Wayne Dyer: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

Wayne Dyer went from counseling professor to bestselling self-help author. What he taught about intention and thought, his main books, one practice you can try, and the criticism.

Who was Wayne Dyer?

Wayne Dyer was an American self-help author and speaker, born May 10, 1940 in Detroit and died August 29, 2015 on Maui, who moved over four decades from mainstream counseling psychology to explicitly spiritual teaching. His father left the family and Dyer spent much of his early childhood in foster homes and an orphanage in the Detroit area before his mother was able to bring her sons home. He served in the United States Navy from 1958 to 1962, then studied at Wayne State University, finishing a doctorate in guidance and counseling in 1970. He taught counselor education at St. John's University in New York and ran a private practice. His first mass-market book, Your Erroneous Zones, appeared in 1976 and became a very large seller after Dyer promoted it himself, driving around the country to radio and television stations rather than waiting for the publisher. He left academia and spent the rest of his life writing and lecturing, later publishing mainly through Hay House and becoming a fixture of public television pledge drives in the United States. He had eight children and married more than once.

The shape of Wayne Dyer's career matters for reading him. The man who wrote Your Erroneous Zones was a working counselor with an academic post, and that book argues in the register of clinical psychology: your feelings follow from your thinking, guilt is spent on a past you cannot alter, worry is spent on a future that has not arrived. The man who wrote The Power of Intention nearly thirty years later was making metaphysical claims about a universal field, and the man who wrote Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life was writing commentary on a Chinese classic. Readers who only know the 1970s books are usually surprised by the later material. Dyer himself acknowledged the shift and did not treat it as a contradiction, describing his life in his memoir I Can See Clearly Now as a sequence of events that had been leading somewhere all along. That memoir, published in 2014, is the closest thing to his own account of how the two halves connect.

What was Wayne Dyer's childhood like?

Wayne Dyer spent much of his early childhood in foster homes and an orphanage in the Detroit area after his father abandoned the family, and he returned to his mother's household when she was able to take her sons back. He spoke about the absent father often in later talks and described forgiving him at his grave as a turning point, a story he retold across many lectures.

How did Wayne Dyer become famous?

Wayne Dyer became famous through Your Erroneous Zones in 1976, which he pushed himself by loading copies into his car and visiting radio and television stations until talk show bookings followed. His later lecture specials for American public television repeated the pattern, putting him in front of general audiences who had never bought a self-help book.

What did Wayne Dyer actually teach?

Wayne Dyer taught that your experience is produced by your thinking, not by your circumstances, and that changing the thought changes what you then encounter. That single claim runs through everything from his 1976 counseling material to his last books, though what he meant by it widened enormously over time. In the early work the claim is psychological: you are upset because of the demand you are making, not because of the event, so drop the demand. In the later work the claim becomes ontological, with Dyer arguing that thought is causal, that a person is a piece of a larger creative source, and that aligning with that source produces outcomes rather than merely producing calm. Alongside this sits his insistence that self-worth cannot be granted by other people, so approval-seeking is a dead end; that blame and excuse-making hand your life to whatever you blame; and that the practical unit of spiritual work is the ordinary day. He also disliked the idea of a life postponed, and his most repeated line, do not die with your music still in you, is a compressed version of that argument.

Two ideas hold the Wayne Dyer teachings together across the shift from counselor to mystic. The first is that the person doing the looking determines what gets seen, which is why his most quoted line concerns changing the way you look at things. The second is that this is not a technique for coping but a claim about identity: Dyer held that the self people defend, made of roles and reputation and possessions, is not the real one, and that what he called the higher self is already whole and does not require improvement. In that framing, the work is subtraction. You stop identifying with the ego, you stop asking whether people approve, you stop rehearsing grievance, and what remains is supposed to be a more capable and more peaceful person. This is where he draws on the Tao and on Indian nondual sources rather than on cognitive therapy, and it is the point at which he parts company with the psychology profession, because nothing in the later account can be tested. Dyer generally answered evidential objections with his own experience.

What did Wayne Dyer mean by the higher self?

Wayne Dyer used the higher self to mean the part of a person that is not made of biography, roles or reputation, and that he considered a piece of a universal source rather than an individual possession. His practical point was that the anxious, comparing self is a construction you can decline to identify with, and that peace comes from that disidentification rather than from improving the constructed self.

Did Wayne Dyer believe thoughts create reality?

Wayne Dyer did argue that thoughts create reality, and increasingly so in his later work, where he treated thought as causal rather than merely interpretive. This is his most contested claim. Dyer presented it as a conclusion drawn from his own experience and reading rather than as a scientific finding, and readers who accept his early cognitive material are not obliged to accept this part.

What is the power of intention in Wayne Dyer's work?

The power of intention, in Wayne Dyer's 2004 book of that name, is not willpower or determination. Dyer redefined intention as a field or force that exists independently of any individual, which he described as the invisible source that everything comes from, and he argued that a person's task is to reconnect with it rather than to generate intention by effort. His stated influence for this move was Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about intent as a force in the universe rather than a mental state, and Dyer said explicitly that reading Castaneda changed how he used the word. The practical content of the book is a list of qualities Dyer called the seven faces of intention: creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance and receptivity. His argument is that the field has those characteristics, so a person becomes a match for it by taking on those characteristics, not by wanting things more intensely. This is why Dyer kept saying that you do not attract what you want but what you are. He treated resentment, contempt and cynicism as the actual obstacles, on the grounds that they put a person out of phase with a field he considered uniformly creative and kind.

Read as psychology rather than metaphysics, The Power of Intention is a book about character preceding outcome, and it holds up reasonably well at that level: someone who becomes more generous, less contemptuous and more willing to receive help does tend to find more opportunities available. Read as Wayne Dyer intended it, the claim is much stronger, because he held that the field itself responds. He offered no mechanism and no evidence, and the supporting material is anecdote, quotation from mystics and poets, and his own conviction. What distinguishes the power of intention from most manifestation writing is the direction of causation Dyer proposes. Standard manifestation asks what you want and tells you to picture it. Dyer asks what you are and tells you to change that, arguing that the wanting is itself a broadcast of absence. He also rejected the idea that intention is about acquiring, and spent a good part of the book on receptivity, which he treated as an active discipline rather than passivity. A reader who takes only that from the book has taken the most defensible part.

What are the seven faces of intention?

The seven faces of intention in Wayne Dyer's account are creativity, kindness, love, beauty, expansion, abundance and receptivity. Dyer presented them as the characteristics of the universal field itself and therefore as the qualities a person cultivates to align with it. In practice they function as a character checklist: he suggested testing a decision by asking which of the seven it expresses.

Where did Wayne Dyer get the idea of intention as a field?

Wayne Dyer credited Carlos Castaneda's writing about intent as a force in the universe as the source that changed his own use of the word from personal resolve to impersonal field. He layered onto that his reading of Lao Tzu, Emerson, Whitman and Patanjali, so the finished idea in The Power of Intention is a blend rather than a single lineage.

How is the power of intention different from setting goals?

Goal setting names an outcome and works backward to actions, and it is measured by whether the outcome arrives. The power of intention as Wayne Dyer described it names a quality of being and works forward from it, on the argument that a person aligned with creativity and abundance will meet possibilities a striving person will not. Dyer did not oppose goals, but he treated them as downstream.

What is Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life about?

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, published in 2007, is Wayne Dyer's commentary on the Tao Te Ching, structured as eighty-one short essays, one for each verse of the Chinese text attributed to Lao Tzu. Dyer worked from multiple English translations rather than the Chinese, compared them, and wrote his own rendering of each verse before commenting. He described spending a year on the project, living with one verse at a time and trying to apply it before writing about it. Each chapter ends with suggestions for putting that verse into practice, which is what separates the book from most Tao Te Ching commentaries. The themes he draws out are the ones the text supports: acting without forcing, the strength of the yielding over the rigid, sufficiency rather than accumulation, and leadership that does not announce itself. It is his most restrained book, because the source keeps pulling him away from the more expansive claims of his manifestation writing. Sinologists would note that Dyer was not a translator and read no Chinese, and the book should be treated as a self-help author's response to the Tao rather than as scholarship on it.

The tension inside Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life is worth naming, because it is the most interesting thing about the book. The Tao Te Ching is largely an argument against striving, against the accumulation of desires, and against the belief that a person can direct events by force of will. Wayne Dyer's other central book, The Power of Intention, is about aligning yourself so that events go a particular way. Dyer resolves this by treating alignment as a form of not-forcing, which is defensible but softens the Tao's more austere point that wanting less is the whole of it. The book is strongest on the verses about sufficiency and about not needing recognition, where Dyer's own voice and the source reinforce each other, and weakest where he reads an ancient text as endorsement of a contemporary self-improvement framework. Read alongside a scholarly translation it works well as a slow daily reader. Read alone it will give you Dyer's Tao rather than the Tao, which he was reasonably open about.

Do you need to know the Tao Te Ching to read Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life?

No. Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life includes Wayne Dyer's own rendering of each of the eighty-one verses before his commentary, so the book stands alone. Readers who want the source without a self-help frame around it are better served reading a scholarly translation in parallel, since Dyer worked from English versions and was interpreting rather than translating.

How should you read Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life?

Read Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life one chapter a day over eighty-one days rather than straight through, which is how Wayne Dyer wrote it and how the practice suggestions at the end of each chapter are meant to be used. Read at speed the essays blur, because they circle a small number of ideas by design.

Which Wayne Dyer books should you read first?

Pick the Wayne Dyer book that matches which Dyer you want. Your Erroneous Zones (1976) is the practical counseling book: guilt, worry, approval-seeking, procrastination and anger, handled without any spiritual framing, and still the most useful thing he wrote for someone who simply wants to think less destructively. Pulling Your Own Strings followed with material on refusing to be manipulated. Real Magic and You'll See It When You Believe It mark the turn toward the spiritual. Manifest Your Destiny introduced the meditation practice he taught most often. The Power of Intention (2004) is the central statement of his mature idea, and Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life (2007) is his Tao Te Ching commentary. Excuses Begone! (2009) is the most concrete of the late books, built around dismantling the specific sentences people use to avoid change. Wishes Fulfilled (2012) is his most explicitly manifestation-focused work and leans on Neville Goddard. I Can See Clearly Now (2014) is the memoir. He also published essay collections such as 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace.

If you are only going to read one Wayne Dyer book, the honest recommendation depends on what you want it to do. For a reader trying to stop tormenting themselves about other people's opinions, Your Erroneous Zones does that job better than anything he wrote later, and it is the book most likely to survive a skeptical reading, since its core is close to established cognitive therapy. For a reader who already has a contemplative practice and wants a daily companion, Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life is the better purchase. The Power of Intention is where his distinctive vocabulary lives, so it is the one to read to understand what people mean when they cite Dyer. The audio recordings matter too, because Dyer was a better speaker than writer, and several lectures cover the same ground more vividly than the corresponding books.

Is Your Erroneous Zones still worth reading?

Yes. Your Erroneous Zones remains the most practical Wayne Dyer book, and its material on guilt, worry and the need for approval maps closely onto cognitive therapy techniques still in use. The dated element is tone and examples rather than substance. A reader who wants Dyer's usefulness without his metaphysics should start and possibly stop there.

What is Excuses Begone about?

Excuses Begone!, published in 2009, is Wayne Dyer's book about the habitual sentences people use to explain why they cannot change: too old, too tired, too risky, not in my nature. Dyer catalogs these, then offers a set of questions for testing whether each is actually true. It is his most operational late book and the one with the least metaphysical scaffolding.

What Wayne Dyer practice can you try this week?

The most specific practice Wayne Dyer taught is the Ah meditation, which he introduced in Manifest Your Destiny and returned to for the rest of his career. Sit somewhere quiet, ideally in the morning, and spend a minute settling. Bring to mind one thing you intend, held as a felt state rather than a shopping request. Then breathe out slowly while silently sounding the syllable ah, letting the sound fill the whole outbreath, and continue for around twenty minutes. Dyer's rationale was that ah appears inside sacred names for the divine across many languages, and he treated it as a creation sound rather than an arbitrary syllable. He was explicit that the meditation is not a request being sent anywhere. The syllable occupies the verbal mind so the intention can sit undisturbed, and the state you hold during it is the thing being practiced. Pair it with the second practice he taught constantly: the last five minutes before sleep. Dyer argued, following Neville Goddard, that whatever occupies your mind as you drift off sinks deeper than daytime thinking, so he told people to end the day deliberately, holding a short present-tense statement rather than reviewing what went wrong.

Run the pair for one week and judge it on what you can actually observe. A workable version: twenty minutes of the Ah meditation on rising, and two to three minutes of deliberate pre-sleep attention, using a present-tense sentence about the person you intend to be rather than about a possession you want. Keep a note each evening of what happened, in one line. What you are testing is not whether the universe delivered anything. It is whether your default mental setting during the day shifted, whether you were less reactive, and whether you slept differently. Those you can honestly assess in seven days. The claim Wayne Dyer makes about outcomes cannot be, and treating the practice as a delivery mechanism is the fastest way to end up disappointed and blaming yourself for insufficient belief. Two guardrails help. Set an alarm so you are not checking the time, and write the pre-sleep sentence down beforehand, because composing it at midnight turns into rumination, which is what the practice is meant to displace.

How do you do the Wayne Dyer Ah meditation correctly?

Sit upright, settle for a minute, bring one intention to mind as a felt state, then sound ah silently on each outbreath for about twenty minutes, returning to the syllable whenever attention drifts. Wayne Dyer emphasized that the intention is held rather than repeated as a demand, and that the syllable is the anchor. Straying and returning is the practice working, not failing.

What did Wayne Dyer say about the five minutes before sleep?

Wayne Dyer taught that the last five minutes before falling asleep are the most influential of the day, because the mind is receptive as it drifts and whatever occupies it settles deeper than ordinary daytime thought. He credited Neville Goddard for this and advised holding a short present-tense statement about who you are becoming rather than reviewing the day's failures or tomorrow's worries.

How long before a Wayne Dyer practice does anything?

Expect changes in mood, reactivity and sleep within one to three weeks if anything is going to shift, which is roughly the timeframe over which any daily meditation begins to register. Wayne Dyer made much larger claims about life circumstances changing, and those are neither quick nor verifiable. Judge the practice by the near-term effects you can actually observe.

What do the most quoted Wayne Dyer lines actually mean?

The most repeated of the Wayne Dyer quotes is: If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. It is usually shared as encouragement, but Dyer meant something more specific and more demanding. His argument was that perception is not a neutral window onto events, that the meaning you assign is added by you, and that because the meaning is added by you it can be withdrawn and replaced. The line is a compressed statement of cognitive reappraisal in his early work, and a claim about the constructed nature of experience in his later work. His other signature line, do not die with your music still in you, is a variation on Thoreau's observation about most people going to their graves with the song still in them, and Dyer used it as a warning against a permanently postponed life. He also frequently reworked the title of You'll See It When You Believe It, inverting the usual demand for proof before commitment. Note that a large number of quotations circulating online under Wayne Dyer's name are misattributed, recycled from other writers, or invented for social media, so it is worth checking against a book before repeating one.

The quotable quality of Wayne Dyer is a mixed inheritance. He was good at compression, and the best lines carry real content: the reversal in You'll See It When You Believe It is a serious claim that commitment precedes evidence in the domains that matter most, arguable but not empty. The problem is that circulated quotations detach from their arguments. Change the way you look at things is a discipline of reappraisal inside a chapter about guilt; on a graphic it becomes a suggestion to cheer up. Dyer's warning about dying with your music inside you was aimed at people deferring a vocation, not an instruction to quit a job you need. If you want to quote Wayne Dyer accurately, take the line from a book you can name, and be willing to say you are paraphrasing when you cannot.

Did Wayne Dyer say do not die with your music still in you?

Yes, this was one of Wayne Dyer's signature lines, used across many lectures and books. The underlying image is older, echoing Henry David Thoreau's remark about people going to the grave with the song still in them, and Dyer often acknowledged his debt to Thoreau and Emerson. His application was specific: he aimed it at people deferring the work they were made for.

Are Wayne Dyer quotes online reliable?

Many are not. Wayne Dyer spoke publicly for four decades, so genuine paraphrases circulate alongside lines he never said and lines that belong to other writers he quoted approvingly. Before repeating a Wayne Dyer quote, check it against a named book or recording, and mark it as a paraphrase if you cannot.

What criticism has Wayne Dyer faced?

Wayne Dyer faced three documented lines of criticism, and a fair account has to include all of them. The first is the charge of unacknowledged borrowing. Albert Ellis, who developed rational emotive therapy, stated publicly that Your Erroneous Zones was derived from his work without proper credit, and wrote to Dyer in 1985 setting out that case, noting that Dyer had attended an Ellis workshop before writing the book. Ellis also said the book was good and had helped many people. Dyer did not concede the point and maintained the book came from years of his own recorded lectures at St. John's. The second concerns health. Dyer disclosed a leukemia diagnosis in 2009 and subsequently described a remote healing session conducted by the Brazilian figure known as John of God, after which he spoke of himself as healed. John of God was later arrested and convicted following accusations of sexual abuse by a large number of women, and his healing practice is not accepted by medicine. The third is the general objection to thought-creates-reality teaching: it is unfalsifiable, and it implies that people who do not recover or do not prosper failed to think correctly.

On the Ellis dispute, the relevant fact is that Ellis raised it publicly and Wayne Dyer did not accept it, and that both accounts are on the record. The health episode is the more serious one, because Dyer had a very large audience and his description of a remote healing carried weight with readers facing illness themselves. Accounts of what actually happened to his leukemia afterward differ, and Dyer's own statements over the following years were not consistent on whether the condition was gone. That ambiguity is part of the record and should not be tidied away in either direction. Dyer was aware of the victim-blaming objection and addressed it in his talks, arguing that he described responsibility rather than fault. The distinction is real but thin, and it does not survive contact with a reader who has been told that their cancer or their poverty is a product of their thinking. Anyone recommending Dyer to someone who is seriously ill should read the health chapters first and decide whether they are comfortable passing them on.

Was Wayne Dyer accused of plagiarism?

Yes. Albert Ellis publicly said that Your Erroneous Zones was derived from rational emotive therapy without adequate acknowledgment, and put the case to Wayne Dyer directly in a 1985 letter. No legal finding followed. Ellis simultaneously praised the book's clarity and usefulness, and Dyer maintained that its content came from his own teaching at St. John's University.

What is the problem with Wayne Dyer's healing claims?

Wayne Dyer described a remote healing by the Brazilian figure known as John of God after his 2009 leukemia diagnosis and later spoke of himself as healed. There is no accepted medical basis for such healing, John of God was later convicted following extensive sexual abuse accusations, and endorsements of this kind can influence seriously ill readers' treatment decisions. Dyer's later statements about his condition were not consistent.

Does Wayne Dyer's teaching blame people for their problems?

Critics argue that it does, since a framework in which thought produces circumstances implies that bad circumstances follow from bad thinking. Wayne Dyer answered that he was assigning responsibility rather than blame, and that responsibility is empowering. The distinction is genuine but narrow, and it collapses for readers dealing with illness, bereavement or poverty they did not cause.

How is Wayne Dyer different from Eckhart Tolle and Louise Hay?

Wayne Dyer differs from Eckhart Tolle most sharply on the question of what you are supposed to do with the future. Tolle's argument in The Power of Now is that the mind's projection into past and future is the source of suffering, and that presence dissolves the problem rather than solving it; Tolle has little interest in outcomes. Dyer's power of intention is oriented toward becoming and toward what follows, so a Dyer practice holds a future state while a Tolle practice deliberately drops it. Against Louise Hay, who founded the publisher that issued most of Dyer's later work, the difference is method and target. Hay's teaching centers on affirmations spoken to yourself in a mirror, and on specific correspondences between mental patterns and bodily ailments. Dyer worked with meditation, with the seven faces of intention and with character, and did not build a symptom-to-thought table. Against Neville Goddard, whom Dyer credited openly in Wishes Fulfilled, the difference is that Goddard's system is a technique for assuming a specific end, while Dyer's is a program for aligning with a field described as kind and abundant.

There are also things Wayne Dyer's approach will not do, and being clear about those is more useful than another endorsement. It has nothing to offer as treatment for a psychiatric condition, and someone with major depression, an anxiety disorder or a trauma history needs clinical care rather than a book about intention; the early Dyer material can sit alongside therapy, but not in place of it. It does not address structural constraint, so a reader whose difficulty is a low wage, an unsafe household or a medical condition may find the framing insulting, and reasonably so. It suits people who already have some room to maneuver and are wasting it on rumination and approval-seeking. It can also become a way of avoiding action, since holding a state feels productive while changing nothing. The corrective Dyer himself offered was Excuses Begone!, which is the book to reach for when the intention work has quietly become a substitute for doing anything.

Wayne Dyer or Eckhart Tolle: which should you read?

Read Eckhart Tolle if your difficulty is compulsive thinking about past and future and you want relief from it rather than a plan. Read Wayne Dyer if you want a directional practice aimed at how you want to live and who you want to become. Tolle is more rigorous about presence; Dyer is warmer, more practical, and more willing to talk about outcomes.

Who influenced Wayne Dyer?

Wayne Dyer drew on Abraham Maslow's self-actualization and on rational emotive therapy in his early work, then on Lao Tzu, Patanjali, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Carlos Castaneda in his later books, and on Neville Goddard in Wishes Fulfilled. He also named contemporary Indian teachers among his influences. The mix is broad rather than a single lineage, which is a fair criticism of it and part of its popular appeal.

Who should not read Wayne Dyer?

Anyone looking for treatment of a diagnosed mental illness or a serious physical condition should not use Wayne Dyer's books in place of clinical care, particularly given his healing claims. Readers who require evidence before engaging with an idea will find the later work unsatisfying, and readers facing hard structural constraints may find the framing dismissive of circumstances they did not choose.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Wayne Dyer die and what was the reported cause?

Wayne Dyer died on August 29, 2015, at his home on Maui, Hawaii, at the age of 75. Reports at the time described the cause as heart-related rather than as a result of the leukemia he had been diagnosed with in 2009. His publisher and family announced the death; a detailed medical account was not made public, and secondhand summaries of the cause vary in wording.

What is the best Wayne Dyer book to start with?

Start with Your Erroneous Zones (1976) if you want Wayne Dyer as a practical counselor dismantling guilt, worry and approval-seeking. Start with The Power of Intention (2004) if you want the metaphysical Dyer. Start with Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life (2007) if you would rather read him commenting on the Tao Te Ching than speaking in his own voice. The three books do not agree with each other on everything.

Did Wayne Dyer teach the law of attraction?

Wayne Dyer taught something adjacent to the law of attraction but framed it differently. Where law-of-attraction material usually says like attracts like, Dyer argued you do not attract what you want but what you are, and that the work is becoming a match for the field of intention rather than sending out requests. In later books such as Wishes Fulfilled he moved closer to explicit manifestation teaching, crediting Neville Goddard.

Was Wayne Dyer a psychologist?

Wayne Dyer held a doctorate in guidance and counseling from Wayne State University, awarded in 1970, and worked as a professor of counselor education at St. John's University in New York before becoming a full-time author. He practiced and taught counseling, and his early books used the language of clinical psychology. His later work was spiritual rather than clinical, and he did not present it as licensed practice.

What did Albert Ellis say about Wayne Dyer?

Albert Ellis, who developed rational emotive therapy, said publicly that Your Erroneous Zones was derived from his work without adequate credit, and he wrote to Wayne Dyer in 1985 making that case. Ellis also said the book was a good one that had helped many people and set out the main principles clearly. Dyer maintained that the book came out of years of his own recorded lectures at St. John's.

How long does the Wayne Dyer Ah meditation take?

The Ah meditation that Wayne Dyer taught takes about twenty minutes in his own instructions, and he suggested doing it in the morning. You sit, bring to mind what you intend, and repeat the sound ah silently on the outbreath as a mantra rather than as a request. Shorter versions of five to ten minutes are workable for beginners, though Dyer himself favored longer sittings.

Is there evidence that Wayne Dyer's methods work?

Wayne Dyer's early cognitive material overlaps with rational emotive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which have a substantial evidence base for anxiety and depression. His later claims about intention as a universal field, about thought influencing physical outcomes, and about spiritual healing are not supported by clinical evidence, and Dyer presented them as personal conviction and interpretation rather than as research findings.