In his book The Power of a Positive Attitude, Roger Fritz, president of Organization Development Consultants, points out the importance of how we feel about ourselves in building a positive attitude.
In Fritz’s opinion, we can eliminate any negative thinking about our capabilities by following these suggestions:
Cast away our negative past. List our personal liabilities, past mistakes, failures, and embarrassments. Burn the list. Watch it turn to ashes and say aloud, “That’s the last time I will let my past get me down. I have more important things to do.” Learn from our past bloopers and get rid of them. Get them off our back. There are enough monkeys in the world waiting to jump on it..
Evaluate our attributes. List our personal assets, competencies, and achievements. A realistic resume is a good start. Our friends will help. Read aloud our accomplishments three times a day for three weeks, and then read it as soon as we get up each day thereafter. Our actions will reinforce our dominant thoughts. If you have ever felt valuable, worthy, or good in the past, you can feel that way again. You spent many years allowing others to program you. Now it’s up to you.
Seek out positive input. Read or listen to something motivational or inspirational everyday. Positive imagery requires positive examples. You also need other people’s experiences. Their research, techniques, and results can out years off your learning curve and save you from painful trial and error.
Write down specific goals. This triggers your inborn, automatic goal-seeking mechanism. Even while you sleep, your subconscious will help you overcome roadblocks, obstacles, and defeats. As you achieve your goals, the written good supports you as a worthy, achieving person, and plants good self-image seeks.
Take responsibility for your emotional environment. It’s hard to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by a bunch of turkeys. The law of emotional gravity is strong. You become like those with whom you associate.
These beginning self-image building steps may seem simplistic, but they are based on sound research and results. They are the foundation for a strong—what I call internal—net worth. When you believe in and support your strengths and values and accept responsibility for being a deserving, creating achiever, then and only then will you have moved toward being a positive influence on other people.
Based on material from Roger Fritz’s book The Power of a Positive Attitude: Discovering the Key to Success, published by AMACOM.
About the Author(s)
AMA Staff American Management Association is a world leader in professional development, advancing the skills of individuals to drive business success. AMA’s approach to improving performance combines experiential learning—“learning through doing”—with opportunities for ongoing professional growth at every step of one’s career journey. AMA supports the goals of individuals and organizations through a complete range of products and services, including seminars, Webcasts and podcasts, conferences, corporate and government solutions, business books and research.