We’ve all heard the
numbers: Consumer confidence is down, retail sales are dismal, unemployment is up. The housing market is iffy. And for many of us, the markets we serve are down as well. There is an important relationship to note here. Confidence – an attitude – is down, so sales are down. When confidence is up, sales follow. The principle at work here is this: Our actions follow our attitudes. The relationship between actions and attitudes is so close, that the
two go hand-in-hand, and our actions can be seen as outward expressions of our attitudes.
For example, let’s say that you got up this morning in a great mood. You bound down the steps, give your spouse a passionate kiss, announce to the kids that it is going to be a great day, and with effervescent energy dance
out the door to the car. It doesn’t take a psychologist to see that your attitude – your great mood – influenced your actions.
While it is easy to connect the two in this example, the principle that it unveils – that our attitudes influence our actions – extends to every aspect of our lives, and particularly to
our jobs, in even the slightest and most mundane portions of our work lives. I was in a particularly pensive mood yesterday afternoon, for example, and, as a result, chose not to answer a couple of emails, but, instead, left them for this morning. An action as simple and mundane as responding to an email was dependent on my attitude.
And that leads us to one of the greatest principles of self-improvement: You can choose your attitudes. You can choose to be happy; you can choose to be sad; you can choose to be confident, and you can choose to be cautious. Don’t believe it? Take this little test. Tomorrow, as you are eating breakfast, tell yourself these things over and over. “It’s going to be a rotten day. Everybody’s afraid to buy. Most people probably
won’t even see me. I’ll probably be laid off soon anyway.” Now, having repeated that litany of dreariness to yourself, pay attention to what kind of attitude you exhibit during the course of the day. You are probably not going to be effervescent and overwhelmingly positive. Instead, you’ll be depressed and discouraged, and you’ll spread it to the people around you like the plague.
