By Norman Vincent Peale.
The book is written with deep concern for the pain, difficulty and struggle of human existence.
It teaches positive thinking, not as a means to fame, riches or power, but to overcome defeat and accomplish worthwhile creative values in life.
This book suggests techniques and gives real time examples which demonstrate that you do not need to be defeated by anything, that you can have peace of mind, improved health, and a never-ceasing flow of energy. In short, that your life can be full of joy and satisfaction.
Believe In Yourself!
Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy. But with sound self-confidence you can succeed.
The greatest secret for eliminating the inferiority complex, which is another term for deep and profound self-doubt, is to fill your mind to overflowing with faith. Develop a tremendous faith in yourself. If you have faith nothing shall be impossible unto you.
Dr. Karl Menninger said, “Attitudes are more important than facts.”
So if you feel that you are defeated and have lost confidence in your ability to win, sit down, take a piece of paper and make a list, not of the factors that are against you, but of those that are for you. Practice thinking confident thoughts, make it a dominating habit, and you will develop such a strong sense of capacity that regardless of what difficulties arise you will be able to overcome them. Feelings of confidence actually induce increased strength.
The secret is to fill your mind with thoughts of faith, confidence, and security. This will force out or expel all thoughts of doubt, all lack of confidence.
What can you do now to build up your self-confidence?
- Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding.
- Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.
- Do not built-up obstacles in your imagination. Depreciate every so-called obstacle. Minimize them.
- Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as YOU can.
- Get a competent counselor to help you understand why you do what you do. Learn the origin of your inferiority and self-doubt feelings which often begin in childhood. Self-knowledge leads to a cure.
- Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.
A Peaceful Mind Generates Power
One must learn to live on a different thought basis, and even though thought change requires effort, it is much easier than to continue living as you are. The life of strain is difficult. The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence. The chief struggle then in gaining mental peace is the effort of revamping your thinking to the relaxed attitude of acceptance of God’s gift of peace.
Have Constant Energy
How we think we feel has a definite effect on how we actually feel physically. If your mind tells you that you are tired, the body mechanism, the nerves, and the muscles accept the fact. If your mind is intensely interested, you can keep on at an activity indefinitely.
The fact that in our consciousness we can tap a reservoir of boundless power as a result of which it is not necessary to suffer depletion of energy.
The body is designed to produce all needed energy over an amazingly long period of time. If the individual takes reasonable care of his body from the standpoint of proper diet, exercise, sleep, no physical abuse, the body will produce and maintain astonishing energy and sustain itself in good health.
If he gives similar attention to a well-balanced emotional life, energy will be conserved.
To live with constant energy it is important to get your emotional faults corrected. You will never have full energy until you do.
How to Create Your Own Happiness
Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? The answer—you do!
The way to happiness: keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your life with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by.
If happiness is determined by our thoughts, it is necessary to drive off the thoughts which make for depression and discouragement.
Stop Fuming and Fretting
Many people make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves by dissipating power and energy through fuming and fretting. We need to stop fuming and fretting and get peaceful if we are to have power to live effectively. And how do we go about doing so?
A first step is to reduce your pace or at least the tempo of your pace. We do not realize how accelerated the rate of our lives has become, or the speed at which we are driving ourselves. Many people are destroying their physical bodies by this pace, but what is even more tragic, they are tearing their minds and souls to shreds as well.
Slow down, for whatever you really want will be there when you get there if you work toward it without stress, without pressing.
Practice and preserve mental quiet. Learn the art of letting go all nervous excitement. To do this, stop at intervals and affirm, “I now relinquish nervous excitement—it is flowing from me. I am at peace.” Do not fume. Do not fret. Practice being peaceful.
In developing a calm control it is necessary to think calmness, for the body responds sensitively to the type of thoughts that pass through the mind. It is also true that the mind can be quieted by first making the body quiet. That is to say, a physical attitude can induce desired mental attitudes.
Expect the Best and Get It
Things become better when you expect the best instead of the worst, for the reason that being freed from self-doubt, you can put your whole self into your endeavor, and nothing can stand in the way of the man who focuses his entire self on a problem. When you approach a difficulty as a personal unity, the difficulty, which itself is a demonstration of disunity, tends to deteriorate. When the entire concentration of all your force—physical, emotional, and spiritual—is brought to bear, the consolidation of these powers properly employed is quite irresistible. Expecting the best means that you put your whole heart (i.e., the central essence of your personality) into what you want to accomplish.
People are defeated in life not because of lack of ability, but for lack of wholeheartedness. Heart is the symbol of creative activity. Fire the heart with where you want to go and what you want to be. If it is so deeply fixed in your unconscious that you will not take no for an answer, then your entire personality will follow where your heart leads.