How to Apply The Power of Positive Thinking
A minister's decades of pastoral casework distilled into specific, repeatable techniques for replacing fear, guilt, and defeat with confidence and energy
About This Book
For over three decades Norman Vincent Peale watched people walk into his office at Marble Collegiate Church in New York defeated by fear, guilt, and exhaustion, and leave changed by a handful of specific, repeatable techniques. Here you'll meet a businessman who prayed his aching toe back to health, a wife who saved her marriage by picturing an empty chair filled again, and a struggling magazine that found hundreds of thousands of readers by refusing to talk about what it lacked. Peale, a minister who built these ideas on decades of pastoral counseling rather than theory, insists none of it is mystical, it's a practical, almost mechanical method for retraining a mind stuck on fear, worry, and defeat.About the Author
Norman Vincent Peale was the minister of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where for many years he taught what he called a system of creative living based on spiritual techniques, working alongside psychiatrists on his own church staff to combine pastoral counseling with clinical insight. He reached people well beyond his congregation through a weekly newspaper column carried in nearly a hundred papers, a national radio program running for seventeen years, and Guideposts magazine, which he helped found. He wrote The Power of Positive Thinking after years of requests from people who had heard him teach these ideas and wanted them in a form they could study and practice at home.
Biggest Takeaway
Apply these techniques and you'll reach for a specific phrase instead of spiraling into self-doubt before a hard conversation or deadline. You'll fall asleep faster because you've learned to actively refill your mind instead of just trying to empty it. You'll catch the small, throwaway pessimistic phrases in your own speech and correct them one at a time instead of feeling permanently anxious. You'll test your goals honestly before chasing them, then hold a specific, steady picture of the outcome you want instead of a vague wish. And you'll start treating a stubborn ache or recurring illness as something worth examining emotionally, not only medically.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
Convinced his career was finished, he needed only nine borrowed words
Emptying your mind of worry only works if you do this next
She pictured her husband's chair filled long before he came home
Why the same product can sell itself for one person and not another
The strange link between how fast you move and how angry you feel
Why cutting down a fifty-year-old tree starts at the smallest branch
Her fever vanished the same night her wedding date did
A struggling magazine's founders pictured 100,000 readers who didn't exist yet
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