Attitudes
(4 minute read)
Thoughts and attitudes are related, but different.
Thoughts are conscious, they happen one at a time and are acted on by choice. You can either act on a thought or dismiss it.
Attitudes are habits of thought that through frequent repetition, have gotten hard-wired into your heart. They trigger your behavior automatically—on auto-pilot— and most often without a conscious thought.
(The heart referred to here is not the physical “pumping” heart in your chest. It is the core of who you are—your inner control center, so to speak—where your thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, desires, motives, and emotions influence your decisions and behavior).
This is the heart you should “always guard,” because everything you say and do automatically flow from it.
With a thought, you decide to act on it. With an attitude, you don’t think about behaving in a certain way, it’s just the way you always act and react in certain situations.
Bad thoughts and attitudes can be changed in an instant by simply dismissing the thought before you act on it, stopping bad behavior in its tracks, replacing it with good behavior and resetting to default.
So be careful which thoughts and behaviors you allow to become ingrained in your heart as attitudes.
Attitudes, like thoughts and actions, are either good or bad, but they can’t be both at the same time and can’t be anything other than good or bad and whatever else represents good and bad.
Your attitude affects every single aspect of your life—
It affects what you say and how you say it, what you do and how you do it, what you can do and what you can’t do, and what you will do and what you won’t do.
It affects how you treat yourself and how you treat others, how you approach the things in life that you want to do, need to do and have to do, but might not want to do.
It affects how you deal with both the good and bad circumstances of life, how you perform all the roles you play in life, how well you perform your work, and the quality of all your relationships, as well as the quality of life you live each day.
In fact, your attitude affects every single aspect of how you live, work and play.
A good attitude makes you feel better, look better, act better and do better.
It sharpens how you sound, improves how you communicate, elevates how you live and love, and enhances how you work, lead, play, perform and get along with others.
Everything is “better” with a good attitude.
But when your attitudes are “bad,” everybody knows it. They’ve seen it many times.
They know what triggers them and the behaviors they produce and they can see them coming from a mile away—
When you’re angry, short tempered, impatient, negative, pessimistic, hard-headed, defensive, moody, argumentative, mean, easily offended, hateful, making excuses, dismissive, un-coachable, or a combination of many of these and more.
The most dangerous part of a bad attitude is not that others hear it and see it, and can even predict it—it’s that you usually don’t. That needs to change.
The most important thing about attitudes is that they shape and define the “content” of your character. Attitudes are the “characteristics” of your character, revealing your identity… defining who (or whose) you really are.
Although God’s standard for our thoughts, attitudes and actions is perfection, in this world, we are not perfect in any shape, form or fashion although we should strive for this every day. As a born-again believer, one day your will be glorified and made holy, just like Jesus.
But until that day, let your goal be:
“Make every effort to have a good attitude about most things most of the time.“
That’s achievable even in this world.
Remember, you can either be the master or the victim of your attitudes.
Be the master!
Notable Thoughts About Attitudes
“When you hear or see a person’s attitude you are literally hearing and seeing the content of his or her character on display.” — James Allen, As a Man Thinketh; emphasis added.
“Have a good attitude about most things, most of the time or even almost all things almost all of the time.” RAC
“Always guard your heart because everything you (say and) do ‘automatically’ flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23); emphasis added.
Be intentional about which attitudes are allowed in your heart—only good. Reject the rest.
Memorize this rule:
Rule #5 – Habits repeated frequently enough become ingrained as “attitudes” that automatically trigger actions and reactions—without a conscious thought.
