In Work and Life, Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude

Attitude is the result of your pattern of interpretation, and produces feelings about your current circumstances and future. In a self-supporting manner, your feelings often produce further thoughts that align with them in order to sustain your emotion. This can be self-destructive when you experience negative emotion. When we’re angry, sad, or feeling helpless, we’re often drawn toward thoughts that support the prevailing mood and dismiss information that contradicts our current emotions.

You can become entrenched in unproductive thoughts and negative emotions through the natural tendency for comparison. This is fueled by a society that urges you to look at yourself and your life critically, against some idealized model, or view life as a contest with those around you. Do you have the perfect figure? Could your muscles be bigger? Do you have a six-pack or is it more like a twelve-pack? Lips too thin? Too many wrinkles? Bags under your eyes? Balding? Don’t like your nose? Eyelashes too thin? Carrying too much weight? The twenty ways society allowed you to identify physical flaws fifty years ago has now become a hundred.

The tendency for comparison goes beyond physical appearance. There’s a thousand ways you can compare yourself to others, which lead you to enter the race to keep up with the Joneses. There are countless ways for you to make yourself feel insignificant and inferior to others if you go looking for even just a little while.

Another way in which you can mire yourself in unproductive thought and emotion is by holding to a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is the ‘nature’ approach of the nature/nurture debate, and it asserts that we’re largely born with the talents and traits we possess and that these remain largely as they are during the course of our lives. This can lead to a state of fragile egotism, where you’re driven to repeatedly demonstrate to yourself and others that you possess intelligence, influence, competitiveness, ambition, and talent. This is done to prove your adequacy for its own sake if you believe these qualities won’t change much over time. In the workplace, the "nature" mindset approach sometimes misuses point-in-time assessments - IQ tests, assessments of working personality, leadership traits or skills - believing that the person seen today is the same we would have seen years ago and will see years from now.

When you succeed, particularly in competition, a "nature" mindset tells you that you truly are superior to others in some way. This egotism can threaten the health of your relationships. And when you fail, the opposite occurs; a fixed mindset approach tells you that you were not good enough in some way, and that this will only change if external circumstances change as your human qualities are immovable. You’re now helpless—at the mercy of fate. Failures risk lingering in your mind and offer a much greater threat to your identity and self-esteem.

So, how do you manage your attitude about circumstances? Consider using the growth mindset (a "nurture" mindset) approach. A "nurture" mindset provides you hope that you can become a better version of yourself with time and effort, improving upon your perceived weaknesses and evolving your talents and knowledge.

When you adopt a "nurture" mindset there’s an opportunity to learn from every setback, every failure, every adverse circumstance—either those you personally experience or those you witness. In doing so, you come to know that your potential is transient precisely because you can learn, develop, and grow. And if failure or problems occur, you learn from them in order to overcome them next time. Misfortune becomes a temporary problem for you; one with specific causes. You are empowered to draw from challenging experiences in order to meet them more effectively in future. A "nurture" mindset doesn’t obsess with judgment, determining whether circumstances are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The focus is instead on what you can learn and apply constructively in future from the experience.

When you adopt a learning perspective, you aren’t enslaved by ego and the need to continually demonstrate your worth to yourself and others. You know you sometimes fail and face difficulties you don’t always overcome well. But that isn’t threatening because you can always rely on gaining wisdom and increasing the chances of success in similar future situations. You are not your failures. A failure is a happening; an event. It ends, and so do its consequences. With a "nurture" mindset you even get to choose, at least to some extent, whether the consequences are personally useful or not.

knowledge + reflection = wisdom

If failures and adversity do not threaten our sense of identity and self-worth, we expose ourselves to situations with greater risk and reward potential. We get creative; we innovate. One leader I worked with said he got to become an executive “by making more mistakes than most anyone else.” I think what he really meant was that he got to make more mistakes than anyone else, and he learned from them to fuel even greater achievements.

Another tool that helps regulate attitude is self-acceptance. It’s difficult in a world where we focus on idealized models of humanity, continual improvement, and lean processes to accept that we are ‘good’ enough at some point and practice self-compassion. The prevailing philosophy seems to be that once we do so, we’re somehow inhibiting our personal growth and giving in to mediocrity and compromise.

Self-acceptance is not in conflict with a "nurture" mindset; they’re not mutually exclusive concepts. At what point can you decide to love yourself and still acknowledge your potential to grow personally and professionally? The answer is: at any point! But you have to choose to do so. This sounds na?ve, but it’s true. You can decide, at any point, that while you’re not perfect, you are brilliant nevertheless - perhaps not in spite of your flaws, but because of them. Giving yourself a break does not mean giving up.

Reframing is common technique used to manage perspective on events and can help maintain emotional control. While this may be linked, directly or indirectly, to a growth mindset reframing invites us to take an alternative view of a situation - replacing our negative judgments with something more useful. By doing so, and even listing the positive, interesting, and negative aspects of an event, we provide ourselves more choice about the perspectives we can take.

We are able to literally create a new reality by telling ourselves: “I can choose to view this event as positive for the following reasons and interesting because of these few reasons. It’s up to me.” The next time something happens in your life that you are inclined to view as ‘bad,’ ask yourself: “Why could someone else view this event as positive? Why would someone view this event as novel or interesting?” Taking the time to ask and answer these questions also allows you to re-establish perspective that got lost in your initial, strong emotional reaction.

Gratitude is another resource for regulating your interpretation of events and the thoughts and emotions that result from them. We have a natural human inclination to seek more: more love, more attention, more respect, more knowledge, more power, more money, more material wealth. In doing so, we often compare ourselves to others—or to an ideal. This causes us discontent and amplifies the gap between what we have today and what we believe life should afford us.

At one point your parents probably said - annoyingly at the time - to be grateful for what you have already. There’s something to this advice our parents gave. At its core, gratitude isn’t about compromising, giving up on our dreams, or settling for mediocrity. It’s about turning our hearts and minds away from discontent and toward positive emotions that serve us better. Our parents likely gained wisdom through hard experience - chasing more until the pursuit itself either had a negative impact on other aspects of their lives, or they obtained what they were after and realized that there’s a point at which more is no longer fulfilling. A mind that’s calm, contented, and appreciative is likely in a much better place to see current and future opportunity - and exploit our current talents and experience for positive outcomes.

Transition can take place either from a negative perspective (i.e., I’m not happy with what I have and things must change) or a place of gratitude (i.e., I’m thankful for the people, experiences, and things that life has afforded me so far and am aiming to grow myself further in this direction.). The latter is a glass-half-full perspective that is far more useful.

It’s been said that you can catch more bees using honey than you can with vinegar. If our aim is to have our minds catch more constructive, positive thoughts and transition them to useful emotion, it’s very hard to do that starting from a place of discontent and negativity. Don’t let adversity teach you to appreciate what you had after it’s gone. Instead, be grateful for it while it’s still around.

·????????Do you ruminate over adversity and the circumstances of your life, or can you move on emotionally from difficulties?

·????????Do you allow problems and failure in one aspect of your life to negatively affect all the other areas of your life, or can you compartmentalize?

·????????Do you get carried away by gut reactions, or do you allow yourself and others to challenge the assumptions that lead you to negative thoughts and emotions?

·????????Do you continually compare yourself and your circumstances to others, concluding that you’re inferior or missing out somehow, or do you practice self-acceptance?

·????????Are you rarely content and always seeking more, or do you reflect positively on your circumstances in order to practice gratitude?

·????????Do you reframe tough circumstances, failure, and adversity to find the knowledge and positivity you can glean from them?

*This article is an excerpt from the book "Fulfilled: Finding Joy and Prosperity In Life"