New Thought · 1866-1954
Your Forces and How to Use Them
Larson's comprehensive guide to unlocking and directing the inner forces - mental, emotional, and physical - that determine every outcome in life. One of his most practically structured works.
What Larson Got Right
Why Your Forces and How to Use Them still matters
Larson's 'building vs fighting' paradigm for habit change is one of the most psychologically sound ideas in the entire New Thought canon - and he articulated it decades before cognitive science confirmed it. His instruction to ignore undesired traits and focus entirely on constructing the positive alternative is a direct precursor to displacement psychology and what modern behaviour change science calls 'identity-based habit formation'. When the good develops, the bad disappears - not through suppression but through starvation of mental energy.
The Optimist Creed ('Promise Yourself') is a sophisticated cognitive-behavioural contract. Each of its twelve promises is not a passive wish but an active self-regulation commitment - treating peace of mind as a deliberate command, projecting constructive mental atmosphere through speech and bearing, replacing existential anxiety with a sense of cosmic partnership. It has been used in hospitals, locker rooms, and professional development for over a century because it works at the level of identity rather than behaviour.
Larson's model of the 'I Am' as the sovereign inner monarch anticipates what modern psychology calls the observing self - the meta-awareness that can witness inner states without being controlled by them. By anchoring identity in this inner sovereign rather than in circumstances, Larson gave his readers a cognitive anchor that remains stable under external pressure. This is the mechanism behind resilience.
His chapter on the building power of constructive speech predates by decades the research on linguistic framing, self-talk, and the relationship between verbal habit and subconscious expectation. His understanding that spoken words shape the personal atmosphere - not just internally but in the social environment around the speaker - is validated by modern research on how tone, word choice, and confidence signals alter how others respond to you.
Historical Context
How Your Forces and How to Use Them came to be written
Christian D. Larson was born in 1874 near Forest City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrant parents. His mother served as a weaver, midwife, and home nurse - a practical self-reliance that deeply shaped his later conviction that human beings contain their own resources for healing and growth.
He attended Iowa State College and then the Meadville Theological School (a Unitarian seminary) before abandoning orthodox ministry in favour of independent metaphysical research. In 1901, at twenty-seven, he founded the New Thought Temple in Cincinnati and launched Eternal Progress, a monthly periodical that eventually reached over 250,000 subscribers.
In 1908 Larson moved to Chicago and incorporated the Progress Company, a metaphysical publishing venture. He secured planning permits for a $150,000 five-storey headquarters building in the Ravenswood district of Chicago. The financial strain of construction proved fatal: in 1912 the Progress Company declared bankruptcy and was forced to sell the new building.
Undeterred, Larson relocated to Los Angeles - then establishing itself as the cultural and spiritual frontier of American metaphysics - and founded the New Literature Publishing Company. The 1912 revised edition of Your Forces and How to Use Them was his first major publication from that base, and it formally integrated the Optimist Creed (originally 'Promise Yourself') into the text.
The book was published into a Progressive Era defined by rapid urbanisation, industrial depersonalisation, and the beginning of the end for agrarian community support systems. Larson's democratic metaphysics - asserting that the ultimate locus of power resided not in external factories but within the human mind - offered a form of spiritual empowerment precisely calibrated to the anxieties of that moment.
Note: There is a separate work with the same title by Prentice Mulford, published in six volumes between 1886 and 1892. The two texts are completely different in scope, structure, and content. Larson's is a single-volume, tightly structured pedagogical text; Mulford's is a loose collection of essays on thought-substance and spiritualism.
Core Principles
The 6 core principles of Your Forces and How to Use Them
The Ruling Principle
The conscious 'I Am' is the sovereign inner monarch of the human system. Recognising and claiming this sovereignty is the first move in directed self-development.
Building vs Fighting
No effort should be made to destroy undesired habits or qualities. Whatever you think about intensely the subconscious takes up and develops further. Build the desired quality and the undesired one fades for lack of attention.
Subconscious Direction
The subconscious mind is the primary source of creative energy and personal capability. It executes on whatever patterns are consistently impressed upon it by conscious thought, emotion, and speech.
Constructive Speech
Spoken words carry active energy that shapes the personal atmosphere and subconscious patterns. What you say about yourself and your world is not description but instruction.
The Optimist Creed
The twelve promises of 'Promise Yourself' are a cognitive-behavioural contract - each promise is a self-regulation commitment treating mental states as disciplines to be practiced rather than conditions to be waited for.
Imagination as Blueprint
Imagination creates mental moulds that the subconscious works to physicalize. The quality of what you can vividly imagine places an upper limit on what the subconscious can build.
Quotes
Worth sharing
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“Promise Yourself: To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.”
“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.”
“No effort should be made to destroy those habits or qualities that we may not desire. When the good develops the bad disappears.”
Chapter by Chapter
What's inside Your Forces and How to Use Them
Legacy
The legacy of Your Forces and How to Use Them
In 1922, Optimist International officially adopted Larson's poem 'Promise Yourself' as 'The Optimist Creed', cementing his philosophy as the cornerstone of a global service organisation spanning thousands of clubs worldwide. The creed has since been used in hospitals to aid patient recovery, in locker rooms to motivate athletes, and by professionals seeking to maintain resilient, positive mindsets under pressure.
Larson's writings directly catalysed the development of Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes. Early in his career, Holmes was so deeply impressed by Larson's textbooks that he abandoned Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science framework in favour of Larson's applied metaphysics. Holmes and his brother Fenwicke took correspondence courses with Larson directly, and Holmes went on to rank Larson's works alongside Ralph Waldo Trine's classics as the most influential texts of the era.
In 1918 Larson joined the staff of Science of Mind Magazine as an associate editor and became a permanent faculty member of Holmes' Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles, cementing his role in shaping what became one of the most significant metaphysical movements of the 20th century.
Your Forces and How to Use Them laid conceptual groundwork for subsequent generations of success writers, directly influencing figures including Orison Swett Marden and Neville Goddard. Dover Publications and Penguin's Tarcher Success Classics series have kept the book continuously in print across more than a century.
What Was Missing
What Larson could not have known
Larson seriously overstates the absolute sovereignty of the mind over physical and biological laws. His implication that physical ageing, structural illness, and deep-seated organic conditions can be reversed through sheer metaphysical alignment encourages a dangerous form of medical neglect. The mind influences biology - it does not override it.
By placing the entire burden of success, health, and happiness on the individual's mental state, Larson's philosophy completely ignores structural inequalities, systemic poverty, institutionalised discrimination, and genetic limitations. His hyper-individualistic framework treats all external failure as a reflection of poor mental husbandry - which is both factually inaccurate and psychologically harmful for people facing genuine structural barriers.
The prose is famously repetitive. The same core insights regarding the subconscious mind are restated continuously across twenty chapters, with the brilliant ideas buried under dense, rambling exposition. Modern readers consistently report that the book would benefit from intensive editing - the ratio of insight to word count is low.
Who This Is For
Who gets the most from Your Forces and How to Use Them
- ✓You feel like you have untapped inner resources but have never had a clear framework for accessing and directing them
- ✓You want to understand how the 'I Am' concept works as a psychological anchor rather than a spiritual claim
- ✓You struggle with negative habits and have found willpower-based approaches exhausting and ineffective
- ✓You are drawn to the Optimist Creed and want the full philosophy behind those twelve promises
- ✓You want a structured, chapter-by-chapter system for building mental sovereignty rather than scattered inspirational advice
- ✓You recognise the cycle of discouragement feeding more discouragement and want a practical exit strategy
The DAR Response
We applied CBT, NLP & somatic work to Your Forces and How to Use Them
Your Forces and How to Use Them is a direct predecessor to the DAR Rewire phase. Larson's displacement principle - build the new pattern rather than fight the old one - is the foundational logic of the Notice-Decode-Challenge-Choose-Decide sequence. You do not argue with the old story; you build the new one consistently until the old one loses its neural grip. Larson understood this experientially a century before neuroscience confirmed that focused positive attention literally starves competing neural pathways of the repeated firing they need to maintain their strength.
The Optimist Creed maps onto the DAR identity work in the Dream phase. It is not a set of aspirations but a set of identity declarations - statements about who you are becoming that the subconscious begins to treat as self-concept. In DAR terms this is the future self becoming the present self: the Optimist Creed is a twelve-point future self script spoken as present reality.
The Tools
DAR workbooks & tools for Your Forces and How to Use Them
Larson's inner forces framework distilled into a clear practical reference guide.
90 days of structured habit tracking aligned with Larson's inner forces framework.
A full year of affirmations from Larson's Your Forces and How to Use Them.
Your Forces and How to Use Them - 30-Day Workbook
30 days of practice activating Larson's inner forces with positive psychology structure.
Your Forces and How to Use Them - Affirmation Card Deck
50 printable affirmation cards drawn from Your Forces and How to Use Them.
Questions Answered
Questions about Your Forces and How to Use Them
What does Larson mean by 'Scientific Thinking'?+
What is the Optimist Creed and why does it work?+
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