विषय - सूची
The Power of Positive Thinking Book Summary – Hey There, Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you stopped to relax and breathe? In this fast-paced world, we rarely take a moment of silence where we try to reconnect with ourselves. We have become corrupted. We lack self-confidence, we lack peace, we lack energy, and most of all, we are unhappy. This book will teach you how to train yourself to take back your happiness, peace, and energy.
Who Should Read This Summary?
This summary is helpful for people who are looking to boost their self-confidence, looking to live with a peaceful mind, looking to increase their energy and power, looking to achieve true happiness, and living a positive life.
About Author
Norman Vincent Peale is a motivational speaker, psychologist, and author of more than 40 books. He is the founder of the concept of positive thinking. His book The Power of Positive Thinking has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 40 languages. Aside from his most famous book, Norman has also published more than 30 bestselling books.
The Power of Positive Thinking Book Summary
Introduction
It’s a proven fact that to change your life, you need to change the way you think. If you want to live a happy life that is full of happiness and success, you need to start thinking positive thoughts. In this book, you will learn how to deal with lots of issues that can interfere with your happiness. First, you will learn how to increase your self-confidence by practicing a simple trick that will help you get past your inferiority complex. Second, you will learn how important having a peaceful mind is to have a peaceful life. You will learn a new strategy that will help you achieve peace of mind and enjoy its benefits.
Next, you will learn how to boost your energy to be able to work hard all day and not feel tired or stressed. You will learn that there are three ingredients that you need to include in your everyday life to keep your energy levels full all the time. You will also learn that the secret to happiness is within you. If you have been seeking happiness from outside sources, this summary will help you understand how happiness works and how to attract it to your life. Lastly, since you have worked hard to stay energized, it’s only fair to teach you how to keep that energy from leaking. We will focus on one cause of energy loss which is anger, and you will learn how to handle your difficult mood swings. This book is a practical guide toward changing the way you think, feel, and eventually act.
Believe In Yourself
Do you know that there is a magical component that you can add to your life and achieve more success? This magical component is your self-confidence. If you don’t have a strong sense of superiority and self-worth, you will never be able to succeed because you will never know who you truly are and what you truly want from life. Even if you have low self-confidence, you can learn how to build up your courage and believe in yourself. Usually, the most important cause for feeling inferior starts from childhood. If you have suffered any type of violence as a child, you will grow up to have low levels of self-confidence. For example, some people suffer from living under the shadow of their elder brothers all their lives. As children, an older brother may have had perfect grades while you had only average grades.
Every time, the same scenario happens. You get scolded a lot by your parents, and you are always getting compared to your great older brother. You may think that this will not affect you, but it will make you feel inferior to your brother, and you will always believe that you only deserve to be average and live an average life. However, you have missed one point. Not everyone who got perfect grades at school will be successful in the future. The most successful people in the world used to be bad in school. The most important A grade you can get is not in school but in real life.
But because no one told you this as a child, you will grow up with an inferiority complex, which means you will always be living in doubt and never believe in yourself. To stop feeling inferior, you need to nurture a great amount of belief in yourself. Try to change your negative self-talk and feelings of inferiority into positive statements that you say to yourself every day. If your mental image of yourself is weak, you need to strengthen it by imagining yourself becoming stronger every day. And if you are afraid to conquer new situations, always imagine that your attitude towards an issue is bigger than the problem itself. If you approach life with a positive attitude, you can handle anything. On the other hand, if you approach life with a negative attitude, even the simplest of negative events will have a huge impact on your life.
A Peaceful Mind Generates Power
Living a peaceful and stress-free life is the dream of every person. It is true that it takes effort to reach that level of calmness, but it is worth working hard for. To live your life with a peaceful mind, you need to change your way of thinking. Start by emptying your mind twice a day. Try to get rid of all your fears, all your insecurities, and all of your negative thoughts and feelings. As you finish this exercise, you will taste a great sense of relief. Now that your mind is empty, you need to fill it with positive thoughts. Think about your blessings and your dreams. Try to imagine yourself living a creative and healthy life. That way, when negative thoughts try to take over your brain, they will have no room to enter since your mind is already filled with happy thoughts.
Over time, these positive thoughts will grow stronger after every practice, and your negative thoughts will have less and less effect on your mind and your overall life. Thus, you will be able to enjoy a life of happiness and peace. If this technique doesn’t fit your style, you can practice silence. Every day, you should devote at least 15 minutes to practicing silence. Choose the quietest room in your house and sit alone for 15 minutes or more. Don’t do anything. Just be calm and enjoy the moment. Silence has proven to have healing power. You can learn from this story. The author Norman Vincent Peale and two of his friends were having breakfast in a hotel. They were discussing how well they slept the previous night.
One friend, we will call him Andy, kept complaining about the quality of his sleep. He said that he kept turning in his bed, and he woke up so tired. Andy explained that he watched the news before he went to bed. He was troubled by what he saw, and he took these troubles with him to bed. The other friend, whom we will call Buddy, stated that he had a wonderful night. He woke up very refreshed even though he read the newspaper and listened to the radio before sleeping. Buddy said that he used a secret routine that allows him to fall asleep every night. Norman and Andy tried to learn this secret plan. Buddy explained that he learned the routine from his dear father.
At the end of every night, everyone should gather around and pray. By praying, everyone went to sleep with a mind full of peace, not full of troubles. Buddy’s change in mental attitude right before he went to sleep allowed him to sleep like a baby. If you want to achieve this level of a peaceful mind, you need to practice the tricks you have learned from this chapter. They will help you be more positive and live a much more peaceful life.
How To Have Constant Energy
Sometimes, we forget how much power our minds are. We forget that if we keep thinking that we are tired, we will actually be physically tired even if we are not. The secret to having an unlimited source of energy is taking care of your body. If you eat healthy food, do your daily workout, sleep enough hours, and don’t abuse your body with unhealthy habits like smoking you will always have enough energy to work hard during the day. Another important ingredient to keep your energy levels always full is having a balanced emotional life. If your body, mind, and spirit dance in the same harmony, you will always feel strong, and you can work for hours without feeling exhausted.
Your energy is not related to your age or your circumstances. Your physical state is affected by your emotional state. And your emotional state is directly affected by your mental state. So, we are back to your thoughts and how they can build or break your life. A businessman, we will call him Sam, once fell into deep trouble. He had been involved in an affair with a woman for months, and he was feeling guilty. When he decided to break the relationship, the woman wasn’t that happy. She threatened that she would tell her husband about everything. Because Sam was scared of the shame that would fall upon him and his family, he stayed silent. He felt hopeless, and he didn’t know what to do.
As a result of these troubles, Sam felt pressure and misery. He was even having trouble sleeping at night. To solve this issue, Sam tried psychotherapy. He wanted the therapist to give him a kind of medication that can make him fall asleep. The problem was that these medications weren’t helping. Sam tried different types of pills, but none of them were able to make him fall asleep at night. For two or three months, Sam was suffering from a severe case of insomnia. Soon, this started to affect his work and his life in general. The psychotherapist then recommended that Sam should consult with the author Norman Vincent Peale. At first, Sam didn’t believe that this would work because he thought that if pills didn’t help him, then nothing else can.
But eventually, Sam visited Norman and shared the whole story. In their session, Norman explained that it was normal not to be able to sleep with two guests on his bed every night. Sam complained and said that he was sleeping alone every night. Norman explained that the two guests he was referring to in Sam’s bed were fear and guilt. Sam was scared of exposure, and he was guilty of what he had done. Slowly, Norman helped Sam accept the consequences of his infidelity and ask forgiveness for his sin. Soon, Sam was able to sleep, and he got his energy back. As we have discussed in this chapter, to have energy all day, you need to take care of your mind, spirit, and body.
Try Prayer Power
Some people believe that if they have a physical problem, that means that there is something wrong with their bodies. They never think to check their mental health or their spiritual health. You should know that even experts in physical health depend on the power of prayer in their healing process. Sometimes, when someone has a disability, they suffer from an unbalanced inner harmony. If you want to achieve physical health, you need to work on improving your spiritual health first. Just like the scientific methods used to release all kinds of power in the world, prayer is known to release positive energy. It can even help you grow old naturally and with fewer health problems.
The purpose of any prayer practice is to help you open your mind and soul to the power of God, which is the greatest power of all. When you understand and receive this kind of power, you will feel unlimited energy flowing through your veins. Some years ago, a man, we will call him Bill, started a small business in New York. He started with only one employee, and they were located in a place that he described as a hole in a wall. After a few years, their business location moved to a bigger place, then to even bigger locations. Bill’s small business became very successful.
When asked about the secret to his huge success, Bill always replies by saying that the secret lies in his hard work, his positive attitude towards the world, and his prayers. Surely, this man was creative and special, but instead of depending on the power of his brain alone, he preferred to utilize the power of prayer. Bill’s formula for success follows these three steps: Prayerize, Picturize, and Actualize. First, if Bill faced a problem, he would deal with it by talking to God. Anything he wanted from life was up for discussion with God, not someone else.
Second, once a solution for a problem or a wish is prayerized, it’s time to picturize it. By this, we mean that you should create a mental image of what you want or print it on paper. When you keep thinking about this picture every day, it will strengthen your chances of making it happen for real. Third, after you keep picturizing your wish, you will unconsciously see your wish come true. That’s what Bill refers to as actualizing. By trying this practice, or any prayer routine that fits your life, you can achieve better results. You can have a better job and better mental, physical, and spiritual health.
How To Create Your Own Happiness
It’s unfortunate to see people trying to find happiness by seeking relationships or material things. Real happiness can only happen when you find happiness from within you because only you can make yourself feel happy. Being happy is the easiest thing to accomplish. Just wake up every day and decide to be happy, and you will be. The same goes for being unhappy. If you keep telling yourself that you are unhappy, you will be unhappy forever. It’s all about choice. It’s true that sometimes circumstances out of our control can make us unhappy, but most of the time, we are miserable because of our own thoughts and attitudes.
H. C. Mattern is a happy fellow who traveled a lot with his wife, Mary. Mattern always carries a special card wherever he goes. This card is the reason for all their happiness. Not only with the couple, but their happiness has also become contagious to anyone who has met them. If you read this card, you will find that it says something like this. “If you want to be happy, let go of hate and worry. Live a simple life. Always give more than you receive. Think less of yourself and more of other people.”
Give this a try, and check the results. You may think that this card is typical and old. Yes, it may be old, but trying it for a week or two will make a difference. You will discover that it’s more powerful than you think, and it will change your life completely. When you change the way you think, you will change the way you feel. When your spirit is happy, your life will forever be. Once you reach this level of happiness, you will feel like you are living in a different world. The truth is you are still on the same planet, earth. The only thing that changed is you.
Stop Fuming and Fretting
Do you know that when you get angry, you lose power? If you have been following the steps we mentioned in the chapter about having more energy, then you might want to learn what can make you lose your energy fast. First, try to slow down and reduce the speed of your life. You may not realize it, but in this modern life, we are driving ourselves insane by how fast we are going. We walk too fast. We eat too fast. We drive too fast, and all because there is something that is waiting to be done. This fast pace life is destroying the lives of many people. They are harming their brains and their spirits. This lifestyle is intoxicating, and it can cause a lot of illness. It makes people constantly sick, stressed, and angry.
The solution is to slow down and try to silence the noise in your head. Try to live a natural and normal pattern of living. Always keep your mental and spiritual health before anything else, and practice letting go of your anger. To reduce your anger, try to sit on a chair. Completely relax on your chair and think of your mind as being calm as the surface of a clear lake. For the next three minutes, try to remember the most beautiful and relaxing scenes you have ever seen. Try to listen to the sound of silence and embrace your calm self. To benefit from the power of this exercise, you need to repeat it regularly.
Let’s look at this example. An aggressive businessman once visited a physician. This businessman was hyperactive, and he started telling the doctor about his busy work life. The businessman told the doctor that he always goes home with a case full of work that needs to be done. Then, the businessman would spend all night finishing his tasks before he goes to sleep. The doctor asked the businessman why he would do such a thing. The doctor believes that this businessman should ask for help or leave his work in someone else’s hands. The businessman felt insulted, and he answered with an angry tone. The businessman told the doctor that he was the only one who could do the job right and quickly. His whole company depends on him.
The doctor told the businessman that he was going to write a prescription, and the businessman should follow it. The prescription is that the businessman should take 2 hours off work every day and he should go for a walk. Then, once every week, the businessman should take a day off and visit the cemetery. The businessman was surprised about this visit to the cemetery. The doctor explained that the businessman needs to look at the gravestones of the people who have passed away. He should reflect on the fact that many of them used to think like businessmen, but the world has been going okay even after their death. The businessman, in other words, should think that most people who are dead now used to be important at some point. Yet, even after they died, the world still works perfectly fine.
The businessman understood what the doctor meant, and he decided to slow down his fast-paced life. The businessman learned how to appreciate himself more, and he became less angry. He became more peaceful, and surprisingly, his work got even better. We believe that if we speed up our lives, we will achieve more. But that’s not true. By living a fast-paced life, we are hurting our health and inner peace. We become angrier and lose more energy in the process. By slowing down, we can control our lives, and get healthier and more peaceful. We can even achieve peace and happiness.
Conclusion
Happiness is the ultimate goal for most people. We seek happiness in our relationships or in realizing our material dreams. But true happiness can only happen when change starts within. By changing the way you think, you can change your life completely. In this book, you have learned that to believe in yourself, you need to deal with your past painful memories. You may not know it yet, but your bad experiences as a child directly affect your present. To deal with your low self-confidence issue, you need to practice positive self-talk and try to create a positive mental image of yourself. If you think of yourself as a strong person, you will become strong.
You also learned that a peaceful mind is the key to a peaceful life. You learned two new practices that you can try to live a peaceful life. One example is to use of the Empty Your Mind technique. Try it, and you will be surprised by the results. And because energy is how we function every day, this book has taught you how to stay energetic all day long by keeping a healthy body, healthy mind, and healthy spirit. Even if you succeed at increasing your energy, you still need to protect it from leaking. One cause of your energy loss is your anger. You learned that you need to control your anger by slowing down the pace of your life.
If you are always busy, you will always be stressed and angry. But, if you decide to take a walk, you will relax, and you will have more time to think and breathe. For anyone who is looking to live a more positive life, this book has both the theory and the practice needed to reach that goal. Starting today, work towards a healthy, peaceful, and more positive mind, heart, and spirit.
