What is attitude?
What is attitude? It is simply a point of view, a perspective on life that directs your inner energy toward outer manifestation and results. The attitude acts like a gyroscope that sets the direction of your energy flow. Specifically, your attitude is your tendency to move toward one thing of all things, in one direction to the exclusion of all other possible directions. Set your course and predict where you will be soon in your life.
As children, whenever it snowed, my friends and I would play the game, “Who can walk the straightest line?” We would set a short course from a starting point to a destination on the other side of the yard. Most of my friends would do their respective walks looking at their feet and measuring the straightness of their path by looking back at the steps they had just taken. When they finally reached the end, their journey could be measured by anything but a straight line. There were small, sometimes serious deviations along the way.
I learned early on that to walk the straightest line, I would have to look where I wanted to go, not where I had been. As long as I kept my head up and my eyes looking toward the destination, I could easily and confidently move in the direction of my goal along the shortest (ie, straightest) route.
Attitudes are formed through experience. All experience occurs with accompanying emotions. Depending on the degree and scope (positive or negative) of those emotions will shape your subsequent attitude toward similar future experiences.
The first time I performed in public is a good example. It was for a talent show in college. I played banjo and blood on a couple songs. I almost didn’t make it to the platform because stage fright had gotten the better of me to the point where I could barely move. I was pretty nervous during my performance and after it was over I felt like I didn’t do quite right. However, to my surprise, I won the competition! I don’t remember the award I received, but I clearly remember how I felt. The feeling of elation and confidence that washed over me was reward enough. Since then, I have performed in public without stage fright because my attitude toward acting was positively shaped by the emotions I attended to from that experience.
Once attitudes are formed, they serve to direct your mental focus and physical movement to get you where you’re already going. Your thought process, like anything of a material nature, is set in motion by experience and emotion along a line of judgment that tends to continue along that line unless something alters its direction.
Try this experiment: Take a clean sheet of paper and gently rub a marble a few times along a straight line anywhere on the page. Place the marble at one end of this line. Tap it gently in the direction of the line and see what happens. That invisible, imperceptible line on the paper, formed by very little repetitive effort, becomes the path along which the marble moves. Direct the action of the marble and determine where it will go out of the many possible paths it could go.
Attitudes are habits of thought that shape your behavior and which, in turn, produce certain kinds of results in your life. We make our clothes with our thoughts and then those clothes make or unmake us. Another way of putting it is that attitudes are the vehicles that lead you along a path that you yourself created (through thought) to the destination toward which you are already headed. They create and sustain the life you experience on a daily basis.
Repetitive thought produces a trajectory that spans both the visible and the invisible universe. The attitude moves your mind in thought towards ideas and imaginations, hopes and dreams that move your body to make these invisible energies visible in your life. Although initially subsequent to the thought, the attitude is formed from the repetitive thought and seeks to manifest its secret existence. This is the reason why their attitudes cannot be disguised or hidden for long. They understand your “second face” to the world, the face that cannot fail to finally reveal the truth about yourself.
change your attitudes
If you don’t like what is being revealed to the world regarding your inner being; if you are not satisfied with the truth about yourself; if you prefer to have different results in your life; If you don’t like where you are and where you are going, how can you change what gets you there: your attitudes?
There are seven ways:
1. Start by examining your current attitudes toward yourself and other people. This is not as difficult as it might seem at first glance. Just ask yourself, “What is destructive about the way I think about myself and others?” In other words, what is causing pain and distress; What is causing me to feel dissatisfied, or maybe even ashamed of my behavior and what I have in my life? If you spend a few minutes thinking honestly and thoughtfully about these issues, you will soon discover that the root of your dissatisfaction is a habit of thinking that is based on incomplete and/or inaccurate information. It will soon be revealed that the story you are telling yourself about yourself and others has been built on a partial basis of fact, many of the bricks and mortar that hold it all are missing, mere prejudice and opinion disguised as facts.
When you discover the “facts of your attitudes,” you will also discover what is good and useful in those attitudes. Keep what works to get what you want in life and get rid of what doesn’t. Make a list, a simple “T” chart, with what works on the left and what doesn’t on the right. Then set goals to increase the size of the list on the left while reducing the size of the right.
2. Listen to what you tell yourself about others. Listen to what they say about you. Your thoughts are made up of the language you use to tell the story about your truth to yourself and to others. That same language is used in the stories they tell about what they experience as the truth about you. What you hear when you really listen will provide additional facts to incorporate into your new and improved truth about yourself story.
3. Your way of thinking determines your paths towards life. James Allen wisely wrote,
“The thought in the mind has made us.
What we are by thought was forged and built.
If a man’s mind has bad thoughts, pain comes upon him as the wheel follows the ox. If one endures with purity of thought, joy follows him like his own shadow, sure.”
“As you think, you travel; just as you love, you attract.
You are today where your thoughts have taken you.
You will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.
You cannot escape the results of your thoughts.
But you can endure and learn; you can accept and rejoice.
Because you will realize the vision of your heart, whether it is low or beautiful.
You will fall, stay or rise with your thoughts.
Value your vision, your ideal.
Because you will become as small as your controlling desire or as big as your dominant aspiration.”
Read that last award again. This is where attitudes are born. If you give in to your uncontrolled desires of the moment, the results that occur will not be rewarding in the long run. In fact, very often they will be the source of regret and sadness for wasted time and misdirected energy that can gradually dissipate one’s life. Regret is an attitude that shapes the expectation of a future experience. You end up feeling insignificant, irrelevant, insufficient, and inadequate for the life you lead.
On the other hand, if you give free rein to your dominant aspirations and pursue your dreams, your attitude is one of hope and joy that can withstand all kinds of difficulties, disappointments, and setbacks. You feel like you can do anything because you have the focused energy to do what you know you need to do to live the truth about yourself. Anticipation and positive expectation are attitudes that shape the type of experiences you will have in the future.
4. To change your attitude you need to change not only your thinking habits but also your giving habits. Give more than you are giving right now. Give to more people than you are giving right now. Not just money, but also your time, your talents, your advice, your hopes and dreams. Share your story with more people. Share more of your story with people. Give them more of your energy, not just more of your knowledge. Give them more than they expect or feel they deserve. Make them better receivers by becoming better givers. Offer them a valuable interaction that goes beyond the ordinary experience. Leave them with a better self-image and greater hope for their future.
5. When you are criticized, admonished or reprimanded, do not get defensive, simply seeking to keep the mental self-portrait that you think is well painted. Be open to the many colors and colors that others have in their life palettes that could help complete and beautify the image you have of yourself. You can help them see their own need for “beautification” by allowing them to help you become the vibrant and colorful person you were created to be. Opening up with the expectation of learning something new and different about yourself is an attitude that leads to becoming a bigger, better, “newer” human being.
6. Don’t try to be perfect! An attitude of perfection makes imperfection reign supreme. Seek excellence and improvement rather than a static position in your life that you define as “perfect.” Life is always changing and so should your attitude about what makes life worth living!
7. There are people and processes that influence your life and attitudes. Those who have contributed positively to your life have also helped shape your attitudes about what it is possible to achieve and have in life. You need to increase positive influences and influencers by attracting more of those people into your life. Ask them who their positive influencers are and ask them to introduce them to you.
Just as there are positive influencers, there are positive processes, such as effective time management and energy flow in your life, that serve as the foundation for attitude. If you feel that you are not in control of your time and that your energy is wasted or misdirected, your attitude toward your future will be bleak. Seek to acquire and refine processes and systems that make your life easier and more efficient. When you gain control over your life through positive processes and systems, your attitude will be one of confidence and “assertive anticipation” for a brighter future.
