I’ve been thinking a lot about attitude and how it affects our ability to achieve our goals and realize our dreams. In fact, mindset affects just about everything–including how your day turn out. Your attitude can determine each and every moment of your life in a multitude of ways.
Think about the saying, “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” It means you woke up in a bad mood, which is basically a bad attitude. And that attitude can affected the whole day and the results or the experiences you have during that 24-hour period.
I’ve known this concept for a long time and apply it in sessions with my clients. I’m a very positive person who always believes “there is a way” or that challenges can be turned into opportunities. However, I had a “lapse” and allowed my attitude to become negative briefly last week. While working on my current book project I got frustrated and lost confidence. I felt depressed and unsure, and I found myself struggling for two days to revise one chapter. Interestingly, that chapter—the first one— included all the main concepts in the book and was actually missing one key concept: attitude! Once I figured that out, the pieces of the chapter feel into place, and my attitude changed. Then work started flowing more smoothly. And I got it! It took realizing I needed to include the importance of a positive attitude for achieving positive results in my book to remind me I needed to do the same in my life.
Attitude is a choice. According to Dr. Alan Zimmerman, author of Pivot, only 85 percent of the U.S. population chooses to have a positive attitude—but it can make the difference between success and failure. To a huge degree, your attitude is based upon your beliefs. Beliefs affect your decisions. Decisions then affect your actions, which affect your results.
In a report published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Michael F. Scheier, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wrote that optimists tend to respond to disappointments, such as being rejected by a literary agent or losing a job, by formulating a plan of action and asking other people for help and advice. On the other hand, pessimists more often react to the same event by trying to ignoring it or assuming they can do nothing to change their results. In a similar study, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, found that pessimists tend to construe bad events, such as a failed marriage or not getting a raise, as the result of personal deficits that will plague them forever in every aspect of their personal and professional lives. Optimists see the same events as due to mistakes remedied by discovering and making the necessary changes.
If you look at these studies and the responses described you will see that optimists believe events, situations or personal faults or deficiencies can be changed; they make decisions, take actions and get results. Pessimists believe events, situations or personal faults or deficiencies can’t be changed, so they make no decisions, take no action and get no results.
Let’s take a look at what happened to me as I revised my chapter. Initially, I got more and more frustrated and dejected when I couldn’t get it to read the way I wanted. Not only that, when someone sent me a negative critique of the draft chapter, I began to believe the whole manuscript was a mess. I started to feel more and more stressed and worried. I started to believe maybe I could not write a good book. This made it harder for me to edit the chapter and I struggled for another day, procrastinating and not doing much when I did work on the chapter.
However, at my core I am an optimist. I was determined to get it right. Despite my negative emotions, when I sat down to edit that chapter the next time I did not say to myself, “I can’t do this.” I said, “I know I can do this.” That belief kept me editing–kept me making decisions, taking action, and getting results.When I managed to find the one missing piece in the chapter—attitude—everything fell together, and my attitude become more optimistic as well.
At that point, my results changed. I finished the chapter in a few hours, even though it had taken me several days to get to that point. And I edited the next chapter in only a day. Plus, I began feeling better about the whole manuscript; I once again began believing in my ability to complete the book project and in the strength and value of the draft manuscript–all because my attitude changed.
You can choose to change your attitude at any time. You can do so when you wake up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night or any time in between.
Have you ever changed your attitude and then achieved different results? Tell me about it by leaving a comment.
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