Chicken-or-Egg Problem: Good Attitude or Good Life?

Do you ever have the attitude of, “I’ll change when the world changes?” Yes, this attitude applies to arguments between people (e.g., “I’ll apologize when he apologizes.”) and individual’s behaviors (e.g., Michael Bolton’s “Why should I change? He’s the one who sucks.” in Office Space), but it also applies to your attitude toward the world. After all, if you are miserable, it’s usually because your life has given you a reason to be miserable, right?

Well, unfortunately, you can’t act like a jerk and expect the world to treat you like royalty (unless there’s money in it for them, as in celebrities who can get away with acting like monsters). Yes, you might have a good reason to be unhappy, but—as I’ve discussed in a previous post—life isn’t fair and, therefore, it is not fair for you to treat others poorly just because something unfortunate happened to you. Quite the opposite, the “kicking the dog” approach to life will often compound your problems: whether you ruin others’ days and they retaliate in some way or you simply make it so no one wants to be around you, your attitude will usually only make your situation worse. With the rare exceptions of exemplary customer service or your parents rewarding your tantrum after a negative experience with a beneficial act, usually you will only make things worse.

How does this work? Well, in the world of business or career, for example, people want to disproportionately reward their best staff: the ones who go out of their way to help the customer or the business. People usually want to show their appreciation for people who go above and beyond, and so seeing the effort put forth will often lead to positive results. Yes, it is true that some work goes unnoticed or overlooked for unfair reasons, but the truth of the matter is that a negative attitude will usually contribute to more negative outcomes than a positive attitude. You try harder, see better outcomes, get better reactions from others, and will eventually see rewards directly from the positivity itself.

So the big question is, “How do I break this trade off by deciding to ‘blink first’ and change my attitude?” Well, if you are familiar with the Emotional Formula, you’ll know that Emotions = Desire + Belief + Experience and will know that if your experience won’t or can’t change first, your only options are to change your desires and beliefs to shift your attitude. Here are some desires and beliefs that you can adopt immediately to change your attitude:

• “I want a positive outcome and know that the best way to attain this is through constructive action.”
  
• “A negative attitude isn’t going to do anything except make things worse.”
  
• “Let me focus on what I can do right now and not worry about the things I can’t affect at this time.”
  
• “If life is random, then if I wait long enough then good things will randomly happen to me and I’ll feel better as a result. Why wait for it to happen, then, to feel better?”
  
• “My life is otherwise going great. Why am I letting this one thing control how I feel and ruin my day?”
  
• “I do have things that I can do to improve my situation; just because luck didn’t go my way this time doesn’t mean that I can’t still do those.”
  
• “What if I hold onto this crappy attitude and miss out on an even better opportunity that appears right in front of me?”
  

There are many, many more, but hopefully this gives you an idea of how to counteract a bad attitude from a bad situation. There are many approaches to combat negative beliefs, from focusing on how worse it could be so you feel more gratitude or focusing on how much you have so that you stop taking things for granted. You can also switch your desires to things that are more attainable in the moment or remind yourself how you already have much—or almost everything—that you want and so, therefore, you must be overreacting. Each one of these techniques changes your attention or perception in a way that allows you to be more constructive moving forward.

Yes, it would be nice if the world catered to you, but the problem is that when something bad happens, a negative attitude over time will only make the world appear even worse as you either only notice bad things or elicit negative reactions from the people around you. Since it can only make your life worse, doing whatever you can to change your attitude first is the safest and best approach forward to turning your life back around to more positive results.