Effectivity

Building Effective Attitudes part 1

Attitude was once a fashionable word.  “That man has attitude” people would say, half in awe; half in judgement.  Wearing a shirt that had the word ”Attitude” printed on it was seen as a display of attitude.  People loved to describe attitudes that lead to achievement, or use the cliche “Bad attitude” to describe someone that took a contrary view to their own.  In the end, though, we woke up to the truth that this word - Attitude - has been thrown around and beaten up to the extent that is barely recognisable. 

It has since fallen from fashion - as all overworked words eventually do - simply because it lost it’s meaning.  However, attitudes themselves haven’t fallen out of favour.  Far from it, attitudes are as common today as they have ever been.  Attitudes are still the basis of action.  They are still something deeply personal.  And they are still some of the most powerful forces at work in the lives of humans.  But are they controllable?

One mistake that we make is to assume that our attitudes are fixed - that they are out of our control.  We subconsciously believe that our attitudes are simply “How we are”, and that we are stuck with them whether they are effective or not.  Psychologists know otherwise, and they are teaching the business marketers what they have learnt.  Business marketers now understand that they are able to create desires and motivation in us, by carefully sculpting our attitudes.  They can work on our attitudes because these attitudes are not fixed and are effected by a host of factors from inside and outside of us.  They have developed ways to probe deep within our attitudes and alter them to suit their own ends.  If these marketers are able to modify our attitudes, then surely we can, and should, beat them to it.  This is a crucial area of personal development because if you can control your attitudes you will have much better control over your achievements. 

Psychologists and consumer behaviorists have developed a model called the Tri-component attitude model to describe the composition of attitudes.  This model claims that our attitudes are made up of three interlinked components:

• Cognition - What we believe about the subject
• Affection - What we feel about the subject
• Conation - What we intend to do about the subject.

The particularly powerful aspect of these three components is that they tend to stay in balance over time.  If we increase the strength of our beliefs about a subject, then subconsciously we will seek to strengthen our feelings and our intentions will follow, so that we retain internal integrity.  If our intention to act strengthens then we will construct stronger beliefs and our feelings will also grow stronger to keep the balance.  Over the next three days I will look at each of these three components in more detail, and see how we can maximise our effectivity by altering each component to suit our goals.  

Your attitudes closely precede your life.  It is almost impossible to live in conflict with your attitudes and so what eventually happens is that you change your life to meet your attitude or you change your attitude to line up with your life.  If you want to take control of your life you can, when you proactively start to develop effective attitudes.  It is much better that you should hold the keys to your attitudes than leave them with a business marketer.    So lets get to it.

Check back tomorrow for part 2 - which will deal with the cognitive component of attitudes and how we can develop them.

What do you know about your own attitudes?  Which attitudes help you achieve your goals and which hold you back?

Thanks

Tom