TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR ATTITUDE

Your Attitude is your Altitude

Haven’t you heard people say “Your attitude is your altitude”? How true is the saying! The heights you reach in your lives are determined by attitudes of Positivity, Inclusiveness, and Compassion. Positivity is contagious for it has its impact on you as well as on others around you.

First, what is meant by ‘attitude’? It is a predisposition of your heart shaped by your prejudices, opinions, and judgments which basically spring from your worldview. To explain it further, You have a specific understanding of yourself, others, and life at large, even the present and future of your life, or life now and life after. All your perceptions and beliefs knead your heart, tuning it to a specific wavelength, expecting certain events, and anticipating certain outcomes. So Attitude is both a mindset and a heartbeat! Actually, Attitude can only be one of two ways: Positive or Negative. You may anticipate the outcomes to be positive or negative, helpful or unhelpful, friendly or inimical, peaceful or conflicting, resulting in serenity or anxiety. There is no mid-way or being neutral. Perhaps at times, both can be in a mix, constantly interchanging, say, someone becomes unpredictable, confused and constantly changing from one disposition to another.

What is the significance of an Attitude? It is your attitude that helps you to decode your experiences, and determine your response to people, situations, and events. For instance, when you have a positive attitude to rain, you see how beautiful and refreshing it is to watch it rain or even get drenched in rain! But if you have a negative attitude, you become irritable and gloomy even at seeing dark clouds. Based on your attitude, you interpret situations and respond differently, sometimes even contradictorily! For instance, when you travel in public transport during a peak hour, and when you see people jostling to get into the bus pushing one another, you say “what a stupid crowd, why can’t they wait and board another bus”? Imagine another situation where you are waiting to board the bus, and you see the people standing inside not making room for people to get in, you say “ what kind of insensitive people, are they blind, cant they see the crowd entering and move to make space for others to get in?” Thus attitude brings either cheers or tears into our life. With a negative attitude, Coping with life becomes a challenge!

Can we change our attitude? Or at least can we hide it? People with negative attitude do rarely see, much less accept they have a negative attitude! Sometimes one may even try to hide it or camouflage it by faking a positive attitude. Unfortunately, the pretention will not stand too long but will betray itself. It is also interesting to note that it is not possible to keep constantly changing one’s attitude depending on people or situations one faces! If you have basically a negative attitude to yourself, your attitude to others too will be negative. You will be quick to blame the situation and hurry to throw the blame on the other. You will be unashamedly guilty of projections and transfers of your negative feelings. You may become restless and feel guilty when you face positive people, and even feel embarrassed at positive words or responses! For instance, if I basically do not trust myself as capable of doing something, when I give instructions to others to do something, I will certainly blurt out “It will be difficult, you know” or “Be careful”. Words like “Don’t and Can’t” will be the jargon frequently appearing in their conversation! Someone may seemingly sound positive by saying, “Hey You can do it‘, but, most likely will add “Don’t disappoint me, ok?” Believe me, Positivity shows itself and Negativity will betray itself!

Can we control our attitude? So what do we do? Can we change our negative attitudes into positive ones? Yes, of course, but it takes a lot of time, and persistence and needs support. But immediately we can resolve to control our negative attitude! By our will, we can avert the negative harmful impacts of our mindset. This is the minimum that we can do and we should. For this we must first all become aware of our negative strands of thinking and feeling; we must acknowledge our colored prejudices, premeditated opinions, and preconceived ideas. We must own them without negating them or throwing the blame on others. It is not necessary that we should go to the roots of these thoughts, but we should for a minute evaluate the consequences and the farfetched impacts they might make in the lives of others. We must see what they are doing to us, making ourselves unapproachable, unlovable, and unpredictable. We may be distanced from friends or dreaded by neighbors. We keep people away and make them pretend to be what they are not, say what they don’t mean, and do what they don’t like in our presence. Hence we must take stock of our attitude and take it into our control!

I am glad to share here, a Presentation of Jim Rohn who has many beautiful things to say. By repeatedly reflecting on them and applying them to our life, we may benefit a lot. I have learned to grow and used the same to help others also find their growth! Why not You??

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