What if it is all about attitude?

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With which attitude do you go through life? Do you take life by the reins, persevere with your goals and fight for your dreams? Do you feel satisfied with your life and try and see the positive side of things? Do you not let others influence your mood?

Or perhaps do you see others and ask yourself how they can seem so happy? How do they seem to achieve what they put their mind to? How can they have so much luck? Or how they do not seem to get upset by anything?

Well it actually sums up in one word: attitude.

And I can assure you that I am writing this post both for you and for me. Because what I am going to tell you, I have had to apply to myself whilst writing this. We cannot always be at our best. And if you add stressful situations and feeling overwhelmed, well what can I say. Then it is necessary to review our attitude and muster up some willpower.

How to improve our attitude?

If we want to work on our attitude I think we have to take four steps:

1. Become aware that our attitude needs improving.
2. Reflect on and analyse the background.
3. Decide which aspects we wish to improve.
4. Act, that is put into practice what we have decided.

Now it turns out we all can decide how to feel and act in any situation. But that does not mean to say it is easy. Because acquired habits urge us to react and behave the familiar way.

#Attitude is Your Paintbrush: It Colors Every Situation. James W. Moore Share on X

Becoming aware

The first step is to realise that a negative, defeatist or passive attitude is not helping us or even aggravating what happens to us.

Let us say you have a car accident. You might get really pissed off. Or might enter victim mode asking yourself why it has to happen to you. But you also may realise that none of these attitudes will help you but to make you feel furious or sad. So you might simply accept it has happened and take the necessary action such as filling in the insurance report or calling the police, if needed.

Or maybe you feel overwhelmed by work and more tasks seem to come in that you manage to get done. So you can get stressed and suffer mental block. You could also get mad at your boss or colleagues. Or you might cry and complain over your troubles to anyone who might want to listen (or not). But you can also choose to act in a more productive way.

As you can see with these examples there are usually several options for how to feel and act.

And with practice we can become aware of what is going on with us and act in a more active and fruitful way. Because life is actually filled with bigger and smaller decisions. Therefore, same as we decide what to have for breakfast or which clothes to wear, we can decide how to face life and how to feel in different situations.

#Life is about decisions. You decide with which #attitude to face it Share on X

Reflect and analyse the background

Once you have become aware that your attitude can need improvement, think about what is up with you. Do you feel dissatisfied with some aspect of your life or due to the expectations you have? Do you feel stressed or overburdened? Are you exhausted? Do you feel angry or sad?

In order to improve your attitude it is essential to know what is going on, how you feel and why.

Decide which aspects to improve

The next step is to take the determination to make changes in our life and way of approaching things. This will depend, of course, on what is going on with you.

If you feel dissatisfied with something, you will have to reflect on how you can improve your situation.

If you are exhausted you will need to take time for relaxing active and consciously. That can be from getting enough sleep, eating well to give your body the need nutrients to taking time for relaxing walks, meditation, yoga and reducing commitments on your agenda for example.

If, on the other hand, you feel stressed or overwhelmed the solution will possibly be to analyse what stresses you, remember your priorities and goals and reduce obligations.

But beyond thinking about which actions we can take, our attitude also depends to a large extent on how we see the world and our life.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right. #HenryFord #Attitude Share on X

Take action

If you want to improve certain aspects of our life or ourselves we need to make changes in our habits when it comes to acting and thinking.

But possibly the fact that we have faced situations in a certain way until now is due to not knowing another way of doing things. Therefore it might be necessary to learn new techniques and skills. Let us see some techniques.

Watch your inner dialogue

The first step is to realise which messages we are sending ourselves. Are we treating ourselves with kindness, encouraging and motivating ourselves? Or to the contrary are we telling ourselves that we do not feel like it? That we are fed up with work, colleagues or whatever? Maybe we feel that certain things or people are driving us crazy? Or we are blaming them for what happens to us and how we feel?

Negative thoughts can take us to feeling dejected and exhausted. Therefore, learning to see the good things happening to us and appreciating them, will help us reduce demotivating and even pessimistic thoughts.

For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. #Epictetus #Attitude Share on X

Beware of generalisations

A coaching and NLP technique invites us to detect the generalisations we make and which can influence or limit our behaviour. So think about your way of expressing yourself when communicating with others or yourself. Do you tend to use words like “always”, “never”, “people”, “everybody”, “nobody” etc. making statements such as “people rile me up”, “nobody helps me”, “I always draw the short straw”, “why does this always have to happen to me”?

I suggest you learn to detect these generalisations and analyse them. Let us have a look at two of the examples and possible question you could pose yourself:

• Statement: “People rile me up.”
• Questions to ask: How exactly is “people”? Who does really drive you crazy? Why do you feel that way? Why do you give that person or those people so much power over your feelings?

• Statement: “I always draw the short straw.”
• Questions to ask: Really always? All the short straws? Why do you consider a task entrusted the short straw? Is it not a part of your duties? Do you not know the task’s objective and benefit?

Becoming aware of generalisations and trying to replace them with less totalitarian thoughts and comments is not an easy task and will take time. But being more conscious that you use them is the first step in the right direction towards a better attitude.

The #meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our #attitude towards them. Antoine de #SaintExupéry Share on X

Listen to your body signals

Nowadays it seems we are so busy that we have learned to ignore what our body want to tell us. As German consultant and coach Elke Nürnberger says in her book: Try and explain a small child why you have been working for hours on end without being able to go to the bathroom, have a break or something to eat. Does that sound familiar? I can tell you that it has happened to me. But does it not sound absurd?

What is more, if we do not pay attention to our body needs and do not take time for a break we will be less productive and effective with what we are doing. Therefore I suggest you learn to reconnect to your body and what it wants to convey. Then you will notice when it asks you for a break, something to eat or to stretch your legs for example.

Pay attention to your mood

As I said in the beginning we cannot always be in best shape, happy and satisfied. It is normal to feel sad or angry at times.

The things is to recognise and accept these emotions in order to then look for a productive way to direct them. That is to say it is not about succumbing to a state of self-pity or being angry with the world but reflecting what we can do to improve our situation and with that our state of mind. Remember that life is about decisions and we can decide whether we want to go through life with a negative and defeatist attitude or rather prefer to take the reins.

Adopt healthy habits

In order to have a positive attitude towards life we need to treat ourselves with kindness and respect and take care of ourselves. So eating healthily, taking regular breaks and doing some physical activity will help us. It is shown that physical activity releases endorphins, which will improve our mood. After all, taking care of ourselves is showing us self-love.

Amongst the healthy habits I also include ensuring a balance between professional and personal life. If you tend to keep brooding over work in your free time, I recommend you learn tricks to disconnect. Otherwise work-related worries and those you might have in your personal life might turn into a huge snowball blocking your mind until turning into an emotional meltdown or outburst of anger.

Life the here and now

Mindfulness teaches us to live consciously the present moment. If you are constantly brooding over what has happened, what has made you angry or sad, and what could happen, what others might be thinking about you etc. it will be difficult to have a good attitude, and feeling like doing whatever you plan to do. Therefore I recommend you take things step by step and face problems when they arise, if they do at all. Worrying about what has not happened yet will only occupy valuable space in your mind, preventing you from having productive and useful thoughts.

#Life is a #journey, not a destination. #RalphWEmerson #Attitude Share on X

Recap

Our attitude towards life determines how we approach situations and what we achieve. It depends on you to decide how you want to feel about what happens to you. What is more, it depends on you not to only wait for things to happen but making them happen. It is all about attitude.

It depends on you to not only wait for things to happen but to make them happen #Attitude Share on X

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