Life is a positive art

At any stage of life we can have ideas that are so clear and strong that they define us completely. We project our future with it. Insofar as these are positive life ideas, I include them under a term I call visionary power. Visionary power is the key concept in the practice of Visionary People Mentoring.

Visionary power is about imagining our present and future so clearly that we can successfully connect our life goals to them. This clear representation is also the result of the strength we draw from processing our past. In other words, visionary power can draw a line between past, present and future.

What do we learn from this definition? That it is a vision, that it is related to success and how we view our life goals. But what exactly is it?

I admit that the concept of visionary power is not easy to explain. This is because, as far as I know, it is not described in literature. Therefore, if we want to give this concept a scientific basis, it is best to define it inductively, that is, on the basis of observed facts and circumstances and with the help of other concepts that can approximately clarify it.

Visionary power can also be understood multidisciplinary. Such as through art philosophy (with art in the broad sense of expressing creative imagination), through anthropology (What does visionary power say about humanism?), through psychology (the experience of happiness, for example), in addition to other scientific disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, such as organizational sciences and all disciplines related to the behavioral sciences.

Let me try to give visionary power a face. I do this from an aspect that I find important within visionary power: positive thinking and action.

As for myself about this positivism: visionary power is a positive art of living that has taught me a lot on my path. Because living is a positive art. This is no different for my life. I mean: if we really LIVE and don't let happiness get lost in a dead end street. To explain how I came to this insight from an early age, I like to look at my childhood. During those years I laid the foundation for the positive thinking and actions that I have started to apply in my life.

“If we want to give a scientific basis to the concept of visionary power, we can best define it inductively, that is, on the basis of observed facts and circumstances and with the help of other concepts that can approximately define it.”

HAPPY PEOPLE

As a child I dreamed of becoming an inventor. But I soon noticed that I was not technical enough, rather philosophical. Ultimately, I became a dreamer who wanted to see the good in everything and everyone. I had not thought about becoming an 'inventor of good people', because in my eyes everyone already had it within them, as a powerful instrument that makes our coexistence harmonious.

The world was beautiful. Or rather: no matter what happened, the world had to and would become more and more beautiful.

The reality is of course different. So it was shocking to learn that my parents' and my grandparents' generation had experienced the shock of a world war. The stories about the war opened my eyes.

I discovered myself as a benefactor and to this day I still am. I always said that I have a special optimism. But life is a bumpy road. I sometimes dare to say that I am not always sure that all is well with the world.

Yet I continue to believe in people. Because everything that we experience positively among ourselves certainly comes from ourselves. Of course, the wonder of nature helps us with this. Staring at the evening sun together on the beach is positive for most people.

As a dreamer of people, a do-gooder, it became my way to be an inventor. But it soon didn't stop at dreams. At school I successfully followed a literary direction. So I discovered the power of words, of ideas, and started devouring books. During one of my book tours I discovered a bestseller that has stuck with me. It was the inspiring work of Norman Vincent Peale: 'The Power of Positive Thinking'.

I immediately fell in love with the idea of positive thinking. It was something powerful, as Peale indicates in the title. Peale's book is actually as much about power as it is about positive thinking. I counted it once: the word power appears 346 times in the book, five of which are in the title of a chapter.

In his later book, “The Power of Your Hidden Energy,” Peale explains this power as our plus factor, or the inexhaustible source of energy within us. We need to tap into that source of energy if we want to be happy and successful. It is a power within us that we can activate, says Peale. So this should be a confidential power for each of us.

Peale’s plus factor reminds me of the concept of visionary power that I use myself. That’s why I decide for myself: if we want to make ourselves and the world more beautiful, let's turn power into something positive. There are so many types of power, but for Peale it is a quality that makes people happy. For the author, happiness and positive thinking go hand in hand. These are aspects that I like to include under the concept of visionary power.

Peale wrote and spoke quite a bit in his life. Quotes from him can easily be found on the Internet. Of these I prefer to remember the most universally applicable. Like these two: “Change your thoughts and you will change your world.” “Confront your obstacles and do something about them. You'll find they don't have half the power you think they have.”

Positive thinking is not an automatic feeling. It requires you to call upon the power you have within yourself to change things for the better. This is visionary power. Confront your obstacles with your brightest ideas. It will make a world of difference for you.

THE ART OF LIVING AS A SCIENCE

Norman Vincent Peale was a motivational speaker and writer. He was a preacher and, apart from a university degree, which allowed him to do journalistic work for a year, he had no education other than theological training. Should we be surprised, then, that Peale chose ‘The Power of Faith’ as the title of the original manuscript of his best-selling book?

Was Peale too religious for the general public? Not in his time. He developed his career as a preacher in the 1920s/30s, a time when faith, sin and morality were still deeply rooted in society. But Peale did not want to confine his faith within the confines of the religious public. Very early on he wrote books with which he also wanted to reach non-believers. They eventually became bestsellers. To give you an idea: when he died in 1993 at the age of 95, the sales count of the almost fifty books he published stood at 74 million. By then, 20 million copies of his 'The Power of Positive Thinking' alone had been sold. This sales success had made Peale rich and powerful friends at the highest levels of politics and business.

But Peale also received a lot of criticism. As if he claimed not to be involved in politics, yet publicly supported the conservative candidates of the Republican Party.

It was also not appreciated by the medical world that he hired a psychiatrist to open a clinic in the basement of his church for people with psychological problems. Peale opened that practice long before the publication of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking.’ It was the time of the great economic crisis in the US that made many people depressed and even commit suicide. Peale had good intentions, but his idea of combining religion with psychiatry was met with resistance from medical professionals.

By the time Peale published ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ in 1952, he had already written a few books. Except for a few, they were not bestsellers. But the themes were similar and would remain so for all of the successful preacher's publications. Peale wanted to see people become happy with this positive thinking. This idea became a mentorship that has touched millions of people. To give an idea, in the 1980s, management guru Ken Blanchard looked to Peale as his mentor and together they developed a program to promote ethics in business. This theme was not unfamiliar to Peale, who obtained his PhD in social ethics before completing his master’s degree.

Peale was a go-getter who successfully pursued what he wanted throughout his career. However, the great success followed the publication of ‘The power of positive thinking’. Is it because the post-World War II world needed a positive story that Peale's book resonated with the general public? However, the first publisher to whom Peale presented the manuscript was not at all happy with it. He discouraged Peale and said it wouldn't sell for anything if he published it. Peale therefore put his manuscript aside.

Until his wife found it, read it and sent it to a publisher. She saw a lot in the manuscript and advised her husband to try the second publisher. This is what Peale ultimately did, to which he responded positively. The publisher asked to adapt the book to a new title: the power of positive thinking.

Peale accepted the challenge and completed the version of his book, which eventually became the bestseller and soon captivated millions of people. But he did write that he had actually never heard of positive thinking when the publisher mentioned it. After research, he came to the conclusion that the concept could not be found in literature either.

For himself, Peale admitted that he himself did not always have the confidence necessary to think positively. Is it any wonder that his wife took on the role of mentor to him (even as she remained in the shadow of her successful husband)? Without her, would we ever have gotten a copy of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’? It was also her idea to involve a psychiatrist in the guidance of people with psychological problems.

We can therefore conclude that positive thinking and acting is not the automatic starting point for many. Many of us could use some mentorship here and learn that passing on trust to each other and inspiring people to self-confidence is an important part of achieving collective entrepreneurship. It is a fundamental theme. I have already discussed it in my blog ‘Trust in visionary power’.

Because positive thinking was a new concept in 1952, Peale had to rely on his own sense of it, his experiences, and his exchange of thoughts about it with others. He managed to describe a fascinating vision of the concept. Promoting and further developing this concept became his life's work. This work became so brilliant to the general public and so unprecedented that we must conclude that it was carried by Peale's own visionary power. The match was so obvious that we even have to conclude that there is a connection between positive thinking, life story and visionary power.

Does this last hypothesis bring us closer to our search for a scientific basis for the concept of visionary power? I think so. That is to say: it gives us the tip for a methodology. I think this can be found if we realize that life stories and the art of living can be approached scientifically. Personally, I like to let the art world have its say here insofar as it is a ‘reader’ of the positive life, of that powerful source of ideas and life stimuli that we have within us and that I call visionary power.

I'm not just thinking about the world of arts. There is a relatively young scientific discipline that has also understood this: so-called positive psychology.

Positive psychology studies what makes people happy. It differs from most disciplines in psychology that focus on what makes people unhappy, based on the need to heal people with mental illness. Positive psychology, on the other hand, mainly looks at happy people, at what makes them grow in happiness.

HAPPY PEOPLE WANT TO GROW

I would like to conclude that positive psychology as a scientific discipline is too young to have sufficient research results to establish its position as a method. This makes the discipline vulnerable to criticism, especially from the perspectives of clinical psychology and humanistic psychology with which it comes into conflict. But positive psychology can be useful for the study of visionary power.

From my practice at Visionary People Mentoring I will certainly follow the evolution of the field. I believe that interdisciplinary collaboration can give the concept of visionary power a scientific basis. I look forward to studies that can help understand the concept of visionary power. I’ll have to get back to it. Because it is as the protagonists of positive psychology say: their research results can be useful for mentors and coaches, because they are the facilitators par excellence of the ‘happy person’ who wants to grow in well-being. Or as I say: who wants to grow in visionary power.

by Thierry Limpens

Update 1-10-2023

Some of Norman Vincent Peale's books:

Norman Vincent Peale (2002): The power of positive thinking. An inspiring guide to overcoming everyday problems. Diemen: Omega.

Norman Vincent Peale (1991): The power of creative thinking. Diemen: Omega.

Norman Vincent Peale (1989): The Power of Your Hidden Energy. Discover the great possibilities of your Plusfactor. Diemen: Omega.