Think-Talk

Attitude. Attitude. Attitude. We’ve all heard the saying that attitude is everything. It is your attitude that will determine your altitude. Attitude is the equalizer; it’s what makes one or breaks one.

“The greatest discovery of any generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.”

William James, Harvard University

What is Attitude?

The best definition of Attitude that I found is from Myers’ Social Psychology where Attitude is defined as “a favorable or unfavorable evaluative reaction toward something or someone, exhibited in ones beliefs, feelings, or intended behavior. It is a social orientation – an underlying inclination to respond to something either favorably or unfavorably.”

Attitude towards Yourself

Attitude towards others is one thing, but I believe that our attitude towards ourselves are more important than those towards others. I also believe that there is a direct correlation in one’s attitude towards others and self. If you treat yourself better, you will undoubtedly treat others like you do yourself.

Attitude towards yourself:

1. can be positive, negative, and/or neutral towards an “attitude object” (a person, behaviour or event).”
2. is intangible, but the effects are tangible.
3. is directly inferred and observable. So is the effects of attitude be it positive, negative, or neutral.
4. is both implicit and explicit.

Attitude towards ourselves determine our attitude toward the world. If you believe that you can, guess what, you will. On the contrary, if you believe that you can’t, guess what, you will not. We shape our own lives and the shapes of them will be determined by our attitudes. For example, a person with a poor attitude towards learning, isn’t going to learn much until he or she changes his or her attitude.

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We’re so familiar with ourselves we tend to take ourselves for granted and we tend to minimize the things we can accomplish, or the goals we can reach, and for some equally strange reason believe that others can accomplish things in our field which we cannot. There are literally millions of human beings living narrow, darkened, frustrated, and defensive lives simply because they take offensive and doubtful attitude towards themselves and as a result towards life in general.

Attitude is a reflection; a result of a person’s will. It is incalculably powerful. It can bring about marvelous results for us but we need to train it patiently day-by-day.

Let’s talk about the attitudes of successful people. The top 5% of people go sailing through life from one success to another and, even when they fail at something, shrug it off and head right out again. No matter who the person is or what he/she does, wherever you find a person doing an outstanding job and getting outstanding results, you will find a person with the right kind of attitude. These people take the attitude towards themselves that they can accomplish what they set out to accomplish. There’s no good reason on earth why they can’t be competent or successful. They have a healthy attitude towards themselves and, as a result, towards life and the things they want to accomplish. And because of this they achieve some remarkable things and they come to be successful, outstanding, brilliant, lucky, and a lot of other things. They’re quite frequently no more brilliant or outstanding than the majority of the people by whom they are surrounded but they did develop the right attitude and they found their accomplishments not too difficult and, many times, surprisingly easy simply because it seems that so few are really trying and really believing in themselves.

Successful people come in all shapes and sizes and in widely varying degrees of intelligence background and so on. But they all have one thing in common:

1. they expect more good out of life than bad;
2. they expect to succeed more than they fail;
3. they radiate confidence assurance;
4. they have about them the attitude of success in their walk, talk, and even dressing.

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If you think you have a bad or negative attitude, you’re probably right. But choose to change it today. The distance between the negative attitude and positive is the amount it took you to read this sentence. Your intentional decision to change. Start today. Start now so you can reap the benefits of the best positive attitude towards yourself tomorrow.