Why Do I Don't Believe In Defeat

The technique used by this man is based on the primary fact about an obstacle, which is—don’t be afraid of it. Practice believing that God is with you and

that in combination with Him, you have the power to handle it.

So the first thing to do about an obstacle is simply to stand up to it and not

complain about it or whine about it, but forthrightly attack it. Don’t go

crawling through life on your hands and knees, half-defeated. Stand up to your

obstacles and do something about them. You will find that they haven’t half

the strength you think they have.

A friend in England sent me a book by Winston Churchill entitled Maxims

and Reflections. In this book, Churchill tells of the British General Tudor, who

commanded a division of the British Fifth Army, which faced the great

German assault in March 1918. The odds were heavily against him, but

General Tudor knew how to meet an apparently immovable and undefeatable

obstacle. His method was simple. He merely stood and let the obstacle break

on him and he, in turn, broke the obstacle. Here is what Churchill said about General Tudor. This is a very great sentence and, it is filled with power: “The impression I had of Tudor was of an iron peg, hammered into the frozen ground, immovable.”

General Tudor knew how to stand up to an obstacle. Just stand up to it, that’s

all, and don’t give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it.

Something has to break, and it won’t be you, it will be the obstacle.

You can do this when you have faith, faith in God, and faith in yourself. Faith

is the chief quality you need. It is enough. In fact, it is more than enough.

Use that formula that the businessman suggested and, you will develop this

brand of powerful faith in God and in yourself. You will learn to know

yourself, your own ability, your power to do things. To the degree to which

your attitude shifts from negative to positive, the mastery touch will come to

you. Then, with assurance, you can say to yourself under any and all

circumstances and mean it, “I don’t believe in defeat.” Your subconscious, which always resents any change, may say to you, “You

don’t believe any such thing.” But remember that your subconscious mind in

a sense is one of the greatest liars in existence. It concurs and sends back to

you your own errors about your abilities. You have created a negative

attitude in your subconscious, and it gives this error back to you. So just turn

on your subconscious and say to it, “Now look here, I do believe that. I insist

upon believing it.” If you talk to your subconscious mind with that

positiveness, in due course it will be convinced. One reason is that you

are now feeding it positive thoughts. In other words, you are at last telling the

truth to your subconscious. After a while your subconscious mind will begin

to send back the truth to you, the truth being that with the help of Jesus Christ,

there isn’t any obstacle you cannot overcome.

An effective method for making your subconscious positive in character is to

eliminate certain expressions of thought and speech, which we may call the

“little negatives.” These so-called “little negatives” clutter up the average

person’s conversation, and while each one is seemingly unimportant in itself,

the total effect of these attitudes is to condition the mind negatively. When

this thought of “little negatives” first occurred to me, I began to analyze my

own conversational habits and was shocked by what I found. I discovered that

I was making such statements as, “I’m afraid I’ll be late,” “I wonder if I’ll

have a flat tire,” “I don’t think I can do that,” or “I’ll never get through this

job. There’s so much to do.” If something turned out badly, I might say, “Oh,

that’s just what I expected.” Or, again, I might observe a few clouds in the sky

and would gloomily state, “I knew it was going to rain.”