By accepting that you choose your attitude you demonstrate a level of personal accountability and pro-activity, which can fill your life and workplace with energy, either good or not so good.
There are benefits as a result of choosing your attitude. You can look at the choice like a fork in the road…which will you choose? Positive or negative?
By seeing the benefits of a good, positive attitude, it can sway your choices and change the path that you may have been heading down, which might not have been the best.
We do need to remember that there are those that feel they have no choice to choose their attitude because of circumstances. Things may have happened, like the loss of a loved one, an unwanted divorce, or an unexpected financial crisis.
As a co-worker to one who feels that they have lost their ability to choose their attitude you must be compassionate. If possible, come along side them, and try encourage them that they have the ability to exercise their free will to choose. But we must not lose sight of the fact that if you do not feel that you have a choice, then you do not.
The hope is that the attitude that you choose is to bring your best self to work each day and to love the work that you do. Even though we may not always be able to do exactly what we love to do all of the time, we can choose to have a great attitude while doing whatever work we need to accomplish.
My Italian Grandma was an excellent example of bringing a great attitude to do a job that was not what one would call exciting to do. After the work of fixing big Italian dinner she would start to clean-up and usually the other women would join in to help her. As we all know, doing dishes and cleaning a kitchen after feeding a couple of dozen people is not really fun.
As a child I remember all of the women of the family in my grandmother’s kitchen laughing and enjoying their time together as they were doing dishes and cleaning up in the kitchen. They could have complained, but they never did, they found the joy of being together enough to make the chore a wonderful time. What a lesson I learned (although it took me many years to realize this) that it is all about the attitude that we bring to the job that makes the difference.
If we can learn this one thing, “to bring our best attitude to work” we will accomplish so much. We will make our workplace an oasis of energy, creativity and fun.
Our attitude is infectious to those we work with… we do have the choice… what will it be?
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