The battle over one’s attitude can feel like a never-ending fight…
I need to stop letting little things bother me. I need to not let that customer’s anger infect my mindset. Just because my co-worker isn’t doing what they said they’d do shouldn’t mean that I should have an attitude of indifference toward promises I made to others. Sure, I’m having a good day, but that negative political link on the internet sure looks interesting. I really enjoy my customers, but all I can think about is this frustrating computer system that I have to deal with every day.
We may want to be optimistic or have a great attitude, but there are challenges and obstacles and negativity around us. Our attitude is a decision we make, and it is reflected in how we go through the day, how we respond and react to others, in what we do and what we decide not to do.
So, if Attitude is Everything, how do you maintain the best attitude possible?
What we’re talking about here is how we’re wired, our mindset. The attitude we employ is based on who we are, how we talk to ourselves, and what we view as our purpose. Granted, it has many obstacles. It is a sum total of every day we’ve lived, it is affected by the challenges we face during the day, and it has the worries that we think about what could happen tomorrow.
While I don’t have that silver bullet answer that will help you win the battle over your attitude every day – trying to make it positive/optimistic – here are 6 actions that I take to get my mind right:
- I read something positive when I wake up in the morning, and I read something positive when I go to bed at night.
- I avoid information sources or articles that have no bearing on my work or my life, but which have an obvious negative tone or slant.
- I tend to gravitate toward people who seem more positive and who seem to share my values, and I try to reduce the amount of time I have to engage with those who are perennially negative.
- I try to empathize and understand others who may be different or negative or complaining, because in that understanding my negativity toward their attitude tends to go away.
- Many times throughout the day, I give thanks or celebrate small successes, even if it’s a success only I experience.
- And as I’ve mentioned a couple times in these tips over the years, at the end of a work day, I total up a list that I create through the day of successes, and I just read it back to myself. It is too easy to forget all the successes when you’re in the midst of just trying to get 100 things done during the course of a day.
So much of how our lives turn out is based on the attitude we bring in. It’s easier for some than others to have that kind of attitude that will help us to live out our purpose and to engage others positively.
But whether it is easy or hard for you, be intentional about filling yourself up with the kind of things that bring out the attitude in yourself that you’d love to see in others.
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After going to the same barber for more than a decade, I decided to leave. The customer experience went down, and the price went up. For my last several visits, I was the one who was driving the conversations – when I could get a word in edgewise between my barber’s preferred banter with his co-workers. The cuts were becoming less consistent, and his price kept inching up; the last price increase was just for his customers – they weren’t changing the posted pricing or the pricing of the other hair stylists, so that was equally confusing and troubling.
There’s nothing like the feeling of comfort I get from a warm greeting at a business establishment. A feeling of “you are my most important customer” and “I cannot wait to serve you” brings a tear to the eye of a customer service consultant. But that’s not the only thing that can bring a tear to my eye.
