Chapter 11-13

Chapter 11

How To Get People To Like you

            We might as well admit it. We want people to like us. If someone says, “I don’t care whether people like me or not,” he is not telling the truth.

            A poll was taken among some high school students on the question, “What do you most desire?” By overwhelming majority the students voted that they wanted to be popular. The same urge is in older people.

            Even if you are a “difficult” person or by nature shy and retiring, even unsocial, you can attain popularity by practicing a few simple, natural and easily mastered techniques.

            First, become a comfortable person, one who is easygoing and pleasant. If you are a comfortable person, do not assume that the reason other people do not like you is because of something wrong with them. Assume, instead, that the trouble is within yourself  and determine to find and eliminate it.

            Another factor in getting people to like you is to practice building up the ego of other persons. Whomever you help to build up and become a better, stronger, finer person will give you his undying devotion. Build up as many people as you can. Do it unselfishly. Do it because you like them and because you see possibilities in them. Do this and you will never lack for friends. You will always be well thought of. Build people up and love them genuinely. Do them good and their esteem and affection will flow back toward you.

Chapter 12

Prescription For Heartache

            There is indeed a “prescription” for heartache. One element in the prescription is physical activity. The sufferer must avoid the temptation to sit and brood. A sensible program which substitutes physical activity for such fruitless brooding reduces the strain on the area of the mind where we reflect, philosophize and suffer mental pain. Muscular activity utilizes another part of the brain and therefore shifts the strain and gives relief.

            Whatever the character of your heartache, one of the first steps is to resolve to get back into the mainstream of life’s activities. Take up your old associations. Form new ones. Get busy walking, riding, swimming, playing get the blood to coursing through your system. Lose yourself in some worthwhile project. Fill your days with creative activity and emphasize the physical aspect of activity.

            Hallucination, a dream, a vision- I do not believe so. I have spent too many years talking to people who have come to the edge of  “something” and had a look across, who unanimously have reported beauty, light and peace, to have any doubt in my own mind.

Chapter 13

How To Draw Upon That Higher Power

A method for drawing upon that Higher Power is to learn to take a positive, optimistic attitude toward every problem. In direct proportion to the intensity of the faith which you muster will you receive power to meet your situation.

There is a Higher Power, and the Power can do everything for you. Draw upon it and experience its great helpfulness. This Higher Power is constantly available. If you are open to it, it will rush in like a mighty tide. It is there for anybody under any circumstances or in any condition. This tremendous inflow of power is of such force that in its inrush it drives everything before it, casting out fear, hate, sickness, weakness, moral defeat, scattering them as though they had never touched you, refreshing and re-strengthening your life with health, happiness and goodness.

Source : Norman Vincent Peale, 1987. The Power of  Positive Thinking. Ballantine Books.

Chapter 8-10

Chapter 8

How To Break The Worry Habit

            You do not need to be a victim of worry. Reduced to its simplest form, what is worry? It is simply an unhealthy and destructive mental habit. You were not born with the worry habit. You acquired it. And because you can change any habit and any acquired attitude, you can cast worry from your mind.

            To break the worry habit, try this worry-breaking formula:

1.      Say to yourself “worry is just a very bad mental habit. And I can change any habit with God’s help”.

2.      First thing every morning before you arise say out loud “I believe”, three times.

3.      Never participate a worry conversation.

4.      Cultivate friendships with hopeful people. Surround yourself with friends who think positive, faith-producing thoughts and who contribute to a creative atmosphere. This will keep you re-stimulated with faith attitude.

5.      See how many people you can help to cure their own worry habit. In helping another to overcome worry you get greater power over it within yourself.

Chapter 9

Power to Solve Personal Problems

One of the most effective techniques in problem solving is the simple device of conceiving of God as partner. Practically everybody believes in a general way that his is true, and many have experienced the reality of this faith. In getting correct solutions to your solutions to your problems, however, it is necessary to go a step further than believing this, for one most actually practice the idea of presence. Practice believing that God is as real as your spouse, or your business partner, or your closest friend. Practice talking matters over with Him. Believe that He hears and gives thought to your problems. Assume that He impresses upon your mind the ideas and insights necessary to solve your problems. Definitely believe that in these solutions there will be no error, but that you will be guided to actions according to truth which results in right outcomes.

Chapter 10

When Vitality sags, Try This Health Formula

            If you are under par, honestly ask yourself if you are harboring any ill will or resentment or grudges, and if so cast them out without delay. They do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings, but every day and every night of your life they are eating at you. Many people suffer poor health not because of what they eat but from what is eating them. Emotional ills turn your body against itself, sapping your energy, reducing your efficiency, causing deterioration in your health. And of course they siphon off your happiness.

Following are some practical suggestions. They have been used successfully by many in counterattacking especially the emotion of anger. A consistent application of these suggestions can produce feelings of well-being:

1.      Remember that anger is an emotion, and an emotion is always warm, even hot. When a person gets angry, the fists tend to clench, the voice rises in stridency, muscles tense, the body becomes rigid. Hold your fingers out straight. Deliberately reduce your tone. Bring it down to a whisper. Remember that it is difficult to argue in a whisper. Slump in a chair, or even lie down if possible. It is difficult to get mad lying down.

2.      Anger expresses the accumulated vehemence of a multitude of minor irritations. These irritations, each rather small in itself, having gathered force by reason of the one being added to the other, finally blaze forth in a fury that often leaves us abashed at ourselves. Therefore, make a list of everything that irritates you. No matter how inconsequential it may be or how silly each is, list it just the same. This will dry up the tiny rivulets that feed the great river of anger.

3.      Every time you feel anger say, ”it isn’t worth it to spend one thousand dollars’ worth of emotion on a five-cent irritation”.

4.      When a hurt-feeling situation arises, get is straightened out as quickly as possible. Go to someone you trust and pour it out to him until not a vestige of it remains within you. Then forget it.

5.      Pray for the person who has hurt your feelings. Continue this until you feel the malice fading away. Sometime you have to pray for quite a while to get a result. A man who tried this method told me that he kept account of the times he needed to pray until the grievance left and peace came. It was exactly 64 times. He literally prayed it out of his system. This is positively guaranteed to work.

Source : Norman Vincent Peale, 1987. The Power of  Positive Thinking. Ballantine Books.

Chapter 5-7

Chapter 5 

Create Your Own Happiness

Who decides whether you shall be happy or unhappy? You do.

When I get up in the morning I have two choices-to be happy or unhappy. You can be unhappy if you want to be. It is the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. Just choose unhappiness. Go around telling yourself that things aren’t going well, that nothing is satisfactory, and you can be quite sure of being unhappy. But say to yourself, “Things are going nicely. Life is good. I choose happiness,” and you can be quite certain of having your choice. To become a happy person, have a clean soul, eyes that see romance in the commonplace, a child’s heart and spiritual simplicity.

Many of us manufacture our own unhappiness. Of course not all unhappiness is self-created, for social conditions are responsible for not a few of our woes. Yet, to a large extent, by our thoughts and attitudes we distill out of the ingredients of life either happiness or unhappiness for ourselves. Anyone who desires it, who wills it and who learns and applies the right formula may become a happy person.

If happiness is determined by our thoughts, it is necessary to drive off the thoughts which make for depression and discouragement. This can be done first  by simply determining to do it, and second by utilizing an easily employed technique which I suggested to a businessman.

The way to happiness: keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, expect little, give much. Fill your live with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget self, think of others. Do as you would be done by. Try this for a week and you will be surprised.

            As you read these words you may say “there is nothing new in that”. Indeed, there is something new in it if you never tried it. When you start to practice it you will find it the most astonishing method of happy and successful living you have ever used. What is the value of having known these principles all your life if you have never made use of them? Such inefficiency in living is tragic.

            Of course in order to give power to these principles of happiness and make them with a dynamic quality of mind. You are not likely to secure effective results even with spiritual principles without spiritual power. When one experiences a dynamic spiritual change inwardly, success with happiness producing ideas becomes extraordinarily easy. If you begin to use spiritual principles, however awkwardly, you will gradually experience spiritual power inwardly. This will give you the greatest surge of happiness you have ever known. It will stay with you, too, as long as you live a God-centered life.

Chapter 6

Expect The Best And Get It

When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you. “throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow”. Copy that sentence. Write it on a card and put it in your pocket. Better still, write it on your mind, you who really want to do something with life. It’s packed with power.

Heart is the symbol of creative activity. Fire the heart with where you want to go and what you want to be. Get it so deeply fixed in your subconscious that you will not take no for an answer, then your entire personality will follow where your heart leads.

EXPECT THE BEST, NOT THE WORST, AND YOU WILL ATTAIN YOUR HEART’S DESIRE.

           

“If you expect failure, you will get failure, but if you expect to succeed, I am sure you will succeed”. Repeat this formula before every call. Believe in it and then marvel at what it will do for you.

            It is a well-defined and authentic principle that what the mind profoundly expects it tends to receive. Perhaps this is true because what you really expect is what you actually want. Unless you really want something sufficiently to create an atmosphere of positive factors by your dynamic desire, it is likely to elude you. “if with all your heart”-that is the secret. “if with all your heart”, that is to say, if with the full complement of your personality, you reach out creatively toward your heart’s desire, your reach will not be in vain.

            At least 10 times every day affirm “I expect the best and God’s help will attain the best.” In so doing your thoughts will turn toward the best and become conditioned to its realization. This practice will bring all of your powers to focus upon the attainment of the best. It will bring the best to you.

Chapter 7

I Don’t Believe In Defeat

            There is no difficulty you cannot overcome. An effective method for making your mind positive in character is to eliminate certain expressions of thought and speech, which we may call the “little negative”. These are “little negative” to be sure, and a big thoughts is of course more powerful than a little one. I determined to root those “little negatives” out of my conversation. I found that the best way to eliminate them was deliberately to say a positive word about everything. When you keep asserting that things are going to work out well, good results do occur. “a clean engine always delivers power”.

            I played golf with a man who was not only an excellent golfer but a philosopher as well. As we went around the golf course the game itself drew out of him a gem of wisdom for which I shall ever be grateful.

            In your mind you have decided that here is the obstacle which will cause you difficulty. The power of overcome this obstacle is in your mind. If you visualize yourself lifting the ball out of the rough believing you can do it, your mind will transfer flexibility, rhythm, and power to your muscles and you will handle that club in such a manner that the ball will rise right out of there in a beautiful shot.   

            All you need to do is to keep your eye on that ball and tell yourself that you are going to lift it out of the grass with a lovely stroke. Let the stiffness and tension go out of you. Hit it with exhilaration and power. Remember, the roughs only mental.

            Believe that Almighty God has put in you the power to lift yourself out the rough by keeping your eye firmly fixed on the source of your power. Affirm to yourself that rough this power you can do anything you have to do. Believe that this power is taking the tension out of you, that this power is flowing through you. Believe this, and a sense of victory will come.

Source : Norman Vincent Peale, 1987. The Power of  Positive Thinking. Ballantine Books.