy, hesitating individuals who lacks self-reliance, you can build your own self-reliance, with reasonable safety. Before we go into how to do it, let me give you two incidents out of life. The first is out of my own life, and it was impor­tant in the research necessary to establish the fact that changing hand­writing will change the individual.

Even after World War I, I was not a pusher. Actually most people who knew me probably THOUGHT I was afraid. Many years later I met a lady who knew me before World War I and she asked me what I did, and I tried to explain it to her. "Well, you may be telling the truth," she said, "but as I remember you, if you'd been a frog I'd never have bet on your making the water."

Plate 71. Signature of M. N. Bunker at the time he greatly admired the showman-founder of the Ransomerian system of handwriting.

Plate 72. Later signature of author, showing greater self-reliance.

However that may be, after World War I a job was offered to me where I had to be responsible for considerable sums of money. This was a new experience. We went to the bank, and the teller gave me the signature card to sign. To this day I remember how I hesitated. Up to this time I had been very proud of my penmanship, and had followed the cue of my favorite handwriting teacher who was rated as one of the world's best. Charlie Ransom, author of the Ransomerian system of handwriting, always made two swinging circles about the last three letters of the Ransom, and I had developed the habit of writing my own name in the same way, similar to plate 71. These flourishes incidentally mean showmanship, and I was making them because I admired Ransom, who was certainly a show­man. He had won the world's first prize for a set of penmanship lessons, and he used that as the basis for building the greatest school of penmanship long before World War I.

That day at the teller's window I knew subconsciously that I was going to discard those flourishes. Then I created a new signature that was to be my trade mark for more than twenty years. As I completed my name, I held the pen steady for a couple of seconds, and then wrote the heavy underscores that you find in plate 72. I had made a discovery, but did not realize it until many years after.

No matter how much of a fearful, hide-behind-the-door individual you are, you can add underscores to your signature, and you will get results in increased self-reliance. Before you undertake to make the change, however, let me tell you of just how it works in actual life.

At the time of World War II a man whom I shall call Bill, because that was not his name, was fortunate enough to gain an amusement con­cession near a huge army camp. When the war was over, if wars are ever over, he suddenly found himself with a hundred thousand dollars after income tax. As far as Bill was concerned, one hundred thousand dollars was riches. He had at one time more money than he had ever dreamed of having, and because he felt good about it, others soon knew about it.

When you get rich you will find that the man with money always has friends, and will also always have chances to double his money if he will just advance some to finance a man who has an idea but no cash. Bill found he had friends, and they had opportunities for him to invest in their various enterprises and double his money while he slept. Bill was rich, and he remembered the days when he had needed financing so he became a financier without any brakes. Ten thousand here, and five thousand there. He was suddenly a partner in a dozen enterprises, none of which zoomed quite as quickly as their promoters had dreamed they would. So Bill followed through and advanced a little here and more there until the day this incident occurred.

Bill was really a great chap to know. Gracious, friendly, a good con­versationalist, and the kind that is usually described as big hearted. He would drop into the office, and sit and tell me how his interests would soon be paying huge profits. Finally one day he urged me to ride along while he went to the city on business.

• $100,000 GONE

His car was perking along perfectly when we left home, but half way to our destination, something went out. Repair men had to give service, and the check Bill wrote was around fifty dollars. He did it readily, and we went on, checked in at the hotel, with rooms connected by a short hall. That hall is important, because after I had washed up I went down that hall to Bill's open door. He was at the desk writing, and looked up with the whitest face a man could have. "I guess God sent you," he said. "Do you know I was just sitting here writing Kitty a note, and if you hadn't come in they would have picked me up off the sidewalk in another ten minutes."

Bill had written a check without funds in the bank. He had invested his hundred thousand, and none of the investments had paid off. He was disappointed, his faith in himself gone. From the joy and thrill of being a millionaire he was broke and he could not take it.

It was not a time for pretty speeches, and he kept repeating that he could not go ahead. He was whipped. He was broke. He had made his hundred thousand by a lucky chance. He suddenly realized it, and was convinced that he had no chance to ever have a second lucky break.

"All right, Bill," I said, "you'll not be any broker in two weeks, and I'll wager that you can build enough self-reliance in two weeks that you will never again consider suicide."

Bill nodded. He would make a try at whatever I suggested.

His note to Kitty gave me the information about him that I needed. His t-bars were as light as they could be. His "Bill" was nothing much but an apology. He had made his money merely by having been fortunate enough to tie up with a man who had self-reliance, and who knew what he wanted. Bill had not actually made his hundred thousand. He had merely shared in the pot because he was honest, and his partner had trusted him to count the incoming money, and keep the operation moving smoothly. Bill was not a financier, and he would never have been one if he had not been honest, and willing to work. Even then he had taken the mouse's share of the profits from the entertainment venture.

Here is what I told him to do. You can do it. You can do it and get results.

Take an ordinary scratch pad and a soft lead pencil that will not cut through the paper when you press hard in writing.

Then write this sentence crossing the t-bars heavily, as you make the **t". or as you complete the word in which the "t" is in the body of the word. After you have completed the sentence sign your name just as you ordinarily do, and make two, three or more heavy cross-bars under the signature. You have an illustration of the principle as I gave it to Bil1 Bradley.

Repeat this exercise thirty times each night, just before you go to sleep. Do not skip one night, and then try to make up for it the next. "Do it every night," I told Bill. He promised he would.

A week later he dropped into the office and reported. "You know it made me sick at my stomach about the third night," he said, "I had to get up and get a drink of ice water. One or two nights I had to take an aspirin. It was doing something to me, but I've stuck to it now for ten days, and it is doing something to me."

Plate 73. A tested exercise for building up your self-esteem.

Bill was correct. He attempted too much of a change at one time. He was trying to build two traits of character, and one was enough. How­ever, he did not suffer seriously, and he is a success today. No more suicide in the picture, no more feeling that he is a failure. However, a graduate grapho analyst would take the program slowly, adjusting the changes to fit the individual writer's needs. My experience with Bill was under the pressure of realizing that something had to be done.

If you believe that all of this is just a phantasy, and that changing handwriting will change the writer, discuss with any competent psychiatrist, and he will explain the principle. He may say that you might find it difficult to get results, but when you have tried it, and found that it is effective, you will have proved the truth of the principle for yourself.

Indeed, you will be using the same principle that I wrote into the first textbooks I ever prepared: I pass it on to you. Do not believe a principle just because you see it in print. A great many false theories find their way into type. Take every grapho analysis rule, learn it, use it, test, and prove it. Then it will not matter what becomes of this book. You will know.

•MAKE HASTE SLOWLY

After you have tested this principle in connection with building self-reliance you may be tempted to undertake other changes in your hand-writing. You may succeed, but I caution you to move slowly. When it comes to actually changing your character, making genuine changes, you must be careful I learned in my early days of testing that these changes must be attempted and made slowly. If, for instance, you were to attempt to increase your thinking speed and comprehension, at the same time strengthening your will power, and possibly attempting to overcome stubbornness, you might easily run into trouble. In my thirty years of experience I have found it easy to do a great deal of damage to your think­ing processes unless you attempt changes slowly, and know enough about grapho analysis to select and use changes that will not create complications.

You are safe, however, in practicing the underscore. You are certain to benefit and there are no contrary forces to worry about. Go ahead and use the simple rule that you have here. It may give you courage to get a better job, or to meet an emergency. It worked for Bill. It can work for you. It had produced for me, before I realized what I had done, when I changed that signature so many years ago.

You may have one question here that has been asked by so many thousands of men and women on coming in contact with grapho analysis for the first time. They have wanted to know, "Will my handwriting change if I change?"

•YOUR HANDWRITING CHANGES AS YOUR CHARACTER CHANGES

Your writing will change as you change. I risk the danger of talking too much about myself when I show you some of my own signature changes as they have occurred over a period of at least half a century. In plate 71, you have the signature that I lost that day when I signed the card in the bank. Plate 72 is the change I made. You may find the fact that I made that change not only when signing checks, but that it became part of my life and my permanent signature from that day, interesting. There was no slight inclination to turn back to the flourished first signature.

This signature remained a part of my thinking and writing habits for more than thirty years. During at least twenty of these years it was my lot to take the abuse, and criticism that falls to every pioneer. In the early days of grapho analysis skeptics who saw the accuracy of an analysis took refuge in their criticisms in telling me and those they met that grapho analysis was not a subject based on scientific principles, but some mystic power that I had found within myself, that it was akin to fortune telling, card reading, and soothsaying generally.

Plate 74. This is the way signature of M. N. Bunker changed after the realization that what people thought about him was unimportant.

Some figured out to their own satisfaction that I had developed some unique bit of magic and that the whole thing was a bit of conjuring. In my research it was only natural that those who were above reproach should condemn the associates that were necessary to know people. Criminals do not fill out questionnaires in order to give you details about themselves and how they think. Therefore, it was necessary to know criminals, become their trusted confidante in order to understand how they thought, and how those thoughts were translated into pen strokes and combinations of strokes.

• SEX AND HANDWRITING

When I began my explorations into handwriting as it reflected sex desires and appetites, it was necessary to know prostitutes, rapists, homo­sexuals. Oh, there were all sorts and kinds of men who trusted me, and with whom it was necessary to mingle on a free and easy basis.

There were many nights I slept in the room with a sex criminal, many times without daring to trust my eyes to more than close. All of this be­cause if I were to understand the individual it was necessary to know him as he was.

Plate 75. A later signature of the author, M. N. Bunker. The message your mind sends through your nervous system controls your handwriting.

This led to criticism, sometimes abuse that to a sensitive man became a burden—and in those days I was sensitive. Finally, the realization that what people thought about me and my research was unimportant. It was the job I did that counted. The day this fact was driven home on my subconscious mind, my signature changed, and plate 74 took the place of the underscored signature. The "k" in the body of my signature developed a huge hump or upper hump, which in time I was to find revealed complete indifference to criticism.

It is said that every man has deep-rooted desires, things he wants to do and which seem impossible of achievement; possessions that seem as unattainable as a trip to the moon. All my life I have traveled by railroad train, bus, automobile, and finally by plane. It has been nothing to sleep one night in New York, the next in Montgomery, Alabama, or New Orleans, and riding all night to be in Seattle the next day. It has been necessary if T were to know people, and get the answers to what their writing told about them. Many a day has rolled into a second without sleep. Through all of this one desire has held on with a grip that nothing could shake. I wanted a home, a place to call my own. As this desire grew, another signature developed. This is plate 75.

It is entirely possible that my signature will change again. It is just as possible, if my life had been a placid one, filled with getting up in the morning, going to the office, keeping books or typing letters all day long, my signature might not have changed. But it has, and changing it has reflected the changes in my pattern of thinking. I know this. So if your writing changes, do not worry about it. Your mind is merely sending a different set of messages through your nervous system to the part of your body that controls the writing instrument. It is not necessarily your fingers. In a later chapter you will learn that the writing of those who hold the pen staff with their teeth and lips, or between the stubs of arms can also be analyzed as effectively as though they held the pen or pencil between the fingers.
For a long time serious medical men have recognized that changes in mental condition show in the writing of the patient. Scores, possibly hun­dreds of grapho analysts have found this is true. Indeed, many grapho analysts without medical training have worked effectively with law enforce­ment officers, and medical specialists in giving them the facts revealed about a writer, by his writing.

When this is true, it is only natural that the whole rule may be worked in reverse. It seems impossible to the layman, but it has been, and is being done. You will find this is true when you use the principle of building self-reliance.

This trait is not going to give you a good personality. It was my privilege over a period of many years to watch the progress of two young people who learned of this principle, and used it effectively. They were both completely self-interested. This is a condition where a man can gain self-reliance to his own detriment. At any rate, these two fellows were as selfish a pair as have come up in my years of experiment. However, they both followed the underscore principle, and it ruined them.

One was deceitful, narrow in his views. When he added self-reliance it gave him confidence that he could profit by even small time thievery, padding bills, because he had the confidence that he could get away with it. His handwriting did not show a brilliant mind, and for a long period of time he was watched as he betrayed the confidence of an associate who trusted him. Then, without warning the self-confident young man who had used his self-confidence to bolster his life of narrow views, misrepre­sentation, even fraud, found himself out in the cold without a single chance. That was self-confidence built on a sandy foundation.

The other one of the two had much the same experience. He built self-confidence, with an even more selfish, stingier attitude, and though he was not thrown out he would have been if he had not had the common sense to get out just before the ax fell. Therefore check your own motives. Consult a grapho analyst if you will, but do not try to build self-confidence unless you have a character that will justify it. Otherwise your newly developed trait may drive you into a corner where you will suffer not be­cause of grapho analysis, or the fact that you have gained self-confidence, but because your general character structure was one that would not carry such confidence.

The chap who has the self-confidence to think that he can scheme and work to steal, and betray and ruin gets the rewards of those characteristics, and because he is self-confident about it, multiplies his results from the other traits—and they are rarely good.

EXAMINATION FOR CHAPTER 7

If you have used the principle explained in this chapter you have gained. It is possible that you may be self-reliant, not afraid. If this is the case, you are fortunate. A majority of people are afraid. They may not have the slightest idea what they fear, but they are afraid. Cornered, they will admit it.

The principle in this chapter is easily tested and produces results. Just a few weeks ago Jimmie who has always run away from school, a job or anything else in life he found difficult, was given the simple exercise. At first he forgot every other night and then tried to make up for lost time by doing the exercise twice as many times in order to make both his maxi­mum and minimum as instructed.

When he discovered that such slip-shod methods did not work, he settled down and stuck to his exercise every night. That was less than six weeks ago and he is doing better on his job. He is not nearly as ready to quit or give up in the face of emergencies.

You have no test for this chapter, but instead, are asked to try the test of self reliance. Prove for yourself the difference in thirty days. But re­member, every night you must do the exercise, not once in a while. Like Jimmy you will soon see the reasons for regularity and will benefit from it.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...