Effectivity

Building Effective Attitudes Part 3 - Affect

Today I went training with a couple of guys from my cycling team. It was a hot day and so we decided to take it easy, but as the kilometres passed we got more and more excited and ended up with a flat out time trial leading up to our turn around.  It was a bad decision and we paid for it as we headed home.  It was getting hotter and hotter as the day wore on and we were all feeling it.  From time to time one of us would simply say “Atsui” (Japanese for hot) and we all nodded and kept on riding.  Then I noticed that one of the guys had begun to repeat it over and over. In time with his pedaling rhythm, he whispered under his breath over and over Atsui, Atsui, Atsui…..It was probably subconscious but I knew exactly where it would head.  I decided to try out my own little experiment, In my mind I repeated the word “Samui” (Japanese  for cold) over and over, and you can probably guess how I began to feel.  I began to notice the feeling of coolness as the sweat ran down  my back, I felt the cooling of the wind rushing past my legs, I even felt a few blasts of cold breeze from the sides but I can’t imagine how.  All in all, I began to feel cooler.  Unfortunately, for my team mate, his ride didn’t end up so well.  He went from bad to worse and as we neared home, he began to lose his coherency and almost lost the plot.  He was suffering serious heat stress.  Of course it wasn’t just because he repeated how he felt, but there is no doubt that this made his feelings so much more powerful.  His feelings took control of his attitude which ended up controlling his performance.

This third part in our series about Building Effective Attitudes, deals with the Affective component of attitudes.  The second part looked at the Cognitive component.  The first part  outlined the way that our attitudes are made up of Cognition, Affection and Conation.    These articles are looking at each of these in turn and provide ways to modify your attitude to increase your effectivity. 

The Affective component of attitudes are your feelings about a subject.  Affect is not reality, only how you feel about reality.  So it is possible to have productive affection as well as unproductive affection.  Your attitude to a subject is clearly controlled partly by how you feel about it. 

Affect occurs without us even thinking about it.  We form feelings about something in an instant, based on a mass of possible cues that we perceive without even noticing them with our conscious mind.  How many times have you felt distrust of someone you meet for the first time without knowing why?  Afterwards you are able to justify why you felt they weren’t trustworthy, but at the time your feelings were instinctive.  These sort of feelings are out of your control.  They occur without you even being aware. 

Affect can also occur in the front of our minds.  We can watch and see our feelings gradually changing and progressing over time.  We meet a person and share something in common, we trust them because they make us feel relaxed.  They give us gifts and we begin to feel very attached to them.  We see them as a very close friend and we may even become very committed to them.  This can all come in observable and controllable stages. 

The main paths to modifying the Affective component of your attitudes are:

• Stimulus to feelings
• Arousal of Feelings 
• Reinforcement of these feelings

Affection begins with stimulus much the same that cognition does.  We feel something because something happens or something is, or something isn’t.  This stimulus occurs either in the real world (something sad occurs) or in your perception of the real world (someone offends you).  Either way, the stimulus has occurred and we transform this stimulus into a feeling. 

Sometimes the stimulus is out of our control, but sometimes we have the opportunity to influence it.  If we think about the stimuli we might receive if we were to learn to scuba dive, we can see that some stimulus is under our control and some is not.  The conditions of the ocean on the day of our first dive are stimulus to our affective attitude.  They determine how we feel about our first experience of diving and they are out of our control.  On the other hand, the school or instructor that we choose will also be a stimulus to our affect.  We may hate our instructor, trust him, or even fall in love with him.  Our feelings towards diving are partly controlled by our choice of instructor and this choice is controlled by us.  These sort of stimulus are well within your control

These stimuli, arouse feelings within us.  These feelings are based on the stimulus but are actually our response and our responsibility.  We are able to change the feelings that the stimulus builds in us if we know ourselves.  This is very important.  To effectively change our own emotions we have to have a very clear view of who we are and what we are like.  The practice of changing is relatively easy compared to the process of getting to know yourself.

Once you have modified your emotions their replacements must be reinforced regularly and from different angles.  Re visiting the same emotion in the same way will be valuable in modifying your attitude, but coming to the same emotions from a different stimulus will be even more powerful.  If you cultivate the feeling of satisfaction when you make a sale then this is powerful.   If you also cultivate satisfaction because you help your client then you are way ahead.  The two reinforce each other.

3 affective exercises:

1.  Choose the stimulus to hang your defining emotions on.  There are always many stimulus to choose from, it is up to you to choose the most effective stimuli.  Concentrate on things that are easily linked to positive emotions.   They are the obvious choice for productive affection.  Try this today, as you sit at your desk write down 3 things that you feel (without thinking) about a goal.   Work backwards to find out what makes you feel this way (what is the stimulus).  Choose another of the possible stimuli and try to get to the point where you feel a totally different affect.  Practice this regularly and you will find that it becomes a lot easier.
2. Think of a goal that you need help to achieve and write down any negative feelings that you have about the subject.  Decide why you feel negative (what is the stimulus).  Then look deeply inside yourself and find a positive feeling to the same stimulus.  It will exist somewhere, but it may take time to find it. 
3. Reinforce these feelings as often as possible.  When you have an effective emotion (one that directs you to effective action) then make the most of it.  Spend time regularly, consciously experiencing the emotion.  Soak yourself in the emotion and practice bringing the emotion to the front of your experience at will.  The more you spend time with this positive emotion the more powerful it will become for you.

These three simple exercises are just a sample to prove to you that you can manipulate your own affection and that this can change your attitude.  Use these as a base to develop your own tools to change your feelings.

It should be clear by now that while affection is personal and comes from deep with in us, it can still be modified and improved to take us closer to a more positive attitude.  A positive attitude can lead to positive action which can then lead to positive achievements.  This is an option too valuable to ignore.  Go to work on your feelings and you will see what I mean.  The next article in this series will be published in a couple of days and will deal with connation which is our intentions.  Stay tuned for more effectivity in modifying your attitudes.

How will you change your affection towards your goals today?  How will you improve your attitude and enable effective action?

Thanks

Tom