We Must Teach our Attitudes to Serve Us.....

Recently I conducted an exercise with some business students I had. I had been watching their approach to class attendance and participation and recognized that their levels of interest and engagement were low, despite having themselves chosen the business field as their future career endeavor. It's an exercise I had seen in a video presentation and thought it would be useful to them. The presenter spoke about wealth creation as well as fulfilling our lives purpose and destiny. He very cleverly showed pictures of well known, highly successful, business moguls and asked participants to give one word that came to mind when viewing the pictures. After documenting a list of about fifteen words for each picture, the presenter asked his audience to determine if each of these words would fall into the category of skill, knowledge or attitude. Interestingly (for me at the time) more than ninety-five percent of the words fell under the category 'attitude.' It was an effective way of teaching his audience (as I later did with my students) that attitude is everything.

Jim Rohn, though deceased, remains my highest value business mentor. Several years ago, he coined the phrase 'It is the set of the sails, not the direction of the wind, that determines which way we will go.' Adversity is a staple of life. Business deals don't get closed, sales numbers fall, competitors out-perform our best efforts. That's business.....and life! It's not what we are going through now, nor what's happened in the past that determines our destiny. It's simply our determination to keep focused on the goal ahead, to turn with the wind, to remind ourselves that pain is a gateway to power and freedom - depending, of course, on our attitude toward that pain. The same sun (they say) that softens the butter, hardens the clay.

Our attitudes are created by our mindset, our mindset by the philosophies (known or unknown) that underlie our perceptions and action. And that's something we have control of. Completely. Obviously, there are those philosophies we may have been force-fed by parents, schools or churches....beliefs that have likely become ingrained in who we are. Some are probably good, some are bad. These likely now form the core of our value system. It's up to us to determine how well these values align with the core of our being. Do they foster and promote a positive attitude to the people and things that are important to us? Do they serve the ultimate goal of facilitating our purpose and destiny?

We must teach our attitudes to serve us...our higher goals and destiny - be those business or life goals. And if our attitudes are fed from our mindset, we must be in control of the things we feed our minds...those things that dictate what we believe and who we are at the core. It may mean deliberately choosing the people we let into our lives and those we release, increasing mindfulness as we make choices, re-thinking the things we have been taught over the years, but which do not promote harmony within. As we focus on pouring in the new we will find that the old ways of thinking and past attitudes that have not served us, will disappear....and slowly we find our minds and attitudes fully aligned at the core with the person we were meant to be.