Your Thoughts Make You What You Are; Predetermining Your Mind To Success
Your Attitude Is The Key To Your Happiness
Just open your eyes – this message is everywhere you look. I stumbled across a great quote that shows this isn’t some newfangled, feel-good, new-age concept. It’s age-old wisdom. More than two hundred years ago, Martha Washington, (yes, I mean the Martha Washington, the first First Lady of the United States), after her husband became president, wrote to a friend about her willingness to support his "duty in obeying the voice of the country" in spite of their desire to retire to a private life at Mount Vernon. In her letter she said, "I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances."
Those who know me are aware that I have always had this habit of simultaneously reading several books at one time… picking up whichever one suits my mood at the moment. Yes, it takes me longer to finish each book, but I think it allows me to consider and contemplate multiple ideas during any given period of time when I’m reading the different books. So, while reading a book on the first ladies of the United States, I’m also reading others.
Anyway, gems of wisdom can be found in so many places, don’t you think? I found another one yesterday in yet another book I’m reading, which takes the age-old wisdom that attitude is the key to happiness one step further…
You Control Your Attitude; Therefore, You Control Your Happiness
Dale Carnegie, in his book about public speaking, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking, quotes William James, the famous psychologist:
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
“Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can.
“So, to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all of our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.”
Your Thoughts Make You What You Are
Earlier in the book, Carnegie talks about what he calls “predetermining your mind to success”. He says, “I was asked once, on a radio program, to tell in three sentences the most important lesson I had ever learned. This is what I said: “The biggest lesson I have ever learned is the stupendous importance of what we think. If I knew what you think, I would know what you are, for your thoughts make you what you are. By changing our thoughts, we can change our lives.’”
Mike Dooley, one of those guys from The Secret, likes to say that Thoughts Become Things, and he’s right, of course. But, I really love what Dale Carnegie says in the passage above… Your Thoughts Make You What You Are.
