Attitude is made of thoughts, feeling, and actions. It is an established way of our responding to people and situations. It roots from what we have learned; it’s based on our thoughts, beliefs and values, assumptions that we hold, and then these things direct our actions. It’s our actions that reveal our attitude. It’s an attitude that drives behavior. Our body language, gestures and every message that we send out is based on our attitude. People consciously or unconsciously understand these messages and pick up the attitude behind that.
Life is hard and inevitably full of challenges, hard knocks, and discord. If you have a good attitude it will help you cope up with all the hardships because it’s an attitude that determines your functioning under given circumstances. A positive attitude will make you learn about your strengths. It will test your firmness when times are tough and ensure your success; however, if you have a negative attitude your life will seem like an endless journey on a jagged path. A negative attitude will make the adversity and challenges even tedious and hard for you. You will become frustrated easily.
Unsuccessful people are mostly those with negative attitudes. They spend all of their time and energy on a thing as unproductive as worrying about future and its uncertainty. They keep moving in circles of negative thoughts. Those who realize that hardships are a part of life, give their required amount of worried thought to it, and spend more time in productive things are likely to be successful.
To change your attitude you need to be aware of your thoughts, feelings, words and actions. This alertness will tell you if your thoughts and feelings are set on a negative direction or they are positive. Everyone has a habit of self-talk. Notice your self-talk. Is it judgmental? Are you critical of yourself? Does your self-talk get you down?
These questions will help you know about your current attitude. Once you become aware of your current attitude and understand how your thoughts feed to this attitude, you’ll be able to consciously choose new thoughts for yourself. If you find yourself indulging in negative self-talk, you need to stop that. If you change what you are thinking, it will change what you do and you will eventually get the control of your life back.
A positive attitude will make a person feel better, happier and more satisfied irrespective of the circumstances. Researchers have also shown that people with positive attitude are less likely to show aging signs, stay stronger and healthier than those with negative attitude. A gloomy attitude is actually killing a person, while, a positive attitude is transforming and improving a person’s feeling and life.
Keywords: attitude, behavior, positive, adversity, negative, frustration, self-improvement.
