Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude

Another key to lifelong success is Attitude. Your attitude affects everything in your life. How’s your attitude? Are you one of those people who is always blaming outside forces for your problems? Do you walk around in a negative state of mind most of the time? I think not. People like that would never have opened this subject in the first place. However positive you may be most of the time, there will be days when you just feel negative. While this may be fine for a brief period, prolonging a negative attitude has disastrous consequences. A negative attitude robs your initiative and destroys your discipline.

Your attitude will determine your altitude and a man who struggles with his attitude will struggle with many other essential and important factors and elements that will lead him to his altitude in life.

The “so what” or “who cares” attitude stops you from taking the actions that will help you build the kind of life you want to have for yourself and your family.

What happens

Here’s how a negative attitude robs us of our potential for good. At one of the low points in my own life, I had developed a “who cares, what’s the use” attitude. I felt that I was stuck where I was because of circumstances outside my control and blamed the world for my conditions. I figured I was at the bottom, so why even care? The problem is, as I learned through a lot of emotional pain,

that there are always lower bottoms to which we can sink. As my attitude continued to be negative and blaming, my situation worsened.

Only when I was willing to take responsibility for my life, stop blaming and look for what little good remained, was I able to begin to turn this situation around. A negative attitude keeps us stuck by robbing us of the self-discipline we need to improve our conditions. If you take a “what’s the use” approach to your circumstances, they will only get worse.

It’s imperative that you turn a negative attitude around and learn to become a positive person.

Gratitude

The fastest and easiest way I know to change from a negative to a positive attitude is to develop an attitude of gratitude. You may even want to keep a gratitude journal, a place where you can build a list of the things you are grateful for in your life. It’s impossible to have gratitude and be in self-pity at the same time, and most negative attitudes are rooted in self-pitying, “poor me” self-talk. You can quickly change a negative attitude to a positive one by becoming grateful.

The simplest way I know to do this is to ask a question like, “What am I grateful for today?” Then, write down whatever comes to mind. It may be all of the blessings you have like good health, a clear mind, a loving family, satisfying work, a comfortable home, friends, and pets and so on.

Make a daily habit of counting your blessings and list what you are grateful for in your life. Doing this first thing in the

morning will help you feel better immediately and begin your day on a positive note.

On days when you are feeling down, take out your “gratitude journal” and reread it. Doing this simple exercise will make you feel better almost immediately.

Forgiveness

Even though this may seem cliché but we can never get enough of the phrase “never give up”. It motivates us to reach for the stars and no matter how hard it is, we continue the job until it is perfected. Thomas A. Edison said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

Why do people quit so easily after making a mistake? In my perception, a mistake is not something terrible or negative but a life lesson learnt. Sometimes, we can never have or get what we always wanted. So what? Let it go and get on with life! If it is meant to be, then it is. Don’t get demotivated just because something didn’t go the way you intended it to be.

Most importantly, never beat yourself up for it. If we blame ourselves, the matter only gets worse. We’ll be wallowing in sadness and we won’t be able to think straight. This incident might eventually lead to depression. Take a break and smell the flowers. Don’t go too hard on yourself. After all, we are only human.

Think of God’s wonderful creations and all the beautiful things in life. Life is magnificent if we look at it from a brighter perspective. It’s not meant to be about work,

stress or depression. These things happen only if we let them happen. It’s not anyone else’s fault because you let it happen. Happiness starts within.

Perseverance

Perseverance is commitment, hard work, patience, endurance. With no determination and perseverance, we can kiss success goodbye. Perseverance is being able to bear difficulties calmly and without complaint. We have to try and try again. Who said life is a bed of roses anyway? There definitely got to be ups and downs. We should rejoice and be grateful when we are at the ups and pick ourselves up when we are experiencing the downs.

All things will come round to him who will but wait. You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try. When something starts to bother you, wait as long as you can before you express frustration. Focus on someone or something that ordinarily makes you lose your patience and try to understand it. Whatever happens in life, face and accept it.

Write your problems down if it makes you feel better. When you look back at your entries, you’ll either realise that your previous problem seemed so petty now or you had finally overcame that problem you had and you’re ready to tackle a new one. Besides that, relaxing or motivating music will definitely perk you up.

Beethoven persevered despite being deaf and managed to compose many beautiful pieces like Fur Elise. Thomas Edison (inventor) had a learning problem, Stevie Wonder

(musician) is blind, Terry Fox (runner) is an amputee with cancer, Helen Keller (author) was deaf and blind, Franklin D. Roosevelt (president) was paralyzed from polio and Stephen Hawking (physicist) has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Great people always persevere no matter what.

The right attitude

Many inventors were first frustrated when using the wrong resources for their inventions but when they imbibed the right information with the right attitude, their inventions became known and they became inventors. Money, wealth, riches, good quality of life, flashy cars or big houses etc. whatever is it that drives you to acquisition of anything is not the greatest achievement in life but the right attitude to everything and everyone in life. As we embark on this new journey this week, let us adopt the right attitude to our friends, neighbours, colleagues, workers, employers, businesses and to everyone we come across, every relationship or friendship we find ourselves in and more importantly our relationship to our maker, our creator, the one who moulded us out of nothing, HE has made us somebody out of nothing, record how far your positive or negative attitude takes you this week and determine to change the world around you.

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”