STEP 3
Identify through self-awareness the attitudes that hold you back or propel you forward.
In this step you will learn how to transform turning points into learning points to help turn your attitude into action.
I saw the negative effects of a bad attitude during my first year on the Seattle University basketball team. Our coach was a great recruiter and, during the off-season, a personable guy. Yet he developed a negative attitude during our first season together, and it took a toll on all of us. I decided to play for Seattle University’s Chieftains instead of the more celebrated University of Washington team because he totally charmed me. He pushed all my buttons. When he came to visit me during my high school career, this coach told me I’d be one of the focal points of his team’s offense, which would then help me get the attention of NBA scouts.
He was a great recruiter, but once practice started, he turned negative. He criticized us and wore us down mentally and physically. Too often he focused on what we did wrong instead of what we needed to do to become better. He’d tell me that I wasn’t getting enough rebounds, but he never offered suggestions for how I might get more.
In fairness, I think Coach was stressed out because we were in a rebuilding season. We’d lost two great players the year before, and we were inexperienced. We probably lacked a lot of the skills and mental toughness he believed were necessary to win. Still, he had a negative attitude. Instead of constantly comparing us to the team he had before, why not look at us as the team we could become? We were a different group of players, but we still had skills. If he had made the adjustment, I think we all would have benefited. The older players might have responded better to his tough-love approach. But since we younger ones hadn’t developed our confidence to that level, we needed a more positive approach. We needed to hear that our coach believed in us.
I will never forget my first day of fall basketball practice. I was taking my man one-on-one, setting him up for a move I had worked on all summer, when I heard Coach yell at the top of his voice, “Pass the ball. You’re taking too long. You’ll probably miss that shot anyway.”
I’d been playing well over the summer. I had visions of greatness. But by the opening game I had lost my confidence. My attitude was in a tailspin. I’d become afraid to shoot for fear of being criticized from the bench.
Looking back, it wasn’t entirely the coach’s fault that I allowed his negative comments to impact my performance. I didn’t know anything about monitoring my inner dialogue to fight off a negative attitude. Later in life I realized that you don’t have to let what someone else says affect you negatively. You can hear the words, but you can choose your attitude. In those days, my self-image and my attitude were very dependent on what my coach said. And he wasn’t inclined to waste his voice on encouraging words.
After one especially bad game, he kept repeating my miserable stats over and over in front of my teammates, questioning how I’d ever been named a high school All-American. I had played poorly, I admit. You hear about a player being “in the zone.” I was in the Twilight Zone. It’s a wonder I didn’t shrink down to five-feet-six in that first season. I kept my height, but I lost all confidence. Long after my playing days were over, I’d still wake up wondering why I passed up so many shots that first year. I was afraid to make a mistake.
To make matters worse, the following year I got sick. I had to sit out my sophomore season because of pneumonia and pleurisy, a weakening of the lungs. Since he didn’t have me to kick around anymore, Coach rode the rest of the team so hard that they threatened to mutiny. I’d been named team captain at the start of our sophomore year, so the guys came to me and asked me to talk to him and get him to ease up. When I went to tell him their concerns, this is what he said: “I’m thirty-five years old. This is how I coach. I’m too old to change. I’ll just have to put together a whole new team next year if everyone on this team leaves.”
Two years later, the coach was gone.
Some people get downsized or rightsized. He got attitude-sized. He had no one to blame but himself. The attitude alarms were going off all around him, but he wouldn’t listen. His players were telling him. His assistant coaches were telling him. I told him. He ignored us all. He refused to acknowledge that his attitude was way out of whack. And it cost him his job.
Bad Attitudes Are Heavy Baggage
Maybe he was under a lot of stress. Maybe he was underpaid by the university or underappreciated by his team. Maybe his father or his coaches had used negative feedback as a motivational tool, and it worked for him. I could never understand why he had such a poor attitude. It didn’t help him. It didn’t help his players either.
It’s not always easy to determine why other people have bad attitudes, but it’s certainly easy to pick them out of a crowd. You could probably name a half-dozen coworkers, relatives, or others you know with bad attitudes. It’s relatively easy to spot someone with a bad attitude. Unless, of course, that someone is you. If you haven’t been getting what you want out of life, if you feel stuck, overlooked, unappreciated, or unfulfilled, it could be that you’ve picked up an attitude that is holding you back.
You might not see it in yourself, but you may have noticed that the people around you respond differently to you. If your relationships with bosses, coworkers, or employees have changed for the worse, if your loved ones or friends don’t treat you the same way, maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s you!
A Good Attitude Begins with Self-Awareness
The ability to recognize our feelings as they come over us is called self-awareness, and it is critical to our development in a highly mobile, fast-changing, and complex society. Self-awareness allows you to be aware of your emotions and attitudes. Knowing yourself and understanding what drives your attitude and emotions is the first step to self-knowledge and self-control. If you remember the experiences that trigger a bad or self-destructive attitude, you can then work to disarm those triggers and even replace the bad emotions with more constructive and empowering emotions to create a better attitude.
Self-awareness is very important. When you tell yourself I shouldn’t be thinking about this before I go to sleep, you are practicing self-awareness because you are monitoring your emotions and judging their potential impact.
When you practice self-awareness, you give yourself far greater control of your actions. This control gives you options. You can decide not to react to negative emotions. Instead you can develop a positive attitude that allows you to let go of the emotion. You can also channel the energy of the negative emotion into a positive action.
If you don’t learn to control or rechannel a negative attitude, it can have a terrible impact on your life. It may have already happened. Do you become easily angered, impatient, insecure, or cynical for reasons you don’t understand? Do other people tell you that you tend to overreact? Do you often find yourself wondering why you got so upset? So angry? So offended? It may be that you have an attitude that you need to examine and root out.
Bad Attitudes: The Early Warning Signs
In my early days at IBM, I was working in an IBM retail products store. I was frustrated. I was burned out. I was stressed. My sales numbers weren’t what they were expected to be. The conditions were ripe for the growth and nourishment of a bad attitude.
My boss was all over me to get my sales numbers up. I’d been hearing that since I transferred into the retail division. If I wanted to be promoted to another division, I had to reach a certain level of sales first. So I did it. I focused and dedicated myself, and I hit the target. But nothing happened. No promotion. No pat on the back. Nothing. That discouraged me. Without even realizing it, I developed a bad attitude about the job. I’d just gotten through yet another discussion with yet another new boss who didn’t like my attitude. It was not one of those shining, golden times in my life.
Turning Points to Learning Points
My cousin Kenny knew I was discouraged. He recommended that I take a class he had already been through. It was a two-and-a-half-day course called “The Pursuit of Excellence.” It was one of those classes you don’t know you need until you take it, but unless you take it, you’ll never know you need it. Get it? I took it and I benefited. It was a wake-up call.
One of the major themes of the course was that you have to take responsibility for your attitude and for your success. It got me out of the blame game and taught me to toss the emotional baggage and attitudes that were holding me back. As part of the course, we were required to review all of the major experiences of our lives—our turning points—and recognize how the choices we made at each point shaped our lives afterward. The idea was to convert those turning points into learning points. Instead of beating yourself up over mistakes you’ve made or losses you’ve suffered, you resolve to learn from them and move on. Sure, it’s easier said than done in many instances, but it’s a much more constructive way to deal with life’s ups and downs.
When I went back through my experiences, I realized that I had chosen the wrong attitude several times and as a result made other bad choices. I didn’t let go of things, so they became baggage. In the course, they taught me to recognize my mistakes and to be accountable.
We are not permanently burdened with the baggage of our pasts. We can leave that luggage behind. It’s OK to clean out the suitcases and take the good stuff that wears well—the happy memories, the hard-earned experience, the lessons learned, the joy of a first love. But the rest of it—the sad times, the loneliness, the broken heart, rejection, fear—you don’t need that emotional baggage. It can only mess up your attitude and your life. Leave it on the doorstep of the past, and step into the future. History does not have to repeat itself, not if you adjust your attitude by turning away from the doors that are closed and walking through the doors that are opened to opportunity.
Three Types of Bad Attitude Baggage
To begin this mental exercise, please picture in your mind three big pieces of carry-on luggage. This is easy for me to do since I spend two-thirds of my life traveling. I don’t count sheep at night. I count garment bags.
If-Only Baggage
The first piece of bad attitude baggage many people carry around is marked If only. This is baggage that has to do with the past. It is often full of unfinished business, plans that went awry, or hurt feelings that have not healed. It’s heavy stuff. Most of the time it will not fit in the overhead compartment. In some cases the pilot will order it taken off the plane because with it he’d never be able to get liftoff.
These are some of the things you’ll typically find in the If-only baggage.
If only:
The If-only baggage gets heavier over time because it keeps growing and growing if you don’t let it go. Unless you learn to release the past, you’ll eventually become so bogged down by it that you’ll never move ahead.
What-Now Baggage
This emotional baggage is packed under pressure of the present. It is heavy with stress and weighty expectations. It sometimes comes packed with good news as well as bad news, but the person carrying it chooses a negative response rather than a positive one. As a result, otherwise able-bodied men and women become paralyzed.
Typical negative inner dialogue contained in What-now baggage goes like this:
The key to dealing with this negative emotional baggage, and almost any other type of recurring stress, is to focus on opportunities and solutions rather than on potentially negative consequences or problems. You can’t move quickly if you are falling under the burden of your stress and concern, so you have to lighten the load.
What-If Baggage
The third type of negative emotional baggage people commonly carry around is labeled What if. It is usually packed with worries about the future, which result when people think about the potential problems ahead rather than the potential opportunities.
What if:
There is nothing wrong in planning ahead. In fact, it would be wise to consider each of these What-if questions and come up with reasonable responses to each scenario. But there is a difference between focusing on the solutions to these problems and merely focusing on the problems. When we become fixated on problems, we become paralyzed. When we look ahead for solutions, we are taking responsibility and some measure of control over our lives. The danger with What-if baggage is that you never put it down, even when you’ve considered what your response might be.
The Root Causes of a Bad Attitude
Habitual bad attitudes are often the product of past experiences and events. Here are some of the most common underlying causes.
LOW SELF-ESTEEM
Do you have a habit of putting other people down? Do you tend to blame other people or circumstances for your mistakes? Do you avoid mentoring or helping other people move up in life? If so, then you’ve probably developed a negative attitude based on low-self esteem.
STRESS
Do you feel burned out? Do you become easily frustrated or irritated? Do you have difficulty sleeping or focusing on a single task for an extended period of time? Have you considered quitting your job, ending a relationship, or even suicide “just to get it over with”? Do you have frequent headaches, stomach problems, or back pain? These can all be signs of stress, which can trigger a poor attitude and lead to serious medical, mental, and physical problems.
I live in Atlanta, which means I have to drive in Atlanta. Look in any encyclopedia under “Atlanta traffic” and you will find a note that says, “See Stress.” I witness stress-induced attitudes all over the road in Atlanta. I see people getting into their cars with facial expressions very similar to those on the soldiers in the landing boats in the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. They are preparing for all-out war.
I see stressed-out attitudes every day in Atlanta, and I try to keep at least three car lengths between them and me. I used to get stressed when traffic snarled, but now I listen to motivational tapes, gospel music, and recorded Bible teachings.
FEAR
The psychologists say this word really stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. Feelings of fear are nature’s alarm system for danger. The problem comes when we try to make this emotion into something real. A fear-induced attitude can render the most efficient and effective person totally useless. Fear locks you up like an engine without oil. It immobilizes you.
RESENTMENT AND ANGER
If you have a conflict with someone you work or live with, it can cause an attitude of resentment and anger that will turn your life upside down. Do you feel the urge to attack or sabotage another person or his or her property? Do you become angry just thinking about that person? Do you lose sleep because of it? Anger and resentment trigger an attitude that in the end is more harmful to you than to anyone else.
INABILITY TO HANDLE CHANGE
In a workplace transformed by rapid changes in technology, shifting demand, realignments, restructuring, corporate take-overs, and mergers, it is little wonder so many people feel threatened when a change is announced. Do you feel that failure is inevitable when faced with change? Do you get a sense of panic, loss, or betrayal? These are all the things that can affect your attitude if you are not prepared to deal with change.
We all experience those emotions at one time or another. Sometimes we get a bad attitude as a result of them. It’s the inability to shake these emotions—often because they are connected to deeply rooted experiences or events—that automatically leads to a bad attitude.
The Basics of Attitude Awareness
One of the most important steps you can take toward achieving your greatest potential in life is to learn to monitor your attitude and its impact on your work performance, on your relationships, and on everyone around you. I generally start my seminars and workshops by asking my audiences a fundamental question: What attitude did you bring into this meeting? Often this brings puzzled looks. Many people close their eyes and lift their heads. That happens so often I’ve wondered if some folks have their Attitude of the Day written on the inside of their eyelids.
In truth, people generally don’t have a high level of attitude awareness. They’ll know if they are hungry. They’ll know if their feet hurt. They’ll know if they are attracted to the person sitting three rows up. But they usually don’t have a good handle on their attitude. That is a mistake because, as it says on the cover of this book, Attitude Is Everything. It governs the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you.
Negative Attitudes on the Job
In writing about “bad attitude baggage,” I am reminded of the man who lost his luggage on a transcontinental flight. Upon arriving at his destination and discovering that his bags had not, this man made his way to the airline’s claim office, where he caused a scene. The employee recording his information patiently endured the angry tirade until the passenger accused her of personal incompetence. “Sir,” she answered, “no one knows where your baggage is yet. At the moment, only two people in the whole world even care where it is—and one of us is rapidly losing interest!”
The truth is, negative attitudes are highly contagious—just as the passenger’s attitude infected the airline employee. Nowhere do negative attitudes seem to spread more quickly than on the job.
In his book Understanding Business Values and Motivators, Dr. Ira Wolfe writes, “An ‘Attitude Virus’ seems to be everywhere…. We see the symptoms every day as rudeness, poor service, lack of motivation, and increased job stress…. Managers feel the painful, long-term effects of the Virus in employee turnover, lost productivity, customer complaints, and a drain on profits. But the greatest damage the Virus does is lowering workplace resistance to other ‘infections’ and causing healthy workers to seek escape to more healthy business environments.”
Dr. Wolfe notes that the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine has diagnosed a workplace condition called “presenteeism”—being “at work” without being productive. “It’s like absenteeism, but worse,” he says, “because, with presenteeism, employees still show up and receive a full paycheck—but they disrupt and demoralize other workers while neglecting the work they are being paid to do. The cost of ‘presenteeism’ in the U.S. alone is estimated to be hundreds of billions of dollars, resulting in over 2.5 billion lost workdays per year.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., had his own idea of what a work attitude should look like. He said, “If a man is called to sweep the streets, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, as Shakespeare wrote poetry, as Beethoven composed music. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause and say, ‘Here lived a great sweeper who did his job well.’”
The Baggage You Carry
Shapes Your Attitude
In order to do something about our bad attitudes, we must first understand where they come from. Often the most debilitating attitude we carry with us is the result of old baggage from our formative years. Since we’ve carried around these burdens of insecurity or low self-esteem, stress, resentment and anger, fear, and suspicion of change for so long, and since the forces behind them are buried so deep in our subconscious “basement,” they are the most difficult to understand or root out.
Bad attitudes accompany those burdensome emotions because we tend to think that what has happened to us in the past will continue to happen to us for the rest of our lives. Too many people see their future in their past. It’s like driving forward while looking in the rearview mirror. You may move ahead a little, but sooner or later you’re going to crash.
It takes serious work to examine the roots of a harmful attitude, but the rewards of ridding ourselves of this heavy baggage can last a lifetime. I once knew a talented, attractive, and smart young lady who was constantly sabotaging her own career and relationships. She’d draw men to her and then drive them off. She’d do outstanding work but alienate her bosses and her coworkers. It was as if she couldn’t help herself. She’d say mean things and pull stunts that would leave people shaking their heads at her tactics; then later she’d grow remorseful and ask for their forgiveness. She was high-maintenance as a friend and as an employee.
This talented but troubled woman was in her early thirties, before she finally identified the emotional baggage she’d been carrying around for most of her adult life. She was living with a lot of negative memories and holding on to hurtful feelings. She hadn’t resolved the feelings she had toward her father and was fearful that her intimate relationships would always end in failure. Plus, she felt the pressure to be successful but feared being promoted to vice president of the firm where she worked. She was burdened with all three types of emotional baggage.
She achieved her self-discovery when she attended her first meeting of a chapter of Adult Children of Alcoholics. There she learned that the negative attitude ingrained in her mind matched very closely the typical characteristics of people who had grown up, as she had, with an alcoholic parent. Those characteristics include a victim mentality, a tendency to seek approval constantly, a powerful drive to succeed but fear of success, and difficulty in forming relationships because of low self-esteem and fear of rejection.
Only after she began attending meetings of this therapeutic service organization did my friend begin to find peace. She was able to recognize and address the attitudes that had been holding her back. She tossed out the baggage that had weighed down her life. She adopted an attitude that finally allowed her talents to manifest and helped her to find happiness.
Look Beneath the Surface
The rocks that lie beneath the water’s surface determine whether a river runs clear and smooth or white-water rough. What lies inside of you determines the attitude you present to the world. By examining how your past experiences have shaped your attitude, you too can learn to navigate life more efficiently. When was the last time you checked the oil in your car or the air pressure in its tires? When’s the last time you conducted an attitude assessment?
ATTITUDE ASSESSMENT
On a sheet of paper, make a list of the negative attitudes that may have held you back in the past. Beside each one, write down what you think the source of that attitude might be. What is the baggage and what does it contain? What past experiences? What hurt? What shame? What anger? What jealousy?
This can be a painful emotional exercise, so I advise you to go off by yourself somewhere or to ask someone who knows you well to help. A brother or sister, spouse, or parent might have clues that you can’t see. This is a cleansing experience. Sometimes you have to scrape hard, so don’t be afraid. And don’t run from what you find. It’s part of who you are. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. What’s past is past. Root it out, recognize it, respect it. It’s a part of your life with which you need to deal.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself when examining your attitude, what influences it, and what impact it had or is having on your life now.
1. How do you respond to stressful situations?
This is where a bad attitude can quickly rise to the surface. When you are pressured to get something done, to perform at a higher level, or to meet high expectations, do you:
Examine which of these responses is most similar to yours when you become stressed out. Then look at why you respond in that manner. What attitude drives you to respond in that way?
A friend of mine used to become highly stressed whenever he had to repair anything around the house. He had limited skills as a mechanic, plumber, or craftsman of any kind, but he realized that his stress was still unusual. One day, while stressing out as he put together a desk for his children, he flashed back to his own youth and heard his father and his brother mocking him for his lack of skills. He realized then how those deep-rooted memories had given him an insecure attitude about doing that kind of work. Because of his insecurities, he often placed too much importance on the task, tried to do it too quickly, and was highly critical of his own work even though he was no worse than the majority of amateurs.
By the way, Michael Jordan’s mechanically inclined father used to tell him to “go in the kitchen with the women” when he was a boy because he was no good with a wrench or screwdriver. But he sure had some other skills that served him very well.
Look at those chores or tasks that stress you out and think about what emotions or experiences might be contributing to that stress. It’s important, because stress is a killer, literally. Research reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine revealed that stress potentially has extremely undesirable consequences. It has been found to speed the spread of cancer, increase vulnerability to viral infections, enhance blockages in veins, accelerate the onset of diabetes, and trigger asthma attacks. Stress has also been linked to ulcers, loss of memory, and general wear and tear on the nervous system.
2. Do you tend to look at the world in a pessimistic way?
Pessimism is the outward expression of bad attitude. If you seem always to find the downside of an otherwise great situation, if you look for the dark lining in the silver clouds, if you see the glass as half empty rather than half full, you too may be suffering from bad-attitude-induced pessimism. Pessimists aren’t much fun to be around. Or to be. They are dream-killers. Their dreams and the dreams of people around them get shot down.
A friend once complained to me that his wife was such a dream-killer. He confided that he was considering going to a marriage counselor because his wife’s pessimistic attitude was taking all of the joy out of their marriage: “I’ll be telling her about this great house I saw, and she’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ll never be able to afford a place like that.’ I mentioned the other day that I’d love to visit Switzerland one day, and she said, ‘When would you ever have the time or money to do that?’ Even when good things happen, she refuses to lighten up. I inherited $20,000 from an aunt, and her response was ‘There won’t be much left after we pay the bills.’ When I told her that I was due for a big promotion and pay raise, she said, ‘I’m not going to count my chickens before they hatch.’”
I had to concede that my friend’s wife certainly did have a pessimistic view of the world. I asked him to consider what experiences or emotions might be behind her pessimistic attitude. He said he didn’t know. He confronted his wife one night. He told her that she was always shooting down his dreams. They had a comfortable life, he said. What right did she have to be so pessimistic? She began weeping. She told him that her father had been a dreamer whose dreams never came true. He would often come to her and her mother and get them excited over a new invention or a new business or a new opportunity that he’d been working on, and it would always fall through. The family’s finances were always close to collapse because her father’s big plans never became realities. As a result, the daughter grew up with no trust in dreams and little patience with dreamers.
My friend talked with her about those experiences and emotions from her past. He reminded his wife that he was not the same man as her father. He noted that he had been successful in achieving many of his dreams and that they’d built a comfortable life as a result of his ability to transform them into reality. She had to agree, the evidence was all around her. She began to move away from a pessimistic attitude into a more positive one. Their marriage became more enjoyable for both of them once she discarded the baggage of her past.
Toss the Baggage and Lighten the Load
It’s amazing what can happen when you toss attitudinal baggage. Another friend of mine turns the sound off during certain NBA games because he can’t stand the commentary of NBC sports commentator Bill Walton. It isn’t that Walton doesn’t know the game. The big redhead won two NCAA championships and two NBA championships in spite of being plagued by injuries that forced an early retirement. No, my friend doesn’t like Walton “because he talks too darn much.”
Since I’m no stranger to being wordy myself, I admire Walton. He’s an Indy 500 motormouth. He squeezes more words into a twenty-second time-out than most people get into a twenty-minute conversation. He seems to take joy in every gusher of words. There just don’t seem to be enough minutes in a day for him to orate, articulate, or pontificate. The other NBA commentators often joke that they can’t get a word in.
I’m on Bill Walton’s team. I love to hear him run off at the mouth because I know he is basking in the freedom of tossed baggage. You see, Walton was once painfully shy. He refused to speak in public. He’d run and hide from reporters even after he had played a great game because, like me, he stuttered terribly. A friend finally helped him find a speech therapist who changed Bill’s life. It is such a pleasure for him finally to be able to express himself that he has a hard time keeping quiet so that other people can talk.
It’s hard to get upset at Walton for jabbering when you understand the pain he endured as a high-profile athlete who was afraid to speak in public. I certainly understand.
The good news is that regardless of where you are in life, regardless of your occupation or your station, you still have the power to choose your responses and your attitude. God made you in his image, and the Lord doesn’t make junk. You are a unique human being. The world has never before seen and will never see the likes of you again. You were born to bless others.
Attitude Tune-Up
Only the limits of our mind-set can determine the boundaries of our future.