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attitude
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ATTITUDE IS THE DIFFERENCE MAKER

WHAT IS AN ATTITUDE?

  • An inward feeling expressed by outward behavior

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR ATTITUDE?

  • Personality – Who you are
  • Environment – What’s around you
  • The Expression of Others – What you feel
  • Self Image – How you see yourself. It’s hard to see anything in the world as positive if you see yourself as negative. If you don’t change your inward feelings about yourself, you will be unable to change your outward actions toward others.
  • Exposure to growth opportunities – What you’ve experienced. If you were rarely exposed to growth experiences or taken outside of your comfort zone, then you may have to work harder to cultivate a positive attitude toward positive personal growth
  • Association with peers – Who you are with
  • Beliefs – What you think
  • Choices – What you do

WHERE ATTITUDE CANNOT MAKE THE DIFFERENCE:

  • Your attitude cannot substitute for competence. Don’t confuse confidence, which is a function of attitude, with competence which is a function of ability. If you think you can do something, that’s confidence. If you can do it, that’s competence.
  • Your attitude cannot substitute for experience.
  • Your attitude cannot change the facts. If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude about it. Don’t complain.
  • Your attitude cannot substitute for personal growth. You need to feed your mind and soul to become the person you desire to be.
  • Your attitude will not stay good automatically. The hardest thing about having a good attitude is that it doesn’t stay that way on its own. Remain sensitive to your personal attitude indicators. When your attitude drops, remind yourself to have a good attitude. It’s called your reset button.

WHAT YOUR ATTITUDE CAN DO FOR YOU.

  • What usually separates the best from the rest?
  • What separates the gold medalist from the silver medalist in the Olympics?
  • What separates the successful entrepreneur from the one who doesn’t make it?

WAYS YOUR ATTITUDE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE:

  • Your attitude makes a difference in your approach to life. Life gives you whatever you expect from it. If you expect bad things, those are what you get. If you expect good things, you often receive them.
  • Your attitude makes a difference in your relationships with people. Who we are determines how we see others.
  • Our negative experiences and emotional baggage color our perception of others’ actions. Hurting people hurt people.
  • We can lift people up or take them down
  • Each person we meet has the potential to teach us something. * * If your track record of dealing with people isn’t as good as you like it to be, maybe you need to look at your attitude.
  • Your attitude makes a difference in how you face challenges. In life, obstacles, challenges, problems, and failures are inevitable. How are you going to handle them? Will you give up? Will you allow circumstances to make you miserable? Or are you going to try to make the best of things? Which path you choose depends on your attitude.

WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR ATTITUDE:

  • A person’s attitude is not set; it is a choice.
  • Take responsibility for your attitude. The first rule of winning is don’t beat yourself. If your attitude isn’t as good as it could be, and you fail to take personal responsibility for it, then you are beating yourself.
  • Evaluate your present attitude. To improve your attitude, you need to assess where you’re starting from.
  • Identify problem feelings about yourself.
  • Identify problem feelings related to others.
  • Identify problem thinking.
  • Develop the desire to change.
  • Change your attitude by changing your thoughts. You can control your thoughts, and because of that, you can control your attitude. We can control our thoughts. Our feelings come from our thoughts. We can control our feelings by changing the way we think. Your attitude is your emotional approach to life.“You are not what you think you are, but what you think. . . you are.”
  • Develop good habits. Much of what we do comes from habitual behaviors. If we desire different results out of life then we must change our habits as well as our attitude. If nothing changes. . . nothing changes.
  • Manage your attitude daily. You can make a decision to have a good attitude but if you don’t make plans to manage that decision every day, then you are likely to end up right back where you started.

FIVE ATTITUDE OBSTACLES

DISCOURAGEMENT

Why do people resist change?

  • Personal loss
  • Fear of unknown
  • Timing could be wrong
  • Feels awkward
  • Tradition

Prepare for change

  • Change will happen whether you like it or not
  • Without change, there can be no improvement
  • Make a commitment to pay the price for change
  • Change must happen within you before it can happen around you
  • Decide what you are not willing to change
  • Remember, It’s never too late to change

CHANGE

There are two kinds of people when it comes to dealing with discouragement: splatters and bouncers. When splatters hit rock bottom, they fall apart, and they stick to the bottom like glue. When bouncers hit bottom, they pull together and bounce back. The difference between the two is having the right attitude. If you believe in yourself, see discouragement as temporary, and handle it the right way, you can bounce back from nearly anything.

  • Get the right perspective – look at things from different points of view.
  • See the right people – find a person that motivates you and lifts you up.
  • Say the right words – speak about more positives than negatives.
  • Have the right expectations – don’t be so concerned to impress as a result you will get depressed, anxious, and obsessed with your flaws. Focus on what you can achieve, not what you can’t.
  • Make the right decisions – you increase discouragement when you have regret or have a guilty conscious. It’s not easy to apologize, admit your faults, forgive, subdue your temper, shoulder a deserved blame. Or start over. But making the decision to do these things when they are called for always pays off.

PROBLEMS

  • Problems are everywhere, and everybody has some
  • Your perspective makes a huge difference in how you approach your problems.
  • There is a difference then problem spotting and problem-solving – Do you point out all the problems or do solve the problems.
  • The size of the person is more important than the size of the problem – You can tell the caliber of a person by the amount of opposition it takes to discourage them. Legal immigrants in the U.S. are four times as likely to become millionaires as native-born Americans. Why? Because their obstacles they often face, such as language differences, culture shock, separation from family, and isolation.
  • Problems, responded to correctly, can actually advance us forward. Most successful people had huge obstacle to over come. The problems they faced—some physical, some emotional, and some financial—prompted them to achieve.

Principles for handling negatives

  • Define what a real problem is. A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem. It’s a predicament.
  • Anticipate problems
  • Face the problem
  • Evaluate the problem
  • Embrace each problem as a potential opportunity
  • Think of people who have bigger problems
  • List all the potential ways to solve the problem
  • Determine the best three ways to solve the problem

FEAR

Negative things fear can do in a person’s life:

  • Fear breeds more fear
  • Fear causes inaction
  • Fear weakens us
  • Fear wastes energy
  • Fear keeps us and others from reaching our potential

How to handle fear

  • Admit your fears
  • Discover the source of your fears
  • Realize how your fears can limit you
  • Accept normal fear as the price of progress
  • Convert fear into desire
  • Focus on things you can control
  • Give today your attention – not yesterday or tomorrow
  • Feed the right emotion and starve the wrong one

FAILURE

Three types of people: the “wills,” the “won’ts,” and the “can’ts.” The first type accomplishes everything. The second oppose everything. The third fail at everything.

Can’t

  • Expecting failure
  • Personalized Failure
  • Refusing to take a risk
  • Letting failure defeat them

Profit from failure:

  • Change your attitude
  • Change your vocabulary
  • Pay little attention to the odds
  • Let failure point you to success
  • Hold on to your sense of humor
  • Learn from your mistakes
  • Don’t lose your perspective
  • Don’t become too familiar with failure
  • Make failure a gauge for growth
  • Never give up