positive thinking
Everything you have always known about positive thinking but were afraid to put into practice
Vera Peiffer
For Nada and Ljuba
Contents
Chapter 1: Mind over matter: The Pendulum Experiment
Chapter 2: The subconscious mind
Chapter 3: What is positive thinking?
Chapter 4: What is on your mind?
Chapter 5: Getting in touch with your subconscious mind
Chapter 6: Setting up your personal success programme
Chapter 7: Some personality traits and their strategies
Chapter 8: How to use this part of the book
Chapter 11: Worrying and remorse
Chapter 15: Hypnosis and self-hypnosis
Chapter 16: Guided affective imagery
Excuse me, have you had this trouble with your eyesight long? No trouble with your eyesight. I see. In that case, would you please read the heading again? OK, now just skip the foreword and go on to the next chapter. Thank you.
I don’t believe this. You’re still reading on when I specifically asked you not to!
You see, when I started working on this book, a friend asked me how far I’d got with my writing and I replied that I had just started on the foreword. My friend waved a contemptuous hand and assured me that she certainly never read any forewords and, as far as she was aware, nobody else did either. That got me thinking. Since I wanted my foreword to be read I thought why not use it to prove a point?
The fact that you were not supposed to read the foreword made it practically irresistible – after all, you’re still reading now, aren’t you?
Note: The harder you try to avoid something, the less you can do it.
You will encounter the implications of these notes throughout the book, and I will demonstrate in the following chapters how they work and how you can use them to your advantage. What is more I know that you will succeed in making the findings of this book work for you, provided you act on your intention of getting more out of life and therefore put these findings into practice.
Theoretical knowledge is a marvellous thing. It increases your self-esteem, impresses your friends and looks good on your CV. All this is also very useful and certainly desirable, but theoretical knowledge cannot effect change: it will never change you from a miserable person into a happy one or from an unsuccessful person into a successful one.
In order to change your life for the better, you need more than just theoretical knowledge. You need to put these theories into practice. This, of course, means that you have to assume responsibility for your own well-being and stop blaming everyone else for things that go wrong in your life. This is not easy, because, let’s face it, it is just so much more convenient to blame your parents/the Government/the weather for the fact that you cannot cope with certain aspects of life, rather than admit that you have not been pulling your weight and are therefore still stuck in that same old job, are still without a partner or still as miserable as you were two years ago.
In the long run, taking responsibility for your actions is a winning strategy because it opens the door to a completely new range of possibilities for becoming a successful person. When I am speaking of success I am speaking of a number of different areas, like health, wealth, happiness and personal fulfilment.
There are practically no limits to what you can achieve provided you put your mind to it. Reading this book will help, but you still have to go out and put the theories into practice. This ultimate step lies with you and you alone. Get on with it now;