Positive Mental Attitude

MYOB 2008-03-17
Show #76
Release date: 17 Mar 2008

Notes

Does having a positive mental attitude matter in business?

Entrepreneurs need various mental disciplines but can self hypnosis work? Or, is it dangerous?

What about mental re-programming? Is it contrary to the spirit of the entrepreneur?

What to commentators such as Derren Brown have to add to the debate?

Do motivational and inspirational speakers have to offer other than palliative sound bites?

Can such books as the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People really help us? Are these grounded in reality for most business owners? Or, do many ultra successful people have rotten lives?

Is NLP, neuro linguistic programming, a force for good? Are NLP practitioners to be trusted?

Guy Kingston and John Richards take on and address these subjects in a lively and informed discussion in this 76th Mind Your Own Business Podcast.

And, they invite listeners to contact the show on feedback@myobpod.com with their experiences and opinions of NLP.

Wikipedia NLP article

Thinking It Rich?

There is an obvious overlap between business management on the one hand and what is usually called “personal development” or “self help” on the other.

The factors that tend to success in personal life are also those which tend to success in business life, and the wise entrepreneur will view his business and personal lives as an integrated whole.

Probably the most famous factor in both business and personal success is “positive mental attitude”, or, more simply, “positive thinking”.

This expression, which is now often associated with businessmen of the most ruthless and energetic type, comes from an unlikely source: Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking, the enormously influential book which effectively launched the modern “self help” industry, was a Protestant Pastor.

Peale was very much a product of what the sociologist Max Weber called “the Protestant work ethic”. He believed that the Gospel teaching that faith can move mountains could be proved in the most literal sense.

“Change your thoughts and you change your world” was his philosophy.

Always a clergyman first and foremost, he saw this as a religious principle, but he also worked closely with friends who were psychoanalysts, businessmen, and educators to apply it to the challenges of the material world.

In doing so, he was building on the tradition of Samuel Smiles, a Victorian moral reformer who had written the original Self-Help, the book that gave its name to the industry. Smiles emphasised the necessity of taking responsibility for one’s life, and for one’s success or failure. Peale took this a stage further by advocating mental attitude as the mechanism for success.

Peale also came to many of the same conclusions as the superbly named Napoleon Hill, who had interviewed 500 successful people in order to learn the common factors in their success. Although Hill was also a devout Christian, he was more overtly materialistic in his objectives, which are reflected in the title of his famous book, Think and Grow Rich.

Like Peale, Hill saw the mental attitude as the major determinant of success or failures. Winners thought like winners.

While thinking like a winner from the start does not itself guarantee success, thinking like a loser – believing that it is inevitable that one will not succeed – practically guarantees failure, not least because it will probably prevent one making the effort, or at least making it with the necessary whole-hearted commitment.

To that extent, the “self help” industry has been beneficial to business. Yet it must never be forgotten that it is an industry. Its primary function is to maximise the number of customers. That means making things look easy, not difficult.

This is, of course, consistent with the industry’s own principle of being positive. However, being positive should not mean being unrealistic.

Despite the typically positive title of Hill’s book, one has to do more than just sit and think nice, positive thoughts to become rich. One must act on those thoughts.

Peale, Smiles, and Hill were all positive thinkers. They also all led amazingly active and varied lives. One would not have led to their success without the other.

In the second edition of his original Self-Help, Smiles added an extra word in a subtitle that better reflected his own experience.

That word was “Perseverance”.