ATTITUDE=100
The only disability in life is bad attitude.
- Scott Hamilton
Let’s begin with a simple example. Suppose that you wear goggles with grey tint and go on a walk. Now, how will you see the world? The blue sky will appear sombrely grey; the green rustling trees will look like a cluster of dead leaves. The lively faces of children laughing will seem all dull, the breathtakingly colourful world will become monotonous, predictable, uninteresting.
Now, is the world like that? NO! The world isn’t like that! Your damned goggles are like that. So you saw the reality not as it was, but as your greyed goggles made you see it. The intensely, vibrantly alive nature became lifeless. Everything that should have delighted you, refreshed you, and filled you with a new lease of vigour, appeared unexciting, listless, lacklustre.
Who is to blame? The world? Nope, surely not. Your goggles? No, not even them. Then?
You are to be blamed. Because at any time, you could have simply removed the goggles and thrown them in the bin. Then your eyes could have soaked in the dazzling beauty of the pulsating world around you. But you didn’t remove the goggles, and the world became languid.
Now, that was just an example. But that’s exactly what’s happening to us. Agreed,we aren’t wearing tinted glasses physically, as in the example above. But we all are wearing such mental glasses, and we perceive the world through these mental, psychological glasses. Glasses of everyone are tinted differently. That’s why everyone perceives the world differently, that’s why sometimes two people just don’t seem to agree on something. How would they? Their very glasses are contradictory. They both are looking at the same thing but both are seeing different things.
These mental glasses are commonly known as attitude or outlook.
And it is these glasses that we are aiming to change.
Now, you will find goggles of myriad shades in the market, each with different hues. But mental glasses come in only two shades. Shade of positivity and shade of negativity. But the blend of these two shades is unique in every single individual. While some possess glasses that have dominant shades of positivity with a slight tinge of negativity, still others have glasses that are predominantly negative with an almost absent tone of positivity. This clearly manifests in their actions. Hence no one thinks exactly alike, and no one does exactly alike.
Now imagine, if our glasses are positively shaded, then the world becomes a place of abundant possibility. But if our glasses are stained with pessimism, we will see negativity where none exists. We will be sceptic about everything, our inner lack of optimism will clearly reflect in our actions.
And you know what? We start moving downwards on the slope of life the moment we run out of the fuel of positivity and enthusiasm.
So the world is, as our mental glasses are, as our attitude is. So then it becomes so very important that we pay attention to what kind of glasses we move around with. What kind of outlook do we possess. Because, as John Mitchell said, “Our attitude towards life will determine life’s attitude towards us.”
Awareness precedes improvement. We first need to be aware of our weak points in order to improve on them. So I have made a pretty straightforward questionnaire, which is given below. The aim of preparing this questionnaire is to raise your awareness level about your mental glasses. We mostly respond to situations subconsciously, and that directly reflects our inner attitude. We need to first become consciously aware of our subconscious attitude, and then we will aim to polish it and give it more shades of positivity.
So below are 6 questions. Be honest while answering. You don’t need to tell the answers to anyone, you just need to accept it, and communicate the answer to your deeper self. The rest will follow. So go ahead, answer!
(Click on the image to enlarge)
If the answer to more than 4 questions was a thumping NO, then you are a very positive person. But if the answer to most of the above questions was YES, well, sorry to say, but then you are quite a negative person. But you have no need to worry, because in my initial tests, an overwhelming number of people got a YES in more than 4 questions. (I didn’t meet anyone who got NO in all six...)
An even better way to do this thing. Take two poster colours- black and white and a colour plate. Now go through the test. Every time you get a YES, add a drop of black, and every time you get a NO, add a drop of white. At the end, look at the colour. That will be the shade of your mental glasses.
An even better way to do this thing. Take two poster colours- black and white and a colour plate. Now go through the test. Every time you get a YES, add a drop of black, and every time you get a NO, add a drop of white. At the end, look at the colour. That will be the shade of your mental glasses.
NOW, TIME TO POLISH THE GLASSES...
CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A LARGER VERSION
So friends, try to imbibe the above sort of attitude. It will surely take time to cast off the worn-out garment of pessimism and negativity and wear radiant clothes of optimism, but keep on trying. Remember that even luck bows in front of an unmovable spirit. Through dogged determination, you can change your attitude. Convince yourself that you need to do it, have an unshakable will and unsinkable optimism, and you shall soon become a dominantly positive person who sees a slight trace of positivity even in the most harshest of circumstances, and to whom life is nothing but a cluster of disguised opportunities.