“For all its shortcomings, positive thinking has stood up with surprising muscularity in the present era of placebo studies, mind-body therapies, brain-biology research, and, most controversial, the findings of quantum physics experiments … may challenge how we come to view ourselves in the twenty-first century, at least as much as Darwinism challenged man’s self-perception in the Victorian age.”
“I raked up certain old griefs out of the ashes of the past, borrowed some new troubles out of the future and put them all under the powerful microscope of a morbid imagination, which magnifies the awful about a thousand times, and diminishes the cheerful.”
– quoting Prentice Mulford an 1880s author who began the modern positive thinking movement’s transition to a philosophy of personal success
“The mind is a magnet. It has the power, first of attracting thought, and next of sending that thought out again … What kind of thought you most charge that magnet (your mind) with, or set it open to receive, it will attract most of that kind to you.”
– Prentice Mulford’s 1886 Law of Success
“Within the parameters of physical possibilities, you receive what you ‘want with your whole soul’ — whether inner truth, a personal accomplishment, relationships, whatever it is. Excluding some great countervailing force, and for either ill or good, the one thing that you want above all else is what you get.”
“The wish to authentically search for the self and its true aims is, perhaps, the greatest form of mental affirmation to which a person can aspire, and the one that brings the most help.”
“Some medical authorities might privately nod in sympathy with the defense of Mesmer by Charles d’Eslon, the late-eighteenth-century Paris physician: ‘It may indeed be entirely imagination. And if it is? Then imagination is a force as potent as it is little understood. Let us work with this mysterious imagination, let us use it to cure, let us learn more about it.'”
“The time has come for science to confront serious implications of the fact that directed, willed mental activity can clearly and systematically alter brain function; that the exertion of willful effort generates a physical force that has the power to change how the brain works and even its physical structure.”
– Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D, UCLA and author of The Mind and the Brain
For over three decades, Jim Clemmer’s keynote presentations, workshops, management team retreats, seven bestselling books, articles, and blog have helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The Clemmer Group is the Canadian strategic partner of Zenger Folkman, an award-winning firm best known for its unique evidence-driven, strengths-based system for developing extraordinary leaders and demonstrating the performance impact they have on organizations.
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