Attitude is everything. Your attitude towards life, environment, people, things, events and even yourself determines the quality of life you are going to have. The things that happen to you and all possible circumstances in your life are not as important as your attitude towards those things and circumstances is. Why? Because you decide how much they are going to influence you. If you choose they can have no long lasting impact at all. It is your reaction, or attitude that determines how much power everything around has towards you. It means your attitude has the greatest power to make you happy or unhappy.
Attitude formation
Attitude formation starts the day a baby is born into the world. It has no opinion of its’ own, but from the very first day starts collecting information from the environment. The closest environment as you know is our parents. They start telling and explaining to us what is good and what is bad. Since babies do not have an opinion of their own, they accept their parents’ opinions as an absolute truth. They trust their parents as in the beginning their parents are the only people they know. Later in life, their attitudes can be changed or confirmed and strengthened. If the experience that they later have in life about this or that question confirm their parents’ delivered opinion, their initial attitude is confirmed and becomes very strong. Later it rules them and the formed attitude becomes a subconscious machine that makes them to react to something one way or another.
As our thoughts are a driving force in attitude formation we have to be very careful about the thoughts that are in our minds. If we accept some thoughts as our own, due to our experience or simply because our parents told us to do so, we start forming an attitude towards this thing or that. Thoughts are confirmed and strengthened by feelings and when we have so many confirmations about some question in life we form a rigid attitude and even possibly a belief towards it.
Attitude change
Attitude change is only possible if we are able to change our thoughts and reactions to everything around. We have to imagine and see things in a different light than we used to see earlier. Our attitudes should never stay in status quo. They can be changed. We are like computers that can be reprogrammed. I hear people saying that they cannot do this or that because they are that way. However, you formed yourself that way because you formed your attitude towards that thing in this way. What do you have to do now? You have to reform your attitude. If you want to change your attitude towards certain aspect you have to start talking to yourself that things are different than you used to believe and from now on you are going to believe differently and behave in a new way. Do it on a daily basis until you see positive results. I hope you learned something about importance of your attitude in your life.
My previous post was thought for the day:
http://thought-fortheday.blogspot.com/2011/02/thought-for-day.html
See also:
Positive thoughts
Beautiful thoughts
More information on attitude you can find in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude/(psychology)