How's Your Attitude?
One of the most important, yet most overlooked decisions a student leader has to make is the type of attitude that one can choose. People may approach a leadership task or assignment with a number of strengths, gifts, and abilities, but if their attitude is poor, it messes up the whole thing.
Many times I will help students to understand the inconsistency with which they view the priority of a good attitude. I will begin by asking a simple question: Whom do you most look up to?
From this question, there will be all kinds of different people who have made some kind of impact on that person’s life. Then I’ll follow-up that question with another: What is one quality or characteristic that you most admire about them?
At this point, I start asking for feedback. As students start answering, the responses are pretty similar in their focus. Consistently 80%-90% of the responses mention something about a person’s attitude. Now when I point that out, people don’t seem all that surprised. But then I add one more question that brings the whole exercise down to a very personal level.
I say something like: “If most of you admire a person and say that their most important quality has to do with their attitude, then what are you doing to develop those types of qualities within your own life?”
The truth is that most of us got up this morning and washed, brushed, groomed, and did everything we could do to make ourselves presentable on the outside. But how much time have we spent cultivating what shows itself time and time again on the inside? How much of a priority have we placed on developing the right kind of attitude?
Behavioral psychologist William James said, “The greatest revelation of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”
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