Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s Positive Thinking

New York, NY – For millions of people throughout the world, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale IS the power of positive thinking, his favorite book which has become one of the top best sellers of all time in over 30 languages.

Now, in this exclusive with Personal Selling Power, Dr. Peale tells how positive thinking can be the power behind the successful salesperson. He also discusses the attitudes which lead to sales success . . . the techniques of positive imagination . . . the energy drain of negative thoughts . . . how to deal with the two common factors of failure.

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, called the most influential Protestant clergyman in the United States, has gained enduring fame as Pastor of Marble Collegiate Church since 1932; author of numerous best selling books; editor of Guideposts magazine; radio and television commentator. His distinguished career began over 60 years ago in Ohio when he took a job as a door-to-door salesman.

PSP: Is it true that you’ve been 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.

PSP: You said once that many people fail in selling because they are victims of a “hardening of their thoughts and attitudes.” 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.

PSP: 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 the other day where 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 good will thoughts, love thoughts, understanding thoughts and remain at all costs, dispassionate. Just take a scientific attitude and ask yourself, “Why does he act that way? There must be something disturbing him that I don’t know about.”

PSP: It’s not because of you that he’s acting that way.

Dr. Peale: That’s right. So you love him just the same. It’s nothing personal. You just take him as he is and like him.

PSP: Instead of wishing he were different?

Dr. Peale: You can’t make him over. You expose a pleasant nature to him and take him as he is.

PSP: So, your own attitude remains positive?

Dr. Peale: Right.

PSP: You’ve recently 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 he will hold the image of a later purchase. Cultivation of an image is very important in selling.

PSP: Images plant the seeds.

Dr. Peale: That is a good figure. 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.

PSP: 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.

PSP: 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.

PSP: On the other hand, you could start with 100% energy at 9:00 in the morning and reach a 30% level at noon by engaging in negative thinking.

Dr. Peale: Yes, you can completely wear yourself out by the debilitating quality of your thoughts.

PSP: In other words, positive thinking maintains the original 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 by hateful thoughts.

PSP: 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 may listen to negative teachers, or he may be surrounded by negative friends. If that person desires to be a positive thinker, he faces a complete reversal of his mental attitude. That person will have to gradually reorganize his 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.

PSP: What would be the starting point to achieve this positive change?

Dr. Peale: Well, the realization that you are not right in your mental attitudes and that you must change would be the starting point.

PSP: 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.

PSP: Mrs. Peale wrote in her book, The Adventure of Being a Wife, which is a wonderful book, “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 – that I could think positive thoughts and stop thinking negative thoughts, and that this choice would determine my future.

PSP: Are you still having negative thoughts?

Dr. Peale: Sure, I have negative thoughts.

PSP: 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 book, 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.

PSP: How can you increase your level of awareness of negative thoughts entering 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 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.

PSP: 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 only write about bad things that happen.

PSP: Newspapers don’t write about human potential.

Dr. Peale: There are very few positive publications. Our magazine, Guideposts, is one of the positive periodicals.

PSP: 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.

PSP: 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 recently talked 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. Now, he not only has 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.

PSP: How about the problems on your way to the goals?

Dr. Peale: A problem is a concentrated opportunity. The only people that 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 know who succeeded in a big way in this life has done so by breaking problems apart and finding the value that was there.

PSP: In your book, The Power of Positive Thinking, you mention a study saying that 75% of the people surveyed listed as their most difficult problem, the lack of self-confidence. 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.

PSP: 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 say, “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 myself self-confidence, because of Bill Jones’ 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.”

PSP: It’s like 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.

PSP: Victory over yourself seems to be the 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 at you again and you must continue to hit him again, knock him 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.

PSP: You’ve said recently, “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, in people, in yourself, and in the power of love.

PSP: 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, a positive thinker is a rugged soul who sees every difficulty. But, he is not defeated by them because he knows that he has within his own mind the ability to understand, to define, to make judgments, and to arrive at right decisions. In addition, he has what it takes to overcome, to live with, or reduce the problem. In a sense, he is a realist in that he sees everything straight, but is never overawed by difficulty.

PSP: What is your meaning of success?

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 can with a positive attitude. Now, if that means being a doctor where you work 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, they didn’t know how to use it . . .

PSP: 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 . . .

PSP: 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.

PSP: Thank you.