If you make up your mind firmly that you will never again speak unkindly of any one, that if you cannot find anything good in them, if you cannot see the best side, you will see nothing and say nothing, it will make a wonderful difference in life for you. You will be surprised to see how soon everything will respond with a message of joy and peace. If you always look on the sunny side of every incident, you will find that there is really very little trouble in the world for you, and even that little can be turned to goodness. Your vinegary countenance and cynical remarks will be cast off as an ugly mask which has been hiding your real, wholesome, happy self, and all the blessings of human experience will be yours.
“Catch the sunshine! Don't be grieving
O'er that darksome billow there!
Life's a sea of stormy billows,
We must meet them everywhere.
Pass right through them! Do not tarry.
Overcome the heaving tide,
Therms a sparkling gleam of sunshine
Waiting on the other side.”
Talk happiness. The world is sad enough
Without your woe. No path is wholly rough.
Look for the places that are smooth and clear,
And speak of them to rest the weary ear
Of earth, so hurt by one continuous strain
Of mortal discontent and grief and pain.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Chapter X.
Negative Creeds Paralyze
Denials should be ignored entirely, for they are but reminders of a condition we are trying to erase from the memory—and by verbal expression of any condition or fact we form a mental image thereof.—Agnes Procter.
NEGATIVES never accomplish anything. There is no life in a negative, nothing but deterioration, destruction, death. Negatives are great enemies of the success candidate. The man who is always talking down everything, who is always complaining of hard times and bad business, poor health and poverty, attracts to himself all the destructive, negative influences about him, and neutralizes all of his endeavor.
Constructive thought abandons the man who is always thinking destructively, and using destructive language, for he has nothing kindred with the positive, nothing to attract it. The creative principles cannot live in a negative, destructive atmosphere, and no signal achievement can take place there. So negative people are always on the down grade, always turning out failures. They lose the power of affirmation, and drift, unable to get ahead.
Negatives will paralyze your ambition, my young friend, if you indulge in them. They will poison your life. They will rob you of power. They will kill your self-confidence until you are a victim of your situation instead of a master of it. The power to do is largely a question of self-faith, self-confidence. No matter what you undertake, you will never do it until you think you can. You will never master it until you first feel the mastery and do the deed in your mind. It must be thought out or it can never be wrought out. It must be a mind accomplishment before it can be a material one.
There is no science in the world which will bring a thing to you while your thought repels it, while doubt and suspicion linger in the mind. No man can pass his self-imposed bounds or limitations. The man who would get up in the world must learn to deny his belief in limitation. He must throw all negative suggestions to the wind. He must think success before he can achieve it. He must affirm continually with decision and vigor that which he wishes to accomplish or be.
Suppose a boy some morning should say, “I can't get up, I can't get up; what’s the use of trying?” It is perfectly sure that he never could get out of bed until he thought he could, until he had confidence in his ability to get up.
How can a boy expect to rise in the world when he is all the time saying to himself: “I can't do this thing. It is useless to try, I know I can't do it. Other boys may do it, but I know I can't." The boy who thinks he can’t get his lessons, who decides that he can't solve his problems, who is sure he can't go through college, can never do any of these things. Very soon he becomes the victim of chronic “can't” Negation has mastered him. “I can't” has become the habit of his life. All self-respect and self-confidence, all consciousness of ability, have been undermined and destroyed. His achievement cannot rise higher than his thoughts.
Contrast this with the boy who always says, “I will.” No matter what obstacles confront him, he says, “I will do the thing I have undertaken.” It is the constant affirmation of his determination to do the thing which increases his confidence in himself, and the power to do the thing, until he actually does it.
It would be impossible for a lawyer to make a reputation in his profession while continually thinking about medicine or engineering. He must think about law, he must study and become thoroughly imbued with its principles. It is absolutely unscientific to expect to attain excellence or ability enough to gain distinction in any particular line while holding the mind open and continually contemplating something radically different. Is it not, therefore, more than foolish, even ridiculous, to expect to develop a strong, vigorous mentality, while acknowledging or contemplating weakness or deficiency?
As long as you contemplate any personal defect—mental, moral, or physical—you will fall below your possible attainment; you cannot approach your ideal, your standard.
As long as you allow negative, destructive, tearing-down processes to exist in your mind, you cannot create anything, and you will be a weakling.
Most people go through life crippled and handicapped by thinking weak thoughts, diseased thoughts, failure thoughts. It would be just as sensible for a girl to try to develop the highest type of beauty of physique and character by holding in her mind the ugliest ideals and thinking of herself as hideous. If she wishes to be beautiful, she must hold steadily the beauty ideal in her mind and try to measure up to it; then not only the physical but also the moral nature responds to this effort to attain the aesthetic ideal; but if she goes through life thinking she is ugly and deformed, and lamenting the fact, beauty will never respond.
What a misfortune to see bright young men or young women hampered and kept back in their careers because of holding the sickly ideal, the confession of weakness and defect. Banish these ghosts, these unrealities, these enemies of your success and happiness, forever from your mind. Rise up out of the valley of despair and despondency, out of the miasma which has poisoned the air around you, out of the foulness which has suffocated you all these years, into the atmosphere of excellence, of power, of beauty; then you will begin to accomplish something in life, to be somebody.
If people could only once realize the demoralizing influence of holding the sickly ideal, the failure ideal, in the mind until the standards of excellence are all dragged down to the level of mediocrity or commonness, they would never again be content to dwell in the valley of failure, to live in the basements of their lives.
How can a man be free, prosperous, and happy while he is imprisoned and enslaved by the poverty thought, the conviction that he is poor and unlucky, and that he can never accumulate money as others do?
In what condition is a man to fight for prosperity when he has lost confidence in his ability, and is convinced that opportunity is for others and not for him? He cannot make a strenuous, energetic effort to release himself from this condition while he holds this failure thought. He does not believe he can push away the limitations which hedge him in. He sees no way to regain his confidence