Why Some Positive Thinkers Get Powerful Results by Norman Vincent Peale

Author:Norman Vincent Peale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504023306
Publisher: Open Road Media

* Exerpted with permission from Guideposts Magazine. Copyright © 1981 by Guideposts Associates, Inc., Carmel, New York 10512.

7.

The Positive Thinker Wins Over Discouragement

Does the positive thinker ever get discouraged? Of course. He is a human being, subject to the rise and fall of moods. But the positive thinker does not remain discouraged because he learns how to deal with this feeling.

Spirit is variable, a mixture of light and dark, up and down, joy and gloom, a rhythmic variation of levels. It is easier to let the down cycle take over than to maintain the up cycle of spirit. The latter requires desire, will, and effort with a pattern of uplifting thoughts.

Hence as a positive thinker, you must take authority over the rhythmic mood cycle. When it goes down, ride with it, but mentally make your thought control bring it upward quickly. As a result, while discouragement comes at intervals, you must not give in to it or settle down in it. Turn on your mental lifting power and rise up over the discouraging mood. The positive thinker wins over discouragement.

It is not necessarily an easy process to become proficient in mastering discouragement. It requires know-how. You have to understand the causes of discouraged attitudes. Once you become knowledgeable about the variableness of spirit, the next step is to develop insight into the law of spirit and understand mood cycles.

Then you must study workable and effective techniques of spirit acceleration. You must investigate and experiment with various mood lifters until you find procedures that work for you and are adaptable to your particular personality characteristics.

In this chapter I will suggest some practical techniques for overcoming discouragement that have been helpful to me and to many others. You might try them separately or in combination. By experimentation you can arrive at an antidiscouragement methodology that will give you a perpetual mastery over the dark moods that attack your positive, enthusiastic spirit.

Here is antidiscouragement suggestion number one: you must really want to overcome discouragement. It is as simple as that. You must truly want to be healed of the discouragement tendency. But you may ask, “How can anyone not want to be rid of the habit of being discouraged? How can anyone is his right mind not go all out to banish discouragement from his life?” The answer is that perhaps few of us are always in our so-called right mind. That is to say, we have a certain amount of the illogical within us. All of us are a mixture of reason and unreason. We do not always think straight.

We can use discouragement to cover up failure and to rationalize our inability to make it successfully. So we can tell ourselves defensively, “You see, I always knew I didn’t have it in me.” And then we can retire to the dark shadows in the mind and console ourselves. In a sense, discouragement is a kind of retreat where we can escape reality and soothe ourselves in self-pity. Accordingly, the semidefeated person, the

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