Poise: How to Attain It

by D. Starke

Some amount of practise will be needed to acquire this mastery of one's thoughts, the parent of poise, which is nothing more than courage based upon solid reason.

It may happen that the desire to follow a line of thought that causes us excessive emotion may lead to the inroad of a horde of secondary ideas, which press one upon the other without any perceptible continuity, carrying with them neither conviction nor illumination.

Reveries of this sort are dangerous enemies of poise. They lead one nowhere, and create in us habits which are not controlled by reason or common sense.

If such thoughts should assail us, the sole means of avoiding injury from them is to repulse them instantly, the moment one becomes conscious of them, and to banish the chaos of scattered fancies by devoting one's whole mind to a single dominant thought that should be associated with the determination to obtain the mastery over oneself.

We have already suggested to the timid the advantage of foreseeing the objections that are likely to be made to what they may say. The mere fact that they have already formulated a mental answer will be a great assistance to the making of a successful retort.

To avoid still further risks of being confronted by a contradiction that may put them at a loss they will do well to adopt the following plan.

Let them put themselves in the place of the person to whom they plan to speak and then ask themselves if, under these circumstances, they will not find some objection to offer to the proposition concerned.

If they discover by this means that, in his place, they would be likely to find such and such difficulties, it must be with this fact in their minds that they devote themselves to the better preparation of their arguments or, if necessary, to modifying the force if not the content of the reasoning upon which they rely to carry conviction.

These objections, as we have already advised, should be uttered aloud, so that we may the better perceive their logic, and also to allow of our repeating them a second time, the ability to accomplish which will be a great encouragement to us.

There is no reason, in fact, for believing that we can not repeat on the morrow, just as perfectly as we have exprest it to-day, a statement that we have made with clearness both of reasoning and of diction.