#attitude
To paraphrase a Southwest Airlines ad: We all know airline employees have attitudes, but we have the good ones.
When your parents told you have an attitude, it was not a compliment. Of course, if you didn’t have the attitude THEY wanted you to have, you were told you have an attitude.
But Gregg Steinberg, professor of human performance at Austin Peay University in Tennessee, believes an attitude can be the force, as in “Star Wars,” that should be with you. He wrote about that in an Oct. 12, 2014, column in The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.
As a child, your parents did not want you have independent thought. They saw that as attitude. They did not want you to think that things they had taught you could be wrong.
As adults, it’s desirable to question things. It’s desirable to investigate for oneself whether something is right or wrong. It’s best, as an adult, not to assume or presume. It’s best to make judgments based on facts.
But attitude is much more than finding facts and making judgments. Attitude is belief. To quote Steinberg, attitude is a force. It’s also, as he said, a choice.
One can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic. Once can choose to see the world as a great place, or a doomed place. Once can choose to believe that the best years of their lives are ahead of them.
Of course, belief is a start. One must act on what he believes. He must choose to fight through the gloom and doom and take charge of his life.
How does one do that when “life” has hit him upside the head? First, he recalls what is good in his life – and we all have good in our lives. Then, he is grateful for the good in his life. Chances are, what’s good in one’s life trumps what’s bad. So, we fight through the bad by having an attitude of gratitude.
Then, one must ask: what can I do to make things great? If you are having trouble finding a good answer to that question, visit www.bign.com/pbilodeau. You’ll see people who had trouble answering that question in the past finding the answer in abundance.
But no good thing comes to us without effort. We must make an effort not only to believe there is good out there, but to find it.
Once we find it, we must do what we need to do to get it. Once we get it, we must help others believe it, find it and grab it.
Perhaps it’s not what lies beneath that matters. It’s what lies within.
Our circumstances may rattle and shake us. But they should never break us.
We mustn’t fear the future, for it eventually will be bright if we make it so.
So, as an adult, it’s OK to have an attitude. It’s OK to defy what peril has been put upon you.
We all have so much good in our lives. Embrace that to start with, then go get more of it.
Attitude is a choice. Choose wisely.
Peter