ATTITUDE IS EVERYTHING! Dr. Ali Qassem www.aliqassem.com admin@aliqassem.com Why is it that some people are successful in their personal lives, family lives, and in their careers while others are not? There are people who struggle through life no matter how hard they work; they do not get the results that successful people get. Even though, every person has the power to realize his/her own potentials and turn his/her willingness and abilities into action and achieve good results, the results are different. What determines this difference is the person s attitude; the way he/she feels and thinks. Encyclopedia Britannica defines attitude as: A mental position with regard to a fact or state; a feeling or emotion toward a fact or state. According to Hogg & Vaughan research (2005, p150), Attitude is a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events or symbols.
In other words, attitude is the way we feel and think about people, things and events, with some degree of favour or disfavour, and it is the controller of our behavior towards these aspects. However, even though attitude is the controller of our behavior, it is not everything we need to sustain a successful, respectable and comfortable career and personal life. Many people believe that attitude is everything; the fact is it is not. Positive attitude will not be a substitute of our self-confidence, our self-image, our abilities, our experience or our skills. Moreover, no matter how positive our attitude is, it will not change the facts, circumstances, and events that surround us. Attitude is not everything, but it is the ultimate difference maker. It is the one thing that can make a difference in the results and outcomes of anything we do. Positive attitude will let us do things in ways better than negative attitude will; hence, better results. Negative attitude cancels all the other skills that the person has. One may comment that regardless of the state of our attitude positive or negative - we cannot change it; it is in our genes and we are born with it. The truth is that we are not born with our attitude. Our attitude is formed and gained by what we know and from the process of how we came to know what we know. It is formed by the influence of internal and external factors. The internal factors are the way we think, feel, our philosophy, how we see ourselves, our experience, and our choices. The external factors are our education, the environment; family, school, friends, media and everything around us, and events. These are the factors that control the information which delivered to our minds. The information and the data we receive the input - control our thought, and that will form our attitude, which controls our behavior, response and reaction towards other people, things and events the output. Positive attitude has a great impact on our lives, and it will always lead to a butter result. However, the fact is that positive thinking and positive attitude do not guarantee success. Positive thinking and positive attitude with effort increase the possibility of success.
In this regard, Shiv khera, the motivational speaker and consultant, mentioned Mohammad Ali, as an example. When Mohammad Ali used to go to the ring, he used to shout loudly, I am the greatest; I am the champion believing that he is going to win. However, he did not win by shouting these words. He was not saying these words while having a drink and watching TV, hoping that he would win. He was shouting while he was punching the bag and practicing, preparing himself for the game. Success in achievements comes from the winning positive attitude and effort not from wishful thinking. There is a big difference between I will try my best attitude and I will attitude. Mike Tyson and Mike Spinks were interviewed before their final championship game. Spinks said, I will try my best, Tyson said, I cannot lose, and we know who was the winner. The great thing about attitude is that it is a choice. Everyone can have a positive mental attitude towards people, things, events and circumstances. Things that happening to us control only 10% of the results, the other 90% are controlled by the way we react or respond to what happen to us. It is universally accepted among psychologists that we cannot control what happen to us, but we can control our attitude toward what happen to us; doing so, will allow us to be mastering change rather than allowing change to master us. In order to change our attitude, we have to change our way of thinking. We can achieve that by changing the information we add to our mind every day. It can be accomplished by changing the books we read, the things we observe and watch, and most importantly, the people we are associated with. There is a new psychological term called Relational illness. There are some people who are negative and will always poison our thought, make us feel down and influence us to be in the loosing side. Mark Twain said: "Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can become great". Resulted from doing a massive research, David McClelland, Harvard University professor of psychology, who was recognized internationally for his expertise on human motivation and entrepreneurship, and taught and researched for 57 years, found that, No matter how much attitude training
a person receives, his/her attitude, to a large degree, is determined by the people he or she is associated with. How we think, believe, see the world around us, and feed our brain have a major impact on our attitude. Whatever a person feeds or puts into his/her mind becomes a part of him/her. If a Malaysian new born baby, for example, lived and was raised in England, spoke English, and practiced the English culture all his/her life, he/she would think, feel, and behave as an English person, not a Malaysian. Feeding our mind with the right information continuously will enable us to establish our positive thinking habit. If we practice positive thinking, (Being optimist) we will act positively and receive positive results. Similarly, if we practice negative thinking, (Being pessimist) we will act negatively and we will receive negative unpleasant results. An optimist person, as Dr. Walter Staples defined, is the person who expects the best in life and sees the good even in the bad, realizing that in adversity as well as opportunity there is something to be gained. He also defined a pessimist person as the person who expects the worse in life by focusing on the ten percent of it that is wrong, forgetting about the ninety percent that is right. The pessimist says, I will believe it when I see it, the optimist says, I will see it when I believe it. The optimist takes actions; the pessimist takes a seat even though he/she knows that he/she has a long walk journey. Those who have the negative mental attitude have to change if they want to act on life, otherwise, they will allow life and its agonies to act on them. Changing our attitude to be positive always, can change our lives. If we do not like the outputs the results- we can change them by changing the inputs. Insanity is keeping on doing the same things and expecting different results. Moreover, if you do not like the situation you currently have, you will go nowhere with the same attitude, knowledge, skills and efforts that you currently have, and you must change. What would you like to be is your choice. You can choose to plant the seeds of failure; having negative thinking and attitude, or you can choose to
plant the seeds of success and realizing your greatest potential by having the right positive attitude. That will increase the possibility of living well and be amongst those who managed to go beyond the limits, reached their goals, and even make history.