The Right Mental Attitude

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goals; nothing on earth can help a man with a wrong mental attitude.”

~ Thomas Jefferson

I was at a job seekers event not long ago and I met two people. There were many people there–over 150–and I bumped into one fellow after a breakout session and before the formal networking tables began. He was preparing to leave and I asked him which networking session he was going to, “Steve, are you going to the Professional table, the Executive table or the open networking table?” He told me he was going to leave, that these networking things don’t work, “No one ever has a contact for me. I’ve been out of work for five years, with a couple of contract jobs in between. And no one ever has a good contact for me.”

He went on to tell me that the economy sucks, life is terrible and he was just getting started telling me everything that was wrong with the world. I interrupted him and asked him if he realized that there are many ways to work a formal networking session. He could practice his elevator speech, offer connections and contacts to others or just meet someone new and follow up for coffee and more practice. Steve just didn’t want to hear that and I stepped back and offered him success in his job search. I’ll pass from documenting his response.

Earlier that day, I met Denise. I’ve known her for a number of years and she was at this event representing a Temp Services business in the area. She stopped me and asked a couple of questions about negotiating for a new opportunity she was considering. She loved the job and the people, but the salary was $5K less than she was currently making. We bounced a couple of options around and role played a little and she left to go networking to see who else she might meet.

Later that same day I was given a book on famous quotations and there was Thomas Jefferson pointing out the moral for me to learn that day. No matter how much you want to help, some people won’t change. It you find yourself in that situation, walk away–no, run away–and focus your time and energy on your goals. Surround yourself with people who possess the right mental attitude. As W. Clement Stone once said, “Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you become like them.”

Do You Really HATE That...

I hear it all the time and sadly, I catch myself saying, “I hate that!” I’m constantly telling my clients that they have to get rid of their Sinkin’ Thinkin’ and stay positive in their thoughts and behavior. However, I’ll be working on my computer and then a challenge security word pops up and I think or say, “I hate that!” Other times, when I’m just finishing a blog posting for the week, ready to send it off to your editor and my computer crashes with the “blue screen of death,” I’ll say, “Oh, I hate that!” Okay, that might be the one exception: if you get the blue screen of death it is bad and probably deserves a strong emotional statement.

“I really hate that,” is a strong, very strong statement. And in most cases probably too strong. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, Ouch! jumps to mind as an appropriate exclamation. A streak of profanities isn’t. When you are challenged with a security word saying, “This is annoying,” is very appropriate... telling yourself you hate it is just creating negative on top of negative. It’s not helping you.
For those of you that cannot picture a challenge word, this is the pop up window that asks you to type the words, often illegible, into the smaller box. Why on God’s green earth would anyone be so cruel as to devise such a frustrating and exasperating step to logging into a computer site? All you want to do is reply to someone’s comment from your LinkedIn account and you click on the hyperlink and up pops this nuisance.

In actuality these challenge words are a good thing. They interrupt a computer attack from hacking your account. So when you say you hate the challenge words, do you mean to say that you really want your account hacked?  Hummm! Plus, it is also a means to digitize older books in the public domain for free eBook access.

The point here is that we’ve adopted all these negative, sarcastic and pejorative phrases and we say them without thinking what we’re really saying.  Our friends in Neuro-Linguistics will tell us that these words do in fact have an effect on our thinking and emotions. We become negative without even realizing it. So give yourself a break and listen to what you’re saying and put a positive spin on your expletives. “Golly, I didn’t mean to hit my now throbbing thumb with that hammer!” or “Oh look, one of those wiggly words that make the world wide web safe for me to surf!”