Applied Psychology: Driving Power of Thought / Being the Third in a Series of Twelve Volumes on the / Applications of Psychology to the Problems of Personal and / Business Efficiency

The Archives of the Mind

There are, therefore, four Prime Laws of Association—the Law of Habit, the Law of Recency, the Law of Contiguity and the Law of Vividness

At the outset of every undertaking you are confronted with two ways of attacking it. One is with doubt and uncertainty; the other is with courage and confidence.

Two Ways of Attacking Business Problems

The first of these mental attitudes is purely negative. It is inhibitory. It is made up of mental pictures of yourself in direful situations, and these mental pictures bring with them depressing emotions and muscular inhibitions.

The second attitude is positive. It is inspiring. It is made up of mental pictures of yourself bringing the affair to a triumphant issue, and these mental pictures bring with them stimulating emotions and the impulses to those bodily activities that will realize your aims.

You have only to start the thing off with the right mental attitude and hold to it. All the rest is automatic. Think this over.

The Hard Work Required to Fail

The truth is, It takes just as much brain work to accomplish a failure as it does to win success—just as much effort to build up a depressive mental attitude as an energizing one.

Creative Power of Thought

Take for granted that you have the courage, the energy, the self-confidence and the enthusiasm to do what you want to do, and you will find yourself in possession of these splendid qualities when the need arises.

Consciously or unconsciously, you have already trained your mind to discriminate among sense-impressions. It perceives some and ignores others. For each perception it selects such associates as you have trained it to select. Have you trained it wisely? Does it associate the new facts of observation with those memory-pictures that will make the new ideas useful and productive of fruitful bodily activities?

Conscious and Unconscious Training

If not, it is time for you to turn over a new leaf and habitually and persistently direct your attention to those associative elements in each new-learned fact that will make for health and happiness and success. Train your mind deliberately, and day by day, to such constant incorporation of feelings of courage and confidence and assurance into all your thoughts that the associated impulses to bodily activity will inevitably influence your whole life.

Even without our telling you, you know that whenever a man makes up his mind that he is beaten in some fight his very thinking so helps on the fatal outcome.

The distinction between wise use and misuse lies in whether disintegrating or creative thoughts, with their correspondingly energizing or depressing emotions or feelings, are allowed to hold sway in consciousness.

Energizing Emotions

When we speak of energizing emotions or feelings we mean love, courage, brightness, earnestness, cheer, enthusiasm. When we speak of depressing emotions or feelings we mean doubt, fear, worry, gloom.

No elements are more essential to a successful business or a successful life than the right kind of emotional elements.

mistakes in the perception of distances fluctuated between one and fourteen millimeters; the time for the sorting of the forty-eight cards, between thirty-five and fifty-eight seconds; the association-time for the six associated words taken together was between nine and twenty-one seconds. The pointing experiments could not be made use of in this first series, as it was found that quite a number of participants were unable to perform the act with the rapidity demanded.

experiment consists in reading to the pupils a long series of pairs of words of which the two members of the pair always logically belong together. Later, one word of each pair will be read to them and they have to write down the word which belonged with it in the pair.

y appropriate tests, the quickness of response to sense-impressions, the character of the associations of ideas, the workings of the individual imagination, the nature of the emotional tendencies, the character and scope of the powers of attention and discrimination, the degree of persistence of the individual and his susceptibility to fatigue in certain forms of effort, the visual, auditory and manual skill, and even the moral character of the subject, can be more or less clearly and definitely determined.

Remember that, whether you know it or not, your inmost thoughts are reflected in your voice and manner, your every act. And all your subordinates, whether they know it or not, see these things and reflect your attitude.