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“How
to Develop Self-Confidence
In Speech and Manner” eBook Online Version
The imagination, then, is a gallery in which we hang pictures, both of what we have done and what we intend to do. We may not always turn these pictures into realities at once, but they are there to interest and encourage us, and to come to our aid when needed. Upon one occasion Webster used, in one of his speeches, an illustration that he had carried in his imagination for fifteen years. Beecher, who was endowed with an unusually vivid imagination, placed this faculty first in importance in the making of a preacher.
He affirmed that a man with a trained imagination could not possibly wear out or become uninteresting to his congregation, and asked pertinently: "Did you ever hear anybody say that spring has been worn out? It has been coming for thousands of years, and it is just as sweet, just as welcome, and just as new, as if the birds sang for the first time; and so it will be for a thousand years to come.''
If it be important that a man have a clear and accurate image of what his material product is to be, how much more important is it that he have a picture of the character and life he is building. It has well been said that no man ever made his mark in the world who did not have a master passion for some one thing. When a boy is scribbling a picture on paper and in answer to your question tells you he doesn't know what it is going to be, you feel sure it will not amount to much. When you ask a youth what calling he intends to follow, and he replies that he has not yet made up his mind, you begin to fear for his success. But what will you say to a man who at thirty, forty, and even fifty, has not determined what his life's ambition is, to what ultimate goal he is working? May not the fact that less than five per cent of men succeed be attributed to this aimless, hit-or-miss way of living one's life?
In the imagination we find again much of the difference between the timid and self-confident man. One pictures defeat and failure, the other sees himself as successful and influential. One man thinks of all the ways in which he will fail, photographs them upon his mind, places them in the gallery of his imagination, there to haunt him day and night. The other man thinks of the one way in which he will succeed sketches himself as a strong, noble, courageous character, places the picture before his mind's eye, delights in it by day and dreams of it by night.
Fear is nowhere else more destructive than in the imagination. It is often a greater enemy than the thing feared. We have all heard of the soldier, a prisoner who was experimented upon many years ago, blindfolded and then told he was bleeding to death, while merely water was trickling from his arm. When subsequently examined he was found to be dead, although not the slightest injury had been done to his body. The fearthought had so completely possessed him that he believed he was actually bleeding to death. Fear sometimes rises from over-caution, but frequently is the result of selfishness. William James puts it in a strong, appealing way when he says: '' The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumpy mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? We ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance." Physicians tell us that nine-tenths of the ills of their patients are imaginary. In many instances a breads pill is all that is necessary to affect a complete cure.
We all know of persons who think themselves born under an unlucky star, or pursued by some unhappy fate. Their imagination is crowded with pictures of the direful things that will surely happen to them sooner or later. They reproach themselves for physical weakness, lack of memory, want of ambition, fear of failure, inability to attract friends, or other short comings. Instead of resolutely setting out to develop themselves, they exhaust their remaining powers in useless regrets. They are for all the world like the "limp" people described in an English magazine, utterly unable to initiate a single thing on their own behalf.
"A molluscous man," it says, "too suddenly ejected from his long-accustomed groove, where, like a toad embedded in the rock, he had made his niche exactly fitting to his own shape, presents a wretched picture of helplessness and unshiftiness. In vain his friends suggest this or that independent endeavor; he shakes his head, and says he can't—it won't do; what he wants is a place where he is not obliged to depend on himself, where he has to do a fixed amount of work for a fixed amount of salary, and where his fiberless plasticity may find a mold ready formed, into which it may run without the necessity of forging shapes for itself. Many a man of respectable intellectual powers has gone down to ruin, and died miserably, because of his limpness, which made it impossible for him to break new ground, or to work at anything whatsoever, with the stimulus of hope only. He must be bolstered up by certainty, supported by the walls of his groove, else he can do nothing; and if he can not get into his friendly groove, he lets himself drift into destruction. In no manner are limp people to be depended on, their very central quality being fluidity, which is a bad thing to rest on."
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