Your Actions Determine Your Character
We’ve already seen that your basic outlook on life, the frame through which you see things, sets in motion a powerful chain of events beginning with the thoughts you think and leading to the words you speak. These two powerful forces, thoughts and words, shape your identity and your reality—that is, how you view yourself and the world around you.
Now let’s look at the third powerful force that stems from your attitude—actions. Your actions are your response to the world, and how you engage the world based on your perception of it. If you have a positive attitude, think hopeful and optimistic thoughts, and speak positively about yourself and others, that will show in your behavior. You’ll be trusting, truthful, helpful, and generous. However, if you have a negative attitude—which gives rise to negative thinking about yourself and others, which in turn takes shape in negative speech like gossip, complaining, and naysaying—that will show up in your actions too. Like the first domino that begins a cascading chain reaction, your attitude, either positive or negative, sets in motion a series of consequences that powerfully affect your life. And there’s a lot at stake here, especially when it comes to your actions, because your actions determine your character. So your character is formed by your basic outlook on life.
Perhaps no person’s life illustrates this powerful principle better than that of Oscar Wilde, the Irish playwright and novelist. The author of many highly popular works, including The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde was one of the best-known literary minds of the nineteenth century. He subscribed to the philosophy of aestheticism, the belief that beauty is the highest good. That mindset pervaded his life. The young aesthete lived out that value in everything from his choice of home decor to his pursuit of a life filled with creature comforts and personal pleasure. Predictably, his outlook on the world eventually took shape in action, and Wilde became immersed in a life of dissipation and immoral conduct. He even spent two years in prison, convicted of “gross immorality.” Later, Wilde reflected on his beliefs and actions.
I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forget that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.1
Take careful notice of this line: “Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character.” Someone has said that character is what you look like in the dark, meaning that your character is indicated by your thoughts and private life. In fact, your character is the sum of all your actions, including the seemingly small decisions you make to be punctual or to procrastinate, to tell the whole truth or spin it to make yourself look better, or to spend time with your family or binge-watch videos. Your outlook on life drives your thoughts, your words, and eventually your actions. So it’s no exaggeration to say that your attitude is what ultimately creates your character. Yes, your attitude has that much power! It seeps into your thoughts, leaks out through your words, and runs like a river through the hundreds of choices you make every day.
Let’s take a look at the ways your attitude shapes your actions, either positively or negatively. First, we’ll look at the effect of a negative attitude on your actions, and then we’ll see a stunning example of how a positive attitude produces a stellar character that positively affects the world.
A Negative Outlook Produces Negative Actions
By now the cascading effect of your attitude on all of your life should be clear. You know the power of a chain reaction in tumbling dominos or creating a stampede. But you may not be aware of how directly your attitude affects your own actions and, by extension, your character. Let’s face it, negative traits are much easier to spot in other people than in ourselves.
Here are just a few of the ways a negative outlook on life will sabotage your ability to take positive actions.
It Kills Your Creativity
Everything positive that you accomplish in life begins with a possibility. You have to see yourself as capable in order to try something new, like learning a language or writing a book. However, a negative outlook grinds those possibilities to dust by making you feel incapable and powerless.
Remember, a negative attitude has its first effect on your view of yourself. Your thoughts shape your identity. Before long, that negative thinking finds itself into your words in naysaying statements like “I could never do that” or “That’ll never work.” As a result, you fail to do the things you’d really like to do.
It Makes You Untrusting
My friend Jeff teaches research and writing methodology to college students. One day he gave them a field assignment: Talk to one stranger each day for two weeks and write about your findings. Jeff wanted to challenge the seemingly prevalent belief that most of the people we encounter every day at school, work, or the shopping mall are out to harm us. He decided to try the experiment himself, and on the very first day he was alert for opportunities to engage someone he’d never met in a brief conversation.
While walking down the aisle in a grocery store, Jeff saw a man coming toward him. A young man in his twenties, looking furtively around, and keeping his right hand in his jacket pocket, the fellow exactly matched the common description we so often see on the news of a criminal suspect! The young man approached Jeff and pulled his hand from his jacket. Frightened, Jeff flinched and was about to yell for help. That’s when the young fellow spoke up. “Can you tell me where to find the diapers?” he asked, pointing to the shopping list in his right hand. “My wife just had a baby, and I need to pick up some things before she comes home from the hospital.” Far from being a threat, the young man was seeking Jeff’s help.
While there certainly are people in the world bent on doing harm, most of the people we meet don’t fit that category. Yet our thinking has been shaped by the good advice our parents gave us: “Don’t talk to strangers!” Jeff realized the profound effect this thinking was having on his actions. He was suspicious of others and treated them accordingly.
That’s the effect of a negative outlook on life. It makes you suspicious of others, untrusting of people who seem different, and unwilling to accept newcomers. Negative thinking produces a defensive reaction that keeps you closed to new relationships.
It Destroys Your Confidence
A negative outlook destroys your self-confidence, and that undermines your success by making you risk averse. We all like living in our comfort zone, but making progress in life requires pushing yourself beyond that from time to time. For example, if you want to find a better job you have to submit resumes and put yourself out there in the hiring process. That can be intimidating, to say the least.
When you have a negative outlook, here’s what happens in your life. You begin by thinking negative thoughts and developing a poor self-image. That thinking takes shape in words such as “I’m too old for that job,” or “They probably wouldn’t hire me,” or “I don’t have the right experience.” Eventually that finds its way into your actions—or rather inactions. It feels safer to go to work every day at a job you hate than to take the risk of stepping out and trying something new.
As the old saying goes, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” A negative attitude holds you back from trying new things.
It Makes You Cut Corners
A funny thing happened at midnight on April 15, 1987. Seven million American children suddenly disappeared. No, it wasn’t a mass abduction. The Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule so that rather than merely listing dependent children by name on their tax forms, taxpayers were required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly seven million children who’d existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms vanished, representing about ten percent of all dependent children in the United States!2
That may make you smile, but it’s further evidence of the negative effects of a poor attitude on your actions and, ultimately, your character. People who cheat in small ways, such as lying on tax returns, shoplifting, or telling “white lies,” are often driven by the belief that the world isn’t fair. I deserve it, they think. Life is easier for other people. Why shouldn’t I get a break? That basic belief in unfairness and inequality finds its way into the selfish, negative behavior of cutting corners, cheating, lying, or worse. Make no mistake, your attitude affects your character.
It Makes You Stingy
We often say that a pessimist sees the glass half empty and optimists see it as half full. I’d like to take that one step further. A person with a positive outlook sees the glass as half full—and getting fuller. The person with a negative attitude sees the glass as half empty—and getting emptier all the time. In other words, negative thinkers have a scarcity mindset. They believe that there’s never enough money, resources, or time. As a result, they begin to see others as a threat to their dwindling supply of resources. They give less money to charity, they dislike sharing, they fight for parking spaces. Why? Because they’re convinced there’ll never be enough for everyone. Negative thinking makes you more likely to hoard resources and exclude people.
We could say a lot more about the effect of a negative outlook on our actions and character, but you get the idea. People who have a negative attitude respond to the world and those around them in negative ways. They become fearful, closed to new possibilities, lacking in confidence, and selfish. The good news is that your character can change, because you have control over your attitude. Let’s take a look at some of the healthy results of a good attitude on your actions and character.
A Positive Outlook Produces Positive Actions
One way to describe the positive effect of your attitude on your actions would be to simply list the opposite traits we’ve just listed. Having a positive attitude does indeed take shape in positive actions, such as a willingness to try new things, openness to new people and situations, honesty, and generosity. When you have a positive outlook, you develop a positive image of yourself. That produces hopeful words, such as “I think we can,” and “We have plenty to go around,” and “Let’s try again.” Those uplifting words create a positive reality that leads to bold, hopeful actions.
People who have a positive attitude become confident, adventurous, and forward-looking. They respond to the world in positive ways, and they’re often much loved and incredibly successful as a result.
That was certainly true of Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A restaurants, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 93. Cathy entered the restaurant business with his brother in 1946. The pair bought a small restaurant in Hapeville, Georgia, called the Dwarf House, which is still in operation today. There they developed the signature chicken sandwich for which the nearly 2000 Chick-fil-A restaurants are known.
Truett Cathy had a positive outlook on life, and that outlook contributed to his success as a businessperson and his willingness to take risks. Cathy’s optimistic attitude was underscored by his powerful faith. Like another highly successful Georgian, President Jimmy Carter, Cathy taught Sunday school at his hometown church for many years. Due to his strong belief in the value of Sunday as a day of worship and family time, all Chick-fil-A restaurants are closed on Sundays. Cathy began the policy in 1948 when he himself was working six days a week and saw how detrimental that was to himself and his family.3 Losing Sunday sales may have cost the company millions, but Cathy’s strong beliefs resulted in positive actions—and he has succeeded.
One of Cathy’s favorite sayings is, “It’s easier to build boys and girls than to mend men and women.” That positive speech turned into positive action when, in the late 1940s, Cathy hired Eddie J. White, a young African-American, at his first restaurant. Remember that the American South was still segregated at that time, so the decision was very unpopular. Cathy was undeterred. His belief in equality and opportunity became bold action. He also mentored an orphan by the name of Woody Faulk, beginning when Woody was 13. Woody eventually became vice president of product development at Chick-fil-A. And Cathy developed a successful foster home system called WinShape Homes. Today, Camp WinShape and the WinShape Foundation provide scholarships for kids and college students.
Woody Faulk gives a good summary of Cathy’s character:
A lot of people look on Truett as Santa Claus, but he’s not. He’ll meet you halfway so that you can learn a lesson from the process. He’s the personification of James 1:22: “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”4
Does your attitude affect your actions? You bet it does. When you have a positive outlook, you’ll be confident, forward-looking, engaged in the world, and willing to take risks to achieve what you believe. Your attitude determines your actions. Your actions determine your character. It’s as simple as that.