Enthusiasm Will Improve Your Personality

The Positive Thinking author and minister, Norman Vincent Peale, believed that enthusiasm could change people’s lives. In this excerpt from his book,Enthusiasm Makes the Difference, Peale explains how enthusiasm will improve your personality:

There is an important form of change, one perhaps more complicated, related as it is to complex moods, to the cyclic rise and fall of emotional reaction. It is the change from apathy to enthusiasm, from indifference to exciting participation; it is an astonishing personality change which sensitizes the spirit, erases dullness and infuses the individual with a powerful motivation that activates enthusiasm and never allows it to run down.

Most people acknowledge the possibility of personality change in connection with hate, fear and other common forms of conflict, but seem to doubt that they can be made over into enthusiastic persons. They argue, “Sure I would like to have enthusiasm, but what if you just haven’t got it? You cannot make yourself enthusiastic can you?” This is always said in anticipation of an of-course-you-can’t agreement. But I do not agree at all. For you can make yourself an optimist. You can develop enthusiasm, and of a type that is continuous and joyous in nature.

The important fact is that you can deliberately make yourself enthusiastic. Actually you can go further and develop a quality of enthusiasm so meaningful and in such depth that it will not decline or run dry no matter what strain it is put to. It has been established by repeated demonstration that a person can make of himself just about what he wants to, provided he wants to badly enough and correctly goes about doing it. A method for deliberately transforming your self into whatever type of person you wish to be is first to decide specifically what particular characteristic you desire to possess and then to hold that image firmly in your consciousness. Second, proceed to develop it by acting as if you actually possessed the desired characteristic. And third, believe and repeatedly affirm that you are in the process of self-creating the quality you have undertaken to develop.