Attitude is Contagious: Surround Yourself with People Who Bring out Your Best

Self-help books focus on success. They direct our attention to external victories, being recognized for our worth, skills, and abilities. Now we have something to say about that: we’re not trying to achieve “external success,” but rather inner peace. 

We’re always acquiring new skills, and that’s all well and good. Proving we can do something well is very gratifying, there’s no denying that. But what really matters is our attitude, because that’s what makes the difference between a good day and a bad day. 

It’s what gives us the ability to be optimistic when everything is against us. It’s what allows us to believe in ourselves when other people are trying to shrink us down and make us small.

“I AM worth it, I DO know how to do it, and I DO deserve it.” These are the three affirmations we should use to feed our attitude every single day. The attitude we should start our days with, just as important as our coffee and toast.

However, there are times when the negative, defeatist, or even toxic mentalities of some of the people around us can definitely affect this sunny perspective and make it stormy.

Your Attitude: A Personal Decision

The number of books published on happiness and personal growth doubles every year. However, the WHO is already warning that sooner than we think, depression will be the number one health and disability problem worldwide. 

So then, let’s go ahead and educate our children to be good at science, math, technology, computer programming. But we also shouldn’t forget to teach them how to deal with frustration, how to process their feelings, their anger, their sadness…

Nobody really talks about attitude, or how to do that “believing in yourself” thing. We don’t know how because the only thing they taught us in school was how to identify the subject and predicate of a sentence or find the least common denominator. We’ve been taught to be good, respectful, and get high grades and then happiness will just appear.

But sooner or later we’ll find out our good intentions aren’t enough for success. We realize that if others don’t believe in us, our fire goes out like a candle blown out by a cold wind. 

Society may give us a good education, but it also holds us back by sticking us in an isolated waiting room. We wait there with other waiting people who infect us with their malnourished hopes, their defeatism, their cut-and-paste self-esteem.

Eventually we realize we’re “sick.” We’re infected by depression and passivity. Our mind clouds over and goes on auto-pilot, unfortunately directed by other people’s negativity.

In the end, we see that attitude is nothing more than a personal decision. It’s one that pulls us out of barren, desolate land where nothing grows. We’ll remember we don’t deserve to be there. We’ll gather the energy to find that which we truly need.

Three Components of a Strong, Brave Attitude

Some people say that a positive attitude won’t solve all our problems. What it will do is annoy plenty of people. With their closed minds and narrow perspectives, they do nothing but put barbed wire up around our dreams and bring storms on our sunny days.

We need to keep in mind that attitude is a personal value that we’ll need to work on every day. Because if we expect it to improve by itself, the toxic influence of others may actually make it even weaker.

So it’s always good to remember these three elements that maintain, shape, and foster strong attitudes:

• Commitment: a good attitude requires a serious commitment to ourselves. A commitment to the goals, values, and objectives we set for ourselves.
• Self-control: in order to fulfill that dream, reach that goal, we need to take control of our own realities, over the things that happen to us. It’s our responsibility. We adopt an active, positive, brave attitude.

The last piece of the puzzle is determination. It’s one component we must not forget, because life will always put challenges in front of us every day. We have to see these tests as challenges we can learn from and use to grow. Let’s be the protagonists of our lives.