10/08/2023
YOUR ATTITUDE IS THE KEY TO YOUR SUCCESS OR FAILURE IN LIFE – FROM THE LITTLE THINGS TO THE BIG ONES
By Emeka Ugwuonye
I am forced by events around us to harmer on this topic for our members. Each of you have the key to your happiness and success or your misery or destruction. That key to either outcome is your attitude. As someone who constantly deal with many people facing stressful and challenging situations in their lives, I constantly see how your attitude to live influence events around you. To help you, I chose to write a post on the subject of attitude and the key to success or failure.
In his famous book, The Law of Human Nature, Robert Greene went to a great and lucid extent to explain the effect and role of our attitudes to our lives. He wrote as follows:
“Each of us has a particular way of looking at the world, of interpreting events and the actions of people around us. That is our attitude, and it determines much of what happens to us in life. … If we feel hostile and suspicious, we make others feel such emotions in our presence. We sabotage our career and relationships by unconsciously creating the circumstances we fear the most…
“What we must understand about the attitude is not only how it colors our perceptions but also how it actively determines what happens to us in life – our health, our relations with people, and our success. Our attitude has a self-fulfilling dynamic.
“The way we think about people tends to have a life effect upon them. If we feel hostile and critical, we tend to inspire critical emotions in other people in return. If we feel defensive, we make other feel defensive.”
To understand the importance of attitude, I will tell you a story. There was a story of two men walking on the same bush path at night in the dark. Something scratched the first man’s foot. He thought it was a toad. It was actually poisonous snake that bit him. But because he assumed it was a toad, he did not worry and nothing happened to him. A few minute later on the same spot, something scratched the foot of the second man. He thought it was a snake bite. In fact, it was a toad that scratched him. But because he thought it was a snake bite, he died the next morning. Your mental predisposition is your attitude. It locks on to the dynamics of your perception of reality and what you think becomes your reality. What you think eventually happens to you.
Another way for me to explain the meaning of attitude and how it affects you is to simply ask you: Why is it that no single thing really means exactly the same thing to two people? Even for two identical twins, no one thing affects them the same way. Everything always means slightly different things to any given two people. The philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer stated it thus: “This is why the same external events or circumstances affect no two people alike; even with perfectly similar surroundings every one lives in a world of his own”.
What makes your world unique is your attitude. The unique way you see the world is your attitude. It could be positive and it could be negative. However, attitude is manageable and controllable, even though it could be originally influenced by many factors including genetics, upbringing, and society around you. You can change it if you understand the role it plays in your life. To emphasis the fact that we can change our attitude, William James wrote: “The greatest discovery of my generation is the fact that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.”
In our context within DPA, how does attitude play in your dealings with others? I will give you just one illustration. Sometimes, we are not able to meet the timeframe we set for various activities. For instance, somebody may be owing you money and you call DPA for help, and I promise to write a letter to the person. I may forget because other urgent matters distracted me. Of course, you are disappointed that I did not send the letter. How do you react to this? Different people will react differently. Their reaction will depend on their attitudes. Now, I will show you how different attitude produce different results, as follows:
PERSON A:
Will send a message and say: “DD, please I am still expecting the letter. This is just to remind you. I know you are busy”.
PERSON B:
Will send a message and say: “I am disappointed that you did not send the letter you promised, even after I registered. I can’t believe that after registering you would abandon me and ignore me while attending to others. I wonder if DPA is a scam”.
Remember that the only thing that happened was just that I was overwhelmed by workload. How do you think I would react to these two people? I will feel sorry for not attending to PERSON A and I will do everything to attend to her. However, PERSON B has placed me on the defensive. I realized that the only mistake I made was to have promised to write the letter the next day. Perhaps, I would have been better off if I had told her I would write the letter next week instead of next day. In dealing with her next time, I will have to be very careful and very guarded. Besides, if I feel pressured to write that letter, I might not be so passionate about it. I am no longer writing to get back her money. I am writing just to make sure she would not say I did not write. (I am not just talking about myself. I am telling you how a normal person would react to that situation).
The difference between PERSON A and PERSON B is that A has a positive attitude to life. She is able to interpret what happened with an open mind knowing that indeed, there could be a good reason for me not keeping my promise. Yes, it is possible that I had a good reason for not doing the work or that I had no reason for not doing the work. Faced with the possibility of good and bad reason, A chose to assume the good reason, while B chose to assume the bad reason. To see how important attitude is, the reactions of A and B will result in totally different outcome and it will change my relationship with them in the future. When I am dealing A, I am free and I am optimistic and I will always give her my best estimate of time. But when I am dealing with B, I will actually avoid making any promises to her. I will start saying: “I am not sure when to write to them” or “I really don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to handle this situation. It is beyond me”. I am just avoid placing myself in a situation where B will judge and criticize me. Eventually, I will not want to do business with B.
Many of us are going through life, facing all manner of challenges and obstacles. We don’t know why things are not working well with us, why many people are disappointing us and betraying us, why we are not having customers in our business, why our landlords are all wicked, why men are always disappointing us, why we cannot find good lovers, etc. The fact is that we should look at our attitudes. We should adopt more positive attitude. We should learn that everything has more than one way to look at it – the positive way and the negative way. Looking at it the positive way boosts our morale and highs our spirts, and looking at it the negative way depresses us and brings out the beast in us. We need to be able to choose the positive way. The ability to control your choice (your reaction to a situation) is a matter of attitude.
Let me say it in a way you will always remember this: It is not what happens to you that will kill you, but rather, it is how you react to that thing. A man was in my office yesterday and he wanted to tell me what caused his marriage to break down. I kept trying to stop him. I told him not to bother to tell me what his wife did that caused him to file for divorce. I told him that I would have been interested in hearing it if he was still interested in reconciliation. But since he already filed for divorce, there was no need. I wasn’t really interested. But he went ahead to tell me. When he finished, I told him that the same or worse things had happened to other men and they are still in their marriages. So, what his wife did was not the true cause of the breakdown of their marriage. He was shocked. I had to calmly explain to him that he had a role in what happened. I said: “Yes, your wife misbehaved. That was her own role. But that was not enough to cause the marriage to break down. Something else happened in addition to what your wife did. That something else was the failure of forgiveness” (ie, his reaction to what his wife did). He was shocked. His wife’s behavior was what happened to him. His failure to forgive her was his reaction to his wife’s behavior. The way you respond to what happened to you depends on your attitude, and, in the end, that is what determines the outcome.
Learn to have great and positive attitude. That will give you tremendous power and control over your destiny. I wish I would have more time to teach on this subject.
