We all know the difference between a Good and a Bad Attitude, and will have likely experienced the extremes of both in our daily interactions with those around us. 

A bad or negative attitude can present in many ways, for example being hostile towards others, a lack of responsibility or having a pessimistic outlook. A good or positive attitude often results in friendliness, a ‘can do’ approach and believing the best about a person or situation.

In the words of Charles Swindoll, “The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of Attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failure, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.
We have a Choice everyday regarding the Attitude we will embrace for that day. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.
And so it is with you… We are in charge of our Attitudes!”

So, what is an attitude?

An attitude is an established way of thinking, behaving and feeling about something. It comprises the following inter-related attributes:

• Thinking – The thoughts and beliefs that we have / hold about a given situation
• Feeling – The emotions that we experience in relation to a particular situation
• Behaviour – Our physical response, including voluntary (and involuntary) action and speech.

Our behaviour is arguably the easiest attribute to observe and measure, for example, why did I say that? why did I use that tone of voice? why did I react like that?
Next our feelings – why do I feel this way about this situation or person?
And when we are looking to modify / improve our behaviour and feelings, it can help to understand that they are directly related to how we interpret a given situation, or rather what we think/believe about a given situation or person.

Often we don’t delve too deeply into our beliefs (what we choose to think and have accepted as true) and yet these often long standing perspectives have a profound effect on the way we live our lives. And the good news is we can change them!
In short, the way we view or think about something or someone influences the way we feel towards them and affects the way we behave.

This is most easily identified in children, who aren’t as adept at hiding their emotions, but the same principle is at work in adults. 

Here is an example from this last week:

Halfway through playing a game with my son, the scoreline was in my favour following a couple of mistakes that he’d made, and he was transformed from an excited child who couldn’t wait to play a game with his father, to a despondent kid, who couldn’t muster the effort to participate properly and whose voice changed into a whiney tone. 

There were a couple of direct consequences in his change of attitude; one, I was now no longer enjoying playing the game with him, and two, because he believed he was now going to lose, he was no longer trying as hard and was naturally making more mistakes and his competency decreased.

It was at this point that I reassured him as most parents would, that its not about winning it’s the taking part that counts (which went down like a lead balloon!), but also that the game wasn’t over yet, and I encouraged him to keep giving it his best as there was still a chance that he could reverse the scoreline. 

He started to listen, and within a couple of rounds, he was back even with me, and as a result, believing again that he could actually win, his enthusiasm and energy level improved and so did his competency. He went on to win the game, but the contrast in the  his behaviour through the game was profound. And the root cause was what he believed about the situation, which drove his feelings and his consequently the extremes in his behaviour.

Some attitude transforming questions: 

Are you aware of a current life situation that you have negative feelings about, or one that is causing you to speak / act in a negative way? 

How can you change how you think about this? What does it look like to have hope in this situation? What is one thing that you can be thankful about? What is one thing that you can do to help build hope in this situation?

In Summary:

• Our thoughts/beliefs about a situation or person can either impact our attitude for better or worse
• We can choose to think higher than our circumstances and ‘take control’ of our attitude by changing what we believe about a situation
  
• A negative attitude often alienates others and reduces our performance level
• A positive attitude draws other people to us and enhances our resourcefulness, performance and fulfilment