Developing A Winning Attitude
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Friday 27 April 2007 |
A positive mental attitude is an absolutely indispensable prerequisite for success. Your attitude determines how well you do and how far you go in life. Speaker and writer, Earl Nightingale called attitude “The Magic Word” and said it is the most important word in the English language.
Most people know that you need to have a positive mental attitude to achieve any measure of happiness and success, but what is it? A positive mental attitude is how you respond to adversity and difficulty. The only way you can tell what type of attitude you have is how you react when things go wrong.
Your attitude is determined by your expectations. If you expect things to go well you’ll generally have a positive mental attitude. If you believe that wonderful and positive things will happen to you during the day, you have a positive and optimistic attitude.
The Law of Cause and Effect is one of the most important of all the universal laws. This law says that for every effect in our lives, there is a specific cause. We have the ability to control the causes and change the effects to anything we want. Our thoughts are the primary causes of the conditions or effects in our lives, and if you want things to be different in the future you have to change your thinking in the present.
What makes this law so universal for every part of your life is that if there is an effect in your life such as ill health, poverty, problems in your relationships, that you don’t like, you can trace it back and find out the cause of the effect, and then by changing the cause you can remove the effect. Doing this will give you a different effect in the future.
Your mind is like a garden, whatever you plant, it will return back to you. If you plant negative thoughts and continuously feed and nourish those thoughts then that is what will grow in you life. On the other hand if you constantly think positive and optimistic thoughts, then your life will be positive and optimistic. You cannot plant one type of thought in you mind and expect a different result to grow.
The Law of Sowing and Reaping says that whatever you sow in life, you will reap. You have to put in before you can get out. You have to give before you can receive. You have to pay the price before you can enjoy the reward. The thoughts you sow in your mind today, you will reap in your experiences in the future. This is a very powerful law that you cannot escape. So, if you want to reap something different in the future you had better start sowing the seeds now.
One of the most important differences between successful people and unsuccessful people is the way they think. Successful people think and talk about the things they want. They talk about achieving their goals, good health, happiness, and prosperity, while unsuccessful people spend most of their time thinking and talking about the things that they don’t want. They constantly complain, worry, and talk about their problems. In both cases people get what they want.
Having a positive mental attitude is not a silly or happy approach to life. No one wants to be around someone like that. A person with a positive mental attitude is someone who has a positive and constructive approach to the invariable ups and downs that occur in everyday life. It is the ability to keep your mind on the things you want in life and off the things that you don’t want.
Developing a positive mental attitude requires mental fitness is much like physical fitness, it requires effort to achieve it but once you’ve achieved it, mental fitness makes you capable of achieving and doing more things that will give success and happiness.
One of the ways to achieve mental fitness is by changing the way you look at problems. Problems are consistent and constant for all of us. They are like waves large and small that keep coming every day. The way you look at your problems will in large part determine your attitude.
Napoleon Hill, author of the classic book Think and Grow Rich, said that within every setback or difficulty there lies the seed of an equal or greater benefit or advantage. This may seem hard to comprehend but your biggest difficulties are sent to as gift to teach you a valuable lesson. Looking for the valuable lesson in every difficulty forces you to dig deeply into your mental resources and creatively find a solution to the problem.
You need to confront each problem you face as an opportunity to learn from it. You need to learn to look for the good or the valuable lesson in every difficulty you face, because if you’re constantly looking for the good in every difficulty you cannot be thinking about something bad or negative at the same time.
If you are looking for and thinking about the good or valuable lesson in every difficulty you mind becomes alive. You are filled with possibilities and creativity about how to solve the problem. When you allow yourself to become negative, anxious, and worried your mind becomes more pessimistic. You go into a survival mode and your ability to be positive and think creatively diminishes greatly.
Future thinking is another powerful technique that will help you to build a positive mental attitude. You need to give all of your thinking to the future because the past is gone. You cannot change the past. It does you no good to worry about things that have already happened and cannot be changed. Needless feelings of remorse and regret will do more to undermine a positive mental attitude than any other external factor.
It’s important to think about your future and the goals you want to achieve. The future is naturally positive and uplifting. If you want to develop a positive mental attitude you have to let go of the past and focus on the future and the things you want. Another reason that you should give all your thoughts to the future is because that is where you’re going to be spending the rest of your life.
Most people simply react to the events and circumstances around them. For example, many people have the attitude that if someone is nice to them then they’ll be nice in return. If someone is unkind or disrespectful to them then they’ll be the same way in return.
You have to put in before you can get out. Remember, it is the Law of Sowing and Reaping not the Law of Reaping and Sowing. Your attitude is a reflection of the type of person you are on the inside and the world you live in. For example, if you want people to be friendly, courteous, and respectful to you, then you have to be those things to other people first.
Every person shapes their own life by his or her attitude. Your environment is a mirror of your attitude and expectations and the only way you can ever bring about change in your life is to develop a positive mental attitude. It’s important to understand that your attitude affects you much more than it affects other people.
Bad habits are hard to break and new ones are hard to form. So developing a positive mental attitude will take time. Start tomorrow morning by expecting the best in everything that happens to you during the day and treat every person you come in contact with the way you expect to be treated. Treat everyone with genuine, kindness, courtesy, and respect and that is what will be reflected back to you. |
posted by ezimind @ 11:06 am  |
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The Keys To Success In Business
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Monday 12 March 2007 |
Success in business has nothing whatsoever to do with salesmanship, little to do with a knowledge of your company’s products or services.
It is owing to some far more basic fundamental principles which will determine your success or failure at anything you do in life.
They are your A,B,C’s, Attitude, Belief and Consistency. Taking them in reverse order.
Consistency
We get up every morning, we brush our teeth wash, get dressed have breakfast. We are consistent in our actions. We do it every day. We need to do the same in being consistent with our tasks associated with our business for the days that we have chosen we are going to work, be it 1 or 7 days a week. We need the 6 marbles in our left pocket or left side of our bag and transfer 1 marble to the other side every time we have carried out a positive action i.e. seeing a customer, talking to someone about the business, etc. etc. We need to do it consistently. We need to have transferred all 6 marbles (better still 10) by the end of the day. We need to concentrate on the actions not on the result. I’ll repeat that, we need to concentrate on the actions not on the results.
When we go mountain climbing, if we would continually look at the summit we would soon trip up and fall. We need to concentrate on every step at a time, one after the other and as surely as the sun goes down we will reach our summit.
Belief
An absolute and genuine belief in our business, it’s products and services and what it can give it’s customers.
Attitude
Possibly the most important of these three but useless on its own. It’s no good having the best attitude in the world if one’s sitting on one’s own in a closed room not talking to anyone. So what is attitude apart from how one feels about oneself and others. I describe it like this.
Your face is transparent, totally transparent and your attitude shines through whether it’s positive or negative. The first second that a prospective customer sees you maybe even before you see him, your attitude comes through. The customer sees it, maybe only subconsciously and will react accordingly. We all know that the first thing any salesperson has to sell is themselves even before they open their mouth. If they can’t sell themselves they might as well turn round and go home and go back to bed. If they can’t sell themselves they wouldn’t be able to sell packet of peanuts or a Mars bar.
Another description of attitude, when I took my 14 year old daughter recently to Disneyland Paris we went one evening to an aquatic circus. Very unusual, people diving, dancing and somersaulting on water. It was a spectacular show. What made it even more enjoyable (we were sitting on the front row) was the fact that all the performers without exception were obviously really enjoying themselves. They were loving every minute of it and gave it their all. Their attitude really shone through like a beacon and this made our enjoyment total.
So when we get up in the morning and do our consistency things let’s get a really big warm smile from within feeling good about ourselves and keep that all day. When we go about our business we need to keep out good attitude with us. If we can’t also be in the place where we are physically there’s no point being there in the first place. It’s easier to ride a horse in the direction that it’s going.
So those are my 3 all important ingredients that determine one’s success or failure at anything in life. |
| posted by ezimind @ 11:18 am |
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Bad Attitudes Mean Lost Business
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Tuesday 27 February 2007 |
Once upon a time, when I was a front line employee at a food manufacturing plant, I had a supervisor, I'll call him "Fred" who intimidated most of his employees. When anyone called in sick, Fred would slam down the phone before the conversation ended. To most of us line workers, it seemed that this was his way of punishing anyone who tried to get by with calling in sick or playing hookey.
Fred also used other intimidation tactics to control his workforce. When someone approached him with a complaint, he made no bones about expressing his irritation: In a raised voice he would say, “That’s just the way it is.” In most cases his tactics worked. His employees learned not to express grievances because it was a no-win situation.
Fred also had two other sayings in his back pocket. Any time a brave employee would try to question the status quo, Fred would say, "I didn't ask you to work here." If that didn't work his final retort was, "If you don't like it find yourself another place to work."
These statements accomplished Fred's goal of closing the subject, but it did little for teamwork and productivity.
Fred never connected the dots that the reason the line went down for two hours was often because of a complaint that went unanswered or an employee with a bad attitude wanted revenge.
I'll never forget one time getting the courage to confront my bosses’ attitude. I explained to him that when he hangs up on others it is intimidating. His response was to tell me that I was the only one who felt this way since I was the only one to bring it up. His second response was to tell me that he never raised his voice it was only my perception. (Had he never heard of the theory that my perception is my reality?) He then justified his behavior by paraphrasing Eleanor Roosevelt, “No one can make you feel anything without your approval.”
Looking back on this situation I realize that there are two philosophies when it comes to attitude: The idealistic philosophy and the realistic philosophy. The idealistic approach is that each person is responsible to choose his attitude no matter how someone else treats you. The idealistic approach goes along with Eleanor Roosevelt’s saying” No one can make you feel anything without your approval.” A minor flaw in this way of thinking is that there is a difference between knowing and doing. Most of us know that we are totally responsible for how we feel, but we are more used to reacting than we are to choosing consciously.
The realistic approach is more of a William Penn philosophy: “No man is fit to command another who cannot command himself.” The realistic philosophy embraces the concept of personal choice but acknowledges the truth that we are often influenced by each other. Some people just make it easier to choose a good attitude.
For example, it’s easier to choose a good attitude when the boss has a great attitude. It’s easier to choose a good attitude when others welcome you with open arms. It’s easier to choose a good attitude when you feel like a valued customer.
Recently I tried a brand new restaurant in town. Several minor mistakes were made. Just when I was thinking that I might never return, the manager approached my table and told me the meal was on the house. The manager realized a profound business truth: If the customer leaves with a good attitude she will return again and again.
Think about the times you have been to the grocery store and you walked away frustrated. Chances are someone was rude to you, you didn’t get help out with the groceries, the place was a mess or they were out of the advertised specials. Perhaps you kept your attitude in check, but I’ll bet that you stopped shopping there nonetheless.
If you attend a new networking group and you are not greeted or made to feel welcome, it influenced your attitude. You might have silently quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, while you researched other networking groups to join.
If you are a leader in any sense of the word, you must never forget the influence you have over others. According to Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in their book Power of Full Engagement, “Leaders have a disproportionate impact on the productivity of others.”
None of us work in a vacuum. Attitudes cause a chain reaction. As a boss, your attitude affects your employees. Your employee’s attitudes affect your customers, and your customers are the lifeblood of your business. The result of bad attitudes whether it be yours of your customers, is lost business. |
| posted by ezimind @ 11:12 am |
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