Unlock the Power of Positive

For millions of people throughout the world, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale still represents the power of positive thinking, which coincidentally is the title of his best-selling book – one of the top best sellers of all time and translated into more than 30 languages. It’s no wonder his legacy of positive thinking still resonates with millions of people. And today his advice and practical wisdom are as relevant – and necessary – as ever.

In this exclusive interview with Selling Power, Dr. Peale explained how positive thinking can be the power that drives success. He also discussed the attitudes that lead to sales success, the techniques of positive imagination, the energy drain of negative thoughts, and how to deal with the two common factors of failure.

Doctor Norman Vincent Peale, who later became an ordained clergyman, author, and publisher, began his distinguished career in Ohio when he took a job as a door-to-door salesman.

Selling Power (SP): Is it true that you were in the business of selling pots and pans?
Dr. Peale: That is right, and I think I am still in the selling business. I see salesmanship as a process of persuasion, whereby another individual is induced to walk the road of agreement with you. If I persuade you that this chair is what you want and you agree, then you walk the road of agreement with me and you buy it. The same is true when I am in the pulpit. If I give you a concept that is going to be beneficial to you and you accept it, I have sold it to you, even if you do not have to pay me any money for it.

SP: You said once that many people fail in selling because they are victims of a “hardening of their thoughts and attitude.” What kinds of attitudes lead to sales success?
Dr. Peale: Let’s say you’re coming to sell me life insurance. You know that in order to buy groceries and clothes for your family, you need to sell so much insurance. Now, if you come in with that attitude, you convey to me, maybe unconsciously, that I’ve got to buy insurance from you to help you out, to do something for you; however, if you believe that you are going to help me by having the protection, the financial security, and the benefits of working with your company, that positive attitude is very likely to result in my signing the order.

SP: You once defined the word personality as “how you affect or stimulate others and how others affect or stimulate you.” How do you prevent a customer’s negative attitude from stimulating you negatively?
Dr. Peale: I was reading in the newspaper that President Reagan was going to have a meeting with a South American president. He was told by his worried aides that this president was going to give a speech criticizing the United States. Reagan just leaned back and said with a smile, “Well, we’ll smother him with love.”
Now, I do not particularly like the word “smother,” but when you’ve got a difficult customer, the thing to do is just send out goodwill thoughts, love thoughts, and understanding thoughts and remain at all costs dispassionate. Just take a scientific attitude and ask yourself, “Why does [the difficult customer] act that way? There must be something disturbing him that I don’t know about.”

SP: It’s not because of you that the customer’s acting that way.
Dr. Peale: That’s right. So you love the difficult customer just the same. It’s nothing personal. You just take customers as they are and like them.

SP: Instead of wishing they were different?
Dr. Peale: You can’t make them over. You expose a pleasant nature to them and take them as they are.

SP: So your own attitude remains positive?
Dr. Peale: Right.

SP: You’ve written about positive imagination. How can your techniques be used in selling?
Dr. Peale: There is a deep tendency in our human nature to become, ultimately, almost precisely what we imagine or image ourselves as being. A customer may say, “That is very interesting, but I don’t need your merchandise right now; however, I will keep this in mind.” Keeping it in mind means that the customer will hold the image of a later purchase. Cultivation of an image is very important in selling.

SP: Images plant the seeds.
Dr. Peale: And seeds will flower. While you are busy planting, you are imaging the flowers. That is the image. When you buy seeds, you are sold by the picture of the flowers on the package. Images do the selling job for you to a considerable extent.

SP: Do you think that our images and thoughts are mainly responsible for how we feel?
Dr. Peale: You can make yourself sick with your thoughts, and you can make yourself well with them.

SP: So if you think negative thoughts, you’re creating negative emotions, which in turn drain your energy?
Dr. Peale: Definitely. A negative emotion creates tiredness, which takes energy and vitality out of you. A positive emotion is created by positive thoughts and images. You can say, “This is a great day. I am fortunate to sell a wonderful product. I look forward to meeting many interesting people today. I will be able to help some of these people, and they will become my friends. I look forward to learning a great deal today.” Thinking and talking that way adds to your enthusiasm and vitality. Your mind is expanding, and all this contributes to your well being.

SP: On the other hand, you could start with 100 percent energy at 9:00 in the morning and reach a 30 percent level at noon by engaging in negative thinking.
Dr. Peale: Yes, you can completely wear yourself out by the debilitating quality of your thoughts.

SP: In other words, positive thinking maintains the energy you already have.
Dr. Peale: If you think positively, hopefully, optimistically, enjoyably, pleasantly, your words will have a therapeutic effect. If you put yourself down mentally, you are reducing the vitality of your system. I knew a doctor once who told me of a man who actually killed himself through hateful thoughts.

SP: Why is it that people can’t resist thinking negative thoughts to the point of hurting themselves? Is it because they can’t stop thinking these negative thoughts, or is it because they cannot imagine positive thoughts?
Dr. Peale: It requires strength of character to make the transition to a positive thinker. It isn’t easy. When a person is born, he or she is a positive thinker. I’ve never seen a negative baby, though a baby may be born into a home where perhaps one of the parents is a negative thinker. He or she may listen to negative teachers or be surrounded by negative friends. If that person desires to be a positive thinker, he or she faces a complete reversal of mental attitude. That person will have to gradually reorganize his or her mind and develop new tracts across the brain. This may take some time. Some people think they can read a book and all of a sudden become positive thinkers.

SP: What would be the starting point to achieve this positive change?
Dr. Peale: Well, the realization that you are not right in your mental attitude and that you must change would be the starting point.

SP: So awareness would be the first step. What would be the second?
Dr. Peale: The commitment to begin practicing positive thoughts. You can develop any mental habit if you’re convinced that it will lead you to success and happiness in life. Then you commit yourself to it and hang in there and stick with it and never give up.

SP: Mrs. Peale wrote about you in her book, The Adventure of Being a Wife (Prentiss-Hall, 1971), “I think he writes about positive thinking because he understands so much about negative thinking.”
Dr. Peale: That’s right. She knows me quite well. I was indeed a negative thinker, the worst you could image. I had little faith in myself and thought that I was a failure. This was until one of my professors told me that I had a choice: I could think positive thoughts and stop thinking negative thoughts, and this choice would determine my future.

SP: Are you still having negative thoughts?
Dr. Peale: Sure, I have negative thoughts.

SP: Could you give us one example?
Dr. Peale: Well, yesterday was Sunday. I had to go to the church to preach a sermon. When my wife and I arrived in our garage, the attendant said, “Dr. Peale, I’ve got bad news for you. Your car won’t start.” So I took a look at it. I got in, and indeed, it wouldn’t start. So we decided to take a taxi.

Now, this morning, my wife asks, “What are we going to do about the car? We’ve got to go upstate tomorrow and the car isn’t operating.” I said, “I don’t know what we are going to do. There is no mechanic in the garage, and if we call a mechanic from the outside, he will show up next week.” Here was a negative thought from the person who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking. So she said, “Let’s believe that we’re going to get that car fixed today,” and she is right now with the mechanic getting it repaired. It is a good thing to have a positive-thinking wife.

SP: How can you increase your level of awareness when negative thoughts enter your mind?
Dr. Peale: I figure that I am the sovereign judge of any thought that goes through my mind. Remember the old saying, “You can’t stop the birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.” If a negative thought comes to your mind, you sit as judge with sovereign power over that thought, and you can let it stay there and grow, or you can cast it out. By practicing positive thinking for as long as I have – being basically negative – I have developed the ability to throw out the negative thought quickly. The moment my wife said we were going to fix that car today, I agreed and ejected the negative thoughts.

SP: You seem to propose only two choices: negative thinking and positive thinking. What about realistic thinking?
Dr. Peale: The trouble is that what most people think is realistic is actually pessimistic. Look at the way newspapers write about reality. It’s mostly negative. You don’t find many positive thinkers on newspapers, because news is a departure from the norm. They write about only bad things that happen.

SP: Newspapers don’t write about human potential.
Dr. Peale: There are very few truly positive publications.

SP: In a recent speech, you talked about the two common factors leading to failure: inertia and aimlessness. How do you propose to deal with these?
Dr. Peale: Inertia is the difficult one. Another name for it is just plain, downright laziness. It is a habit, growing in an unenthusiastic, depressed attitude of mind. Once you get into the habit of action, you’ll create more enthusiastic thoughts by which to rule out inertia. Action creates motivation. Action is the best medicine I know.

SP: How about aimlessness?
Dr. Peale: If you want to avoid failure, you must develop sharp, clearly defined, enthusiastic goals, something you want to attain. I was talking to Mr. John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony magazine. He was very poor and started that magazine with $600 borrowed from his grandmother. He decided he wanted to be a publisher and set small, attainable goals, one after another. He not only published Ebony but other magazines, as well. The little goals were the starting point, but way out ahead, he had a big goal. He could see it. He imagined it.

SP: How about the problems on your way to the goals?
Dr. Peale: A problem is a concentrated opportunity. The only people who I ever have known to have no problems are in the cemetery. The more problems you have, the more alive you are. Every problem contains the seeds of its own solution. I often say, when the Lord wants to give you the greatest value in this world, He doesn’t wrap it in a sophisticated package and hand it to you on a silver platter. He is too subtle, too adroit for that. He takes this value and buries it at the heart of a big, tough problem. How He must watch with delight when you’ve got what it takes to break that problem apart and find at its heart what the Bible calls “the pearl of the great price.” Everybody I’ve ever known who succeeded in a big way in this life has done so by breaking problems apart and finding the value that was there.

SP: In The Power of Positive Thinking, you mention a study that found that 75 percent of the people surveyed listed the lack of self-confidence as their most difficult problem. Do you think that is still true today?
Dr. Peale: Yes, there are so many people who have no confidence. They don’t believe in themselves.

SP: Your wife wrote in her book, “Norman’s creativity carried a price tag, and that price tag was a constant vulnerability in self-doubt.” How did you overcome it?
Dr. Peale: I haven’t overcome it. I still wonder whether I can put this speech across, and so I say to myself, “Do you know this subject?” And I reply, “Yes, I’ve studied it.” Then I say to myself, “There is Bill Jones out there in the audience, and he is going to listen to me, and he thinks I know something that is going to benefit him.” So I begin to fortify my self-confidence because of Bill Jones’s faith in me. I say a prayer, and then I say to myself, “Forget yourself. Forget your name. Don’t make a big deal out of this. Simply go out there, love those people, and help them.”

SP: That’s as with selling. You could say, “Forget about yourself and talk about your customer’s needs.”
Dr. Peale: That’s right. Go in there and help that customer. I tell you, I think that life is a battle from the beginning to the end. One of the biggest battles you will ever have will be with yourself.

SP: Victory over yourself seems to be the main goal.
Dr. Peale: That’s goal number one. Even if it takes you 90 years and you win victories, the old enemy of self-doubt sneaks up on you again, and you must continue to hit it again, knock it out, and go forward. There is only one mental pattern that is stronger than fear, and that is faith. So cultivate faith, and that will be your substitution for self-doubt.

SP: You’ve said, “American people are so nervous and high strung that it almost makes it impossible to put them to sleep with a sermon.” How do you combat stress without sacrificing success?
Dr. Peale: Stress comes from tension, worry, and anxiety. You can quiet yourself down if you just deepen your faith in God, people, yourself, and the power of love.

SP: If you throw a blanket of faith over a personal problem, isn’t there a possibility of covering up something that prevents you from growing?
Dr. Peale: Of course, that is always a possibility. To me, positive thinkers are rugged souls who see every difficulty. But they are not defeated by difficulties because they know that they have within their own mind the ability to understand, define, make judgments, and arrive at right decisions. In addition, they have what it takes to overcome, live with, or reduce the problem. In a sense, they are realists in that they see everything straight but are never overawed by difficulty.

SP: What is the meaning of success to you?
Dr. Peale: The meaning of success, in my judgment, is to be a whole person, completely in charge of yourself. It is to be someone who sees life as a wonderful opportunity, someone who goes out to do the very best he or she can with a positive attitude. Now, if that means being a doctor and working 18 hours a day, but you enjoy being a doctor, you love it whether you make much money or not, you are still a success. Some of the wealthiest people I have known have been the most unsuccessful, because they were filled with worry that they wouldn’t keep their money, and they didn’t know how to use it.

SP: So to you, success means doing the work you enjoy doing.
Dr. Peale: Exactly. For me, it means writing books, running all over the country, making speeches.

SP: One hundred years from now, how would you like to be remembered?
Dr. Peale: I’d like to be remembered as a person who helped people to be great persons.

SP: Thank you. •