Can or Can't? It's An Important Question.

Are you the kind of person who looks at a new challenge as an opportunity to overcome the odds and achieve your goal? Or do you go negative and focus on all of the reasons why you’ll fail at the challenge? The first approach will get you a lot farther in life, but the second one is often easier and can be hard to break out of. The good news is that with a change of perspective, you can change your attitude towards challenges.It’s easy to ask ourselves what will happen if something goes wrong with our challenge. What if this big client hates my proposal and fires me? What if that cute girl rejects me when I ask her out? What if I tell everyone I’m training for a marathon and then can’t finish the race? But have you ever tried taking the opposite approach – focusing on the things you’ll gain if it goes right? This can be a powerful tool to shift your mindset around a challenge.

The way we think about our lives and ourselves has a direct impact on whether or not we succeed at our goals. If you have a “can do” attitude, you give yourself a chance to win in any situation. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will win all the time, but by having a little confidence in yourself you at least make it possible. With a “can’t do” attitude, there is no chance from the get-go, so why should you even try? Your odds of failing go way up with this approach.

After we completed a difficult task like painting our house, my dad would always clap us on the shoulder and comment proudly, “Once again, man triumphs over his environment.” It felt great to have him acknowledge that we had worked hard and completed a task that seemed completely impossible when we first started. Ask yourself this week: how much could you accomplish if you adopted a “can-do” attitude towards things that currently seem impossible?