The longer I live the more I realise the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances. It’s more important than failures and successes than what other people think or say or do. It’s more important than knowledge, appearance or skill.
It will make or break a company, an institution, a home.
The remarkable thing is we have a choice regarding the attitude we will embrace every day, today in fact.
We cannot change our past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.
I believe that life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it.
We are in charge of our attitudes.
The author of this article is Will Kintish, leading UK authority on effective and confident networking both offline and online. If you’d like Will to speak at your conference or training workshops, call him on 0161 773 3727. Visit www.kintish.co.uk and www.linkedintraining.co.uk for further free and valuable information on all aspects of networking.
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I certainly agree that attitudes are really important Will. But would you agree with me in pointing out that, outcomes are dictated by our behaviours, what we do or say rather than merely how we feel about something?
For example, if your attitude towards cold calling or other forms of sales prospecting is that you hate it, that is simply an internalised emotion. The fact that your sales pipeline might be looking a bit thin is most likely due to the fact that you did not make any calls – the action (or lack of it in this case) If you made the calls (despite your attitude towards it) your attitude remains the same but the outcome in all probability would be vastly different.
Conventional wisdom teaches us that our attitudes drive our behaviour. So if you accept that it’s only actions that determine outcomes then to change an outcome you must adjust your attitude right? The problem with this premise is that it’s extremely hard to change a deep seated emotional response to a task, event or set of circumstances. You can’t simply say to yourself, “Yesterday I hated X, today I absolutely love X” and by saying so, shift your emotional response to X. We as humans simply do not work that way.
What The Sandler Sales Institute (amongst several other studies, Strengthsfinder 2.0 is a great example) have long realised is that conventional wisdom in this case is wrong, it not attitudes that drive behaviour but rather the reverse that is true. We have shown time and again that you can only change outcomes by changing your behaviours BUT that that the outcomes of carrying out the new behaviour more often than not cause a change of attitude!!
We’ve seen many, many clients come to us with a dread of cold calling and because of this attitude they didn’t do any prospecting. We could not change this embedded emotional response overnight, but we asked them to make some cold calls anyway despite their distaste or fear or it. The outcomes they achieved as a resulted of the new behaviours resulted in quite remarkable shifts in their attitude toward the activity and now that they enjoyed it more, they did more of it and so the cycle continues.
So I would argue that in the world around us:
It’s ALL about behaviours