Count Your Blessings

Attitude is upstream from results. It’s not the other way around.

I’m sure you’ve encountered this, but many people anchor their attitudes as reactive; the result of things that happen. If things are going well, they’re positive – and vice versa.

The problem is that most stuff that happens to you happens because of you. Most, not all – but there’s very little point in focusing on the stuff you can’t control. You should focus on what you can.

When you make that distinction, you can realize how important a positive attitude is. Here’s the thing – neither a positive attitude nor a negative attitude will, by itself, do anything at all. You can’t sit around and wish good things into existence, no matter how upbeat you are. You need to work. But your attitude tremendously affects what you consider as viable pathways to work.

Now, some people will tell you that your attitude has no physical effect on the world around you, and therefore can’t make an impact. The world doesn’t know about your attitude and certainly doesn’t bend to it in terms of what opportunities are presented. This falls into a category of beliefs I call “unhelpful.” See, I don’t like to qualify beliefs as correct or incorrect, right or wrong. Instead, I use the terms “helpful” and “unhelpful.” A belief that your attitude doesn’t matter is an unhelpful belief, as is a negative attitude.

Why? Because the human mind is an imperfect computer.

Have you ever seen those cool pictures where it looks like a bunch of scribbled lines, but when you put on red-colored glasses to eliminate the red lines, the remaining blue lines form a clear picture? Your life is actually very much like that. Every day you actually see a thousand different things – good and bad, useful and useless, opportunities and dangers. And then your mind filters them. But every mind filters differently, and even the same mind can filter differently based on what you’re primed to see.

Your attitude is a high-impact way of priming yourself to filter out the bad stuff and see the opportunities. It’s like a bag of marbles of different colors – instead of picking them out at random, your attitude lets you look in the bag and grab the ones you actually want.

You can create an amazing feedback loop. Start with a positive statement – “Today I will find some success, no matter how small.” Then work. It’s almost guaranteed that you’ll find some success, no matter how small. Then your attitude statement was proven correct! Use that to prime your mind for greater statements and your work for greater successes.

Work backwards if you need to. Look for a recent success, no matter how small. Say, “I did that, so I can do this.” Then work. Rinse, repeat. Count your blessings, and watch them grow.