Your attitude is a gateway to your personality. It is impossible to have a good personality and have a bad attitude. These two items must be congruent to be authentic. Are you a “Glass half-full,” or a “Glass half-empty” type of person? I like to think of myself as the “Glass is refillable” type of person. This statement is even a demonstration of attitude, one that tends to ride the fence, or doesn’t choose sides because I don’t like conflict. The really wonderful thing about your attitude is that you get to choose yours every day. Just like a belief that is negotiable, your attitude is also negotiable. You wake up every morning and have the choice to see the day as partly cloudy or mostly sunny, the choice is truly yours to make.

 

I heard a story about a married couple, the husband was a bit of a complainer, always able to find the negative in most any situation. The wife was one who constantly tried to please her husband in hopes that someday he would see the error in his ways. One morning as the couple was sitting at the breakfast table, the wife asked her husband what he would like to eat, the husband gruffly responded, “Two eggs, one fried, one scrambled.” The wife went to work to fill his order, when she presented the husband his plate he disgustedly barked, “You scrambled the wrong egg!” I hope that you are in no way in possession af an attitude as bad as that, but even that grumpy old man had it in his box of tools to make a better perception of the situation at hand and find at least some good in what was occurring.

 

To improve our attitudes, I feel that it is imperative to seek to find the good in all situations, this is hard and I am not at a level of perfection myself, ask my wife. But, if we work to see the good in every situation we will start to see the good in more and more things. We will start to seek out the good in all situations and this will build our positive attitude. Remember, this is a simple thing to do, but it is far from easy, if it were everybody would be a smiling bundle of joy and maybe that would start to be a little irritating.

 

When I work with individuals and even groups, I like to start each session by asking, “What is good in your world today?” and as we go along I ask them later to tell me “What is your win for the past week?” At first, folks struggle with this question and really have difficulty coming up with something. Many will say, “Well I am here and breathing.” This is a good start, as I would hate for them to be here and not breathing. It always intrigues me that as we go along each week, people start finding all kinds of things that were good that week and some have trouble by the end of the sessions to keep their win for the week to just one item, many say, “Wow, I don’t know where to begin, there were so many wins this past week.”

 

I never, in these sessions ask for what is bad or what is wrong as we all know what those items are, and we most likely have reflected on them enough to make us nauseous. No one is harder on us than our self, so there is no sense in dwelling on them. Besides, we are working on developing a positive attitude not participating in a pity party. Keeping a positive attitude can be difficult but if you stay at it long enough it will become a regular part of your routine and you will find that you have developed a better attitude in just a few short days.

 

What is your win for the week?