I’m a great believer in the power of attitude. I guess you could call me an attitude guy. My belief shows up in my relationships, my speaking, my writing—everywhere. I can’t remember a single time I was asked to get a better attitude. Of course there are times when I do need to adjust my attitude, but I am always careful to do that quickly and privately.
Although I believe in attitude, I don’t believe it is everything. I never have, and I never will. Attitude cannot make up for incompetence. Attitude cannot give you a skill that you don’t possess. Attitude doesn’t make all your dreams come true. It isn’t everything you need in life, but it sets the tone for your life. If all things are equal between two people except for their attitudes, the person with the better attitude will usually be more successful in life—and enjoy life more.
No single change you make in your life will have a greater positive impact on you and those around you than making a choice to improve your attitude. If your attitude capacity isn’t as good as you would like it to be, start the process of improving it by recognizing these truths. You may want to say them aloud:
1. “I need to change.” Change is personal. Only you can do it for yourself.
2. “I’m able to change.” Change is possible. Many others have changed.
3. “I’ll be rewarded for change.” Change is profitable. You will see results.
Your attitude is one of the most pliable and resilient parts of you. Regardless of your age or circumstances, you can change it if you’re willing to.
When I am in need of an attitude adjustment, I practice self-talk. In fact, what I really do is coach myself on my attitude continually throughout the day. Why? Because it’s so easy to become discouraged without a good attitude. The greatest separator between successful and unsuccessful people is how they deal with and explain their failures, problems, and difficulties.
Davies Guttmann, the author of The Power of Positivity, explains how people can be in the exact same circumstances and react totally differently. He writes,
Imagine two students who receive the same poor grade on an exam. The first student thinks, “I’m such a failure! I always do poorly in this subject. I can’t do anything right!” The second student thinks, “This test was difficult! Oh well, it’s just one test in one class. I tend to do well in other subjects.” These students are exhibiting two types of what psychologists call “explanatory styles.” Explanatory styles reflect three attributions that a person forms about a recent event. Did it happen because of me (internal) or something or someone else (external)? Will this always happen to me (stable) or can I change what caused it (unstable)? Is this something that affects all aspects of my life (pervasive) or was it a solitary occurrence (limited)? Pessimistic people tend to view problems as internal, unchangeable, and pervasive, whereas optimistic people are the opposite.1
What Guttmann is describing is self-talk. When pessimistic people see their problems as internal, they say to themselves, “This happened because of me.” When they believe their problems are unchangeable, they say, “This always happens to me.” And when they believe their problems are pervasive, they say, “This affects all aspects of my life.”
If this describes you, then I encourage you to self-talk your way to the other explanatory style. When something happens to you, recognize that it is external. Identify the source of the problem and say to yourself, “This happened because of that.” Remind yourself that it is changeable. You’re not trapped. Tell yourself, “I can make changes to prevent this from happening again.” And finally, know that just because something negative happened, it won’t be that way forever. Tell yourself, “It was a solitary occurrence. It doesn’t have to affect the rest of my life.”
Positive self-talk is one of the most important tools I have to keep my attitude positive. When something goes wrong, I say something like this: “Wow! That didn’t go the way I expected. Okay. That’s not what I wanted, but I can get through this. I win more often than I lose, but no one goes undefeated. Now, what can I learn from what I just experienced? What do I need to change? Is there someone who can help me? Because of this, I’ll become better, but I won’t become bitter. This too shall pass.”
My self-talk sometimes continues up to twenty-four hours after a failure or defeat. During that time, I want to process through any negative emotional baggage and put it behind me. That’s important, because whatever you can’t release possesses you. I also want to articulate what I am learning from it and the changes I need to make to become better. Finally, I identify the behavior I will need to exhibit to bring me out of my problem, because I’ve learned that I can’t talk my way out of a problem that I behaved myself into.
Coaching and encouraging yourself is huge when it comes to choosing a positive attitude regardless of circumstances. It is the single best thing you can do to help yourself. That being said, there are some foundational things you can do to put yourself in a positive position most of the time. By doing these three things, you make it easier for yourself to bounce back from difficulties:
It is much easier to face life’s difficulties and respond positively when you display humility. How do you do that? I love the advice I once heard: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” Doing small things that may seem unimportant to us but that benefit others helps us cultivate humility. Doing them with love builds on that.
Margaret and I have a vacation cottage in the mountains of North Carolina. We enjoy the coolness of the area during the hot summers, and we love the small-town feel. The pace of life there is different. Everyone is on “mountain time.” When we arrive there, my internal engine automatically begins to idle.
Recently my friend Ronnie was building a porch for us, and one day he tentatively asked if I would consider speaking to the local Rotary Club. Ronnie is an active member in the club and enjoys it, but his request came almost in the form of an apology. He shared that the club was small and couldn’t pay me. He said he knew that I often spoke to large crowds and made “big money” doing it.
By the time he finished, he was ready to say no for me. But I interrupted him and said, “Yes, I’d be glad to speak to the Rotary Club.”
Not knowing what to do with my yes, he again repeated the reasons he felt that I should say no. I assured him that I wanted to come and speak. And I did.
What a wonderful decision. When I got there, we all stood in line with our paper plates to get our food. Once everyone was seated, I got up and walked around from table to table and met each person. I learned more about our little community and the people there. During the proceedings, two high school students were recognized as scholarship recipients from the club. I was pleased to get to encourage them and meet their parents. And then I spoke and received a wonderful response from the club members. At the end of the session, the Rotary chapter chairman presented me with a walking stick as a thank you for my time.
That walking stick sits out on our porch. I often look at it, and sometimes I walk over, pick it up, and hold it in my hands. It reminds me of my early days of speaking. Small crowds, potluck buffets, paper plates, warm handshakes, and down-home folks. Those early days formed me and made what I do today possible. And speaking to my friends was an opportunity for me one more time to practice my calling. That walking stick helps me remember who I am—a guy named John who wants to be people’s friend and help them.
I greatly admired South African leader Nelson Mandela. I admire his attitude and his leadership. When he would refer to his twenty-seven years of imprisonment, eighteen of which were on Robben Island, Mandela would often say, “It was a tragedy to lose the best days of your life, but you learned a lot.” What a great outlook.
Teachability is an attitude of wanting to learn from every experience and every person. It requires an appreciation for everything we experience, knowing that we can always learn something—if we have the right spirit.
As a young leader, I didn’t always display that spirit. I was more interested in looking good than I was in getting better. I wanted to teach others more than be taught. I was not especially teachable. I wish that back when I was young, I had read these words by Kyle Rote Jr.: “There is no doubt in my mind that there are many ways to be a winner, but there is really only one way to be a loser and that is to fail and not look beyond the failure.”
Because I wanted to look good, I covered up my mistakes and didn’t look at my failures. As a result, I missed the important lessons I could have learned. The book of Ecclesiastes advises, “In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity, consider.”2 In other words, when trouble comes, be teachable.
As I look back on my youth and early career, and I think about the mistakes I made, I conclude that:
I didn’t make enough mistakes, because I wanted to be perfect.
I didn’t admit enough of my mistakes, because I wanted to look perfect.
Those things are not true of me anymore. My passion to learn has done nothing but grow. And it’s still growing. Because I want to learn from everyone and everything, it allows me to learn from everyone and everything. That’s a teachable spirit.
What is your attitude toward learning—from your mistakes, from your difficult circumstances, from others who want to help you, from others who oppose you? Are you ready to learn? Teachability not only displays a positive attitude, it also fosters a positive attitude.
To maintain a positive attitude, you need to be resilient and not let anything negative take hold of you. Time spent on being angry about the past means less time moving forward and doing what you desire to do. I keep very short accounts and don’t carry any emotional baggage in my life. Why? Because while I’m holding a grudge against someone and nursing my hurt feelings, they’re probably out dancing. If you think someone or something other than yourself is responsible for your success or happiness, then you will be neither happy nor successful. You have to learn how to bounce back from rejection.
I think all authors understand rejection. Personally, I’ve had my share. One of my most embarrassing moments as a writer was when my publisher sent one of my early manuscripts back to me. They didn’t even bother tweaking it. They just sent it back and basically said, “Try again.”
People outside of the publishing world don’t know this, but the submission of even the best manuscript is like a game of Ping-Pong. You send the manuscript in, and they send it back with questions. You send it back with the questions answered, and they send it to you with a request for changes. You send it back with changes made, and they send it back with copyedits. It goes back and forth, back and forth, until everybody is satisfied.
After hundreds of rejections, rewrites, and revisions, I can tell you that I’ve never gotten used to it. I think it’s weird when people say they like setbacks and enjoy disapproval. I don’t. I like approval, applause, thumbs up, and standing ovations. But I don’t always get what I like. Although I’ve never gotten used to rejection, I do know how to get through it successfully. How? Practice.
Dean Smith, the great North Carolina basketball coach, had a great perspective on setbacks. He said, “If you make every game a life-or-death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.” I love that, because I recognize that resilient people have a positive outlook. They know that the difficulties they’re facing are only temporary. They reflect on the fact that they’ve overcome problems and setbacks before and survived. And they can do it again. Resilient people don’t focus on the negative experience. They focus on what they can learn from the experience.
When I played basketball in high school, during the games my coach would always tell us, “Give yourselves a chance to win.” What did he mean? He wanted us to battle hard and keep the score close for the first three quarters if we were playing a tough opponent. That way in the fourth quarter, we had a chance to win.
Johnny Majors, a highly successful college football coach, said, “Eighty percent of the college football games are won in the fourth quarter.” By his reckoning, four games out of five are close enough to come down to what is done in the last fifteen minutes of play. How do you stay in the game until then? Resilience. Resilience gives us a chance to win.
People say that starting is half the battle. I disagree. Have you ever attended a game where one minute after it started, the buzzer sounded and the players lined up to receive their trophies? Of course not! Anyone can start. Not everyone stays in the game.
I think it is very easy for us to lose perspective in life and get discouraged. Too often we see a single victory as a finish line, or a single loss as a grave. The reality is that life is a long game. If it were a baseball game, there would be thirty thousand innings. (That’s one inning a day for more than eighty years.) If it were a race, it would be more than eighty thousand miles. (That’s a 5K every day.) If it were—You get the idea. We need to have the right perspective and remain positive because there are still a lot of at bats or miles ahead of us.
Perspective is especially important if you’re a leader. Recently it was my privilege to help consult with a team called Finish Line Leaders. I love that name! While I was with them, I taught a lesson about how to maintain perspective as leaders who want to reach the finish line. Here is a summary of what I taught them:
• Recruiting: Entering the race is essential to finishing the race.
• Qualification: Qualifying team members on the front end increases the odds of their finishing on the back end.
• Attitude: Your attitude as a leader sets the tone for the team as they race.
• Conditioning: The finish line is never close to the starting line; you need to train to reach it.
• Example: Leaders set the pace for others and demonstrate how to finish the race.
• Belief: Leaders inspire others to finish well.
• Resiliency: No one crosses the finish line by accident.
• Teamwork: Leaders never cross the finish line alone.
• Celebration: The more team members who cross the finish line, the greater the celebration.
In the end, as leaders, what we want to do is help the members of our team to cross the finish line with us so we can all celebrate together. It’s difficult to start the race, run it with excellence, and make it to the finish line unless we maintain a positive attitude.
I’ve always felt that people with great attitudes add value to everything they do. That’s one of the reasons I’ve taught leaders about the importance of attitude. Now I have stats to back my belief. I recently read an article in Fast Company about the consulting firm DHW. Here’s what the article reported:
You probably heard that a happy employee is a productive one who can boost the bottom line. How much? Here are some numbers:
• 33% higher profitability (Gallup)
• 43% more productivity (Hay Group)
• 37% higher sales (Shawn Achor)
• 51% lower turnover (Gallup)
• 50% less safety incidents (Babcock Marine Clyde)
• 66% decrease in sick leave (Forbes)
• 125% less burnout (HBR)
It’s no surprise that the twenty employees of Delivering Happiness at Work (DHW) compiled this list and toss around the data any chance they get. The startup brainchild of Zappos’ Tony Hsieh and business partner Jenn Lim emerged after the publication of Delivering Happiness, a book that waxes on the benefits of value-based management and work-life balance.3
If you’re a leader, you can’t afford to ignore the importance of attitude. And if you’re not a leader—you can’t afford to ignore the importance of attitude. If your attitude is wrong, it’s difficult for anything else in your life to be right.
Perhaps the finest example of positive attitudes in the midst of difficult circumstances that I’ve ever seen is displayed by the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura. They have been called the Paraguay Landfill Harmonic Orchestra. The first time I saw them was when I was in Helsinki, Finland. I was there to speak, and right before I went onstage, they played.
The audience and I could see instantly that they were different from any other orchestra. Most of the musicians were children. Maybe that didn’t make them different from all other orchestras, but something else did: their instruments were made out of the trash from their city dump in Asunción, Paraguay. All of us were spellbound as we listened to beautiful music played by beautiful children who have come out of difficult life.
I was proud to have my picture taken with them that day, but I couldn’t get the fond memories of them out of my head for weeks afterward. So a few months later when I traveled to Paraguay, I visited their little music school near the dump. I talked with the orchestra’s founder and conductor, Favio Chávez. I met the man who makes the instruments out of the trash they collect. And I listened to the families who are being lifted in life by the work of those at their school.
Favio started the school to help people. He wasn’t even a professional musician. He was an environmental engineer who played guitar. He said of the school, “Those who know a little train those who know a little less. We work together. The world throws us their trash, and we give back to the world beautiful music.” They also demonstrate to the world the value of a great attitude.
Most people would say that if you have nothing, you can do nothing. Favio and the children he helps prove that’s not true. The members of their little orchestra may have a dump beside them, but they have a great attitude inside of them. As I watched their faces as they played, I thought of the words of American author, philosopher, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
These kids have come alive because their attitude allowed them to overcome adversity. And their ability to overcome adversity is empowering them to add value to others.
Years ago I determined that attitude is a choice. Since that time I haven’t felt sorry for anyone who chooses to have a bad attitude. I just try to help the ones I can by encouraging them to increase their attitude capacity. And as for the ones who won’t change, I just try to avoid them.
If your attitude gets better because your circumstances improve, then that says nothing about your attitude. It’s only a sign that your situation has changed. How can you tell that your attitude has gotten better? You know that your attitude capacity has increased when your attitude is remaining positive even as your difficulties rise. When that happens, you know you can weather almost any storm and come out of it better than ever.
1. What kind of self-talk do you engage in? Have you ever paid attention to it? If not, take some time to observe it. What could you do to make what you say to yourself more positive?
2. How would you score yourself in the three areas discussed in the chapter: humility, teachability, and resilience? Which of the three could you most readily improve? What can you do immediately to improve it?
3. If there is so much evidence that having a good attitude makes people happier and more productive, why do you believe people still choose to have negative attitudes? What could you do to encourage others to choose to have more positive attitudes?