While Neville is the kind of figure that serious people immediately want to dismiss or argue with, the West Indies-born author wrote with remarkable vigor and persuasiveness. Our mental and emotive images, Neville maintained, literally create the surrounding world we experience. The Power of Awareness by Neville (1952) - Neville Goddard (who used only his first name) was an extraordinarily original metaphysical thinker who, from the late 1930s until his death in 1972, argued elegantly for one radical concept: the human mind is God. Jarrett produced just one additional book, The Meaning of the Mark (1931), which extrapolates on the methods and ideas behind his shorter pamphlet.ĥ. If approached with maturity, Jarrett’s exercise amounts to a personal inventory-taking and a meaningful assessment of one’s true aims. (1926) - In twenty-eight gloriously succinct pages, the author - whose initials stood for Roy Herbert Jarrett, a Chicago salesman and ad man - distills the positive-thinking enterprise into a (deceptively) simple exercise of itemizing your desires in a list. Coué’s work ran deeper than is commonly understood and warrants rediscovery.Ĥ. Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion by Emile Coué (1922) - A French hypnotherapist, Coué was the target of endless mockery for prescribing anxious modern people with a simple daily affirmation: “Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” What critics missed, and what is on display in this finely reasoned and sprightly book, is that the self-taught healer and therapist possessed a keen understanding of the subconscious mind and the mechanisms by which his seemingly simplistic mantra (and other affirmations) could be used to bypass our self-limiting personal conceptions. Howard was one of the most compelling and unclassifiable voices to emerge from the American metaphysical scene.ģ. The practical philosopher called for eschewing worldly ambition in favor of living by an inner knowing available to all people. The Power of Your Super Mind by Vernon Howard (1967) - While not a positive-thinking book in any strict sense, Howard saw the aware mind as providing a channel for awakening men and women to a higher power and purpose. The Strangest Secret became the first spoken-word record to go gold, and helped launch the fields of business motivation and audio publishing.Ģ. He emphasized nonconformity and self-education. The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale (1956) - The radio presenter and entrepreneur Nightingale possessed an unfailingly dignified and measured manner, which he used in this recorded lecture to distill the positive-thinking philosophy into a neat 30-minute capsule. ( MORE: Hopefulness Is Better Than Happiness for Diet Success)ġ. While many of these books proved too esoteric in tone to attain the mass appeal of Dale Carnegie and Joel Osteen, they are a treasure of serviceable ideas and are all still available today. This list considers the most compelling and overlooked expressions of this practical philosophy. You probably believe some of them already. But the philosophy has produced ideas that are deeply useful, even profound. This message grew out of mental-healing and Transcendentalist tracts of the mid-nineteenth century, and attained mass appeal in works such as Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of the Positive Thinking.Ĭritics generally view positive thinking as namby-pamby nonsense. Most self-help programs are based in “positive thinking” – the principle that your thoughts shape your destiny.
Follow self-help industry today generates literally thousands of books, seminars, and audio programs, on which Americans spend more than $11 billion yearly.
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