The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

Make it a rule never to affirm of your health, your success, or yourself what you do not wish to be true. Don't say that you feel "rocky," that you are used up, played out, that you feel miserable, that you don't feel like doing anything. Never tell people of your aches and pains, for every repetition means etching the black pictures of these conditions deeper and deeper into your consciousness. Instead of thus intensifying them, say to yourself, "The Power that created, and that sustains me every instant of my life, repairs, renews, restores, cures me. I am health, I am vigor, I am power, I am that which I think I am." Refuse to see or to hold for an instant an imperfect, discordant sin or disease-marred image of yourself. Do not harbor a suggestion of your inferiority, physically or mentally. Always picture yourself as a great, strong, splendid man or woman, clean, true, beautiful—a sublime specimen of humanity. Do not allow yourself to harbor a thought of physical or mental weakness. Think health, power, perfection at every breath. Persist in holding the thought of yourself as you long to be, the ideal which your Creator saw ahead of you when he fashioned you. Cling to your vision of health without taint, weakness or defect.

Have you a hair-trigger temper, and do you fly all to pieces over the least provocation, starting raging fires in your brain that are as destructive to your mental and physical forces as are the great forest fires to the vast tracts of territory over which they sweep? If you have you are minimizing all your powers and seriously endangering your success, your happiness, your life itself. Ask Sing Sing what the hot tempers, the fires of uncontrolled anger, of jealous rage, of revenge, of hate, of all the explosive passions have done. Ask the poorhouses, the insane asylums, the morgues, ask the records of human wreckage everywhere, what the fruits of uncontrolled passions of every sort are.

Anger, whatever its cause, is temporary insanity. Are you in the habit of losing your temper, of flying into a rage over trifles? If you could only see what a miserable spectacle, what a fool exhibition, you make of yourself on such occasions, when you go all to pieces and rave like a madman because you miss your train, or because you think some one insults you, when you step down from the throne of your reason and let the brute sit there and rule in your place, you would be so chagrined and mortified that you would leave nothing undone to rid yourself of your fault. Why, nothing could hire you, when in your right mind, to make such a ludicrous and contemptible exhibition of yourself. You only do it when under the stress of angry passion, when shorn of your power by this temporary insanity.

To retain self-control, mental poise, equanimity, under all provocations, great or small, is an index of a fine strong character. It is a triumph of strength over weakness, of greatness over littleness. The habit of conquering ourselves is the habit of victory; it strengthens all the faculties.

You can bring this great force of control to your aid, by calling on the divinity within you, by asserting your oneness with the Divine who is eternal calmness. Say to yourself, "God's image is in me. I am of divine lineage. I was not intended to be passion's slave. It is unworthy of a real man, of a real woman, to be the plaything of temper, or any sort of explosive tearing down passion. There is something divine in me and I will not allow my lower nature to get control."

The constant affirmation of your oneness with your Creator, with the One, will give you a wonderful sense of power, and will help you to overcome every handicap. But you must be very positive, very insistent and persistent in your affirmations. No matter what fault you are trying to overcome or what good quality you are anxious to acquire there must be no weakness, indecision or vacillation in your affirmations or your efforts.

If you are cursed with the fatal habit of indecision; if you are a weak vacillator, always taking things up for reconsideration because you are not quite sure that you have done the right thing; if you allow yourself to waver, to doubt the wisdom of your decision, you will be incapable of ever under any circumstances arriving at an intelligent conclusion.

You can cure the curse of indecision by asserting your power to see clearly, think quickly and act decisively. If you are in doubt as to what career to choose; if you hesitate in regard to what course you should take in any difficulty, which of two or three paths you should follow, whatever your problem may be, ask for light and the divine power within will come to your aid and guide you aright. Repeat the "I am" in every instance. "I am positive." "I can decide vigorously, firmly, finally." Resolve every morning that you will, during that day, decide things without possibility of recall or reconsideration. First go over the matter to be decided very thoroughly and carefully. In making your decision use the best judgment at your command and then close the incident. You will secure yourself against vacillation by refusing, after it is thus closed, to wonder whether you have done the wisest thing, by resisting every temptation to open the matter for reconsideration.

If you feel that you are a coward somewhere in your nature, you can strengthen this deficient faculty wonderfully by holding the courageous ideal, by thinking and reading about heroic people and things, holding the thought of fearlessness, that you are God's child, that you are not afraid of anything on the earth. Study the stories of heroic lives; think, act, live, the heroic thought. Say, "I am a son of God, and I was never made to cower, to slink, to be afraid. Fear is not an attribute of divinity. I am brave, courageous; I am a conqueror."

If you are suffering with the poverty disease, if your whole life has been stunted by poverty, saturated with poverty-stricken thoughts and convictions, if you have been heading towards the poverty goal, just turn about face, and put the law of abundance into operation. Face towards prosperity and success instead of poverty and failure. All the good things you need are yours by inheritance. Claim them, expect them, work for them, pray for them, and you will realize them in your life. Make this last stanza of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's splendid little poem "Assertion" a new bead on your rosary. Repeat it frequently, and work cheerfully, confidently, courageously toward its fulfillment.