Photo credit: Brenda Starr

Our series on Peace at Any Point kicked off with the idea of making a PACT with yourself to: Practice Attitudes, Characteristics, and Techniques. Since practice applies to all three, we’ll weave it into our explorations of attitudes, characteristics and techniques. Today the focus is on attitudes.

at·ti·tude
noun
1. manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, especially of the mind: a negative attitude; group attitudes.
—Random House Dictionary

Attitudes have had a significant impact on the quality of my life. I started off with a set of pretty negative assumptions, including:

• The world is not a friendly place; it’s safer to hide than to risk being myself
• There is no purpose or spiritual direction outside of my will; I must make my own way and success in life
• I am not worthy of love, attention, or value
• My feelings are determined by other people’s feelings
• It’s my job to make everyone around me happy
• I don’t match society expectations for beauty and behavior, so I must be a loser
• Life is deadly serious – there’s no time for fooling around

These attitudes led me down the road of depression through college and into early adulthood and working life. Though I appeared to “function well,” I felt an inner emptiness that I tried to fill with romantic relationships. I thought if I had a boyfriend and the potential to meet societal standards of marriage and family, then I would feel whole inside.

As I’ve shared here before, it took an abruptly canceled engagement and four long years in an alcoholic relationship to bring me to the willingness to face my negative attitudes about life and to decide to change them.

How’s Your Attitude?

Attitudes shape our perspectives and are sometimes difficult to even recognize. And attitudes are contagious. So the question is: Are yours worth catching?

• Do you bring people down when you’re with them?
• Are you easily affected by others’ negativity?
• Do you get sucked into gossip sessions and use them to feel better about yourself?
• Are you envious of what others have?
• Do you suffer from self-pity?
• Do you pick fights, or are easily provoked into arguments?
• Do small things annoy you disproportionately?
• Do you find yourself naysaying others or putting them down?
• Is your instinctive response to invitations and opportunities to say no?
• Are you critical and judgmental toward yourself and others?

Answering yes to any of these questions may be a clue that you have underlying negative attitudes about life.

I wish changing attitudes were as easy as slipping off a negativity nightshirt and putting on a positivity parka. Unfortunately, changing attitudes is not like changing clothes. As I discovered, it takes a big first step – one of waking up and becoming aware. Before we can change, we must recognize the attitudes that have brought us to a place we don’t want to be.

For me, I had to hit a hard bottom – a place of pain so deep and sustained that I became willing to face my negative attitudes and begin to do something to change them. I realized that by living out my fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and insecurity, I was making myself miserable. How did I know? I was completely focused on someone else – a boyfriend – as the source of my peace and happiness. If he was not well, happy, and healthy, then how could I be? My attitudes and beliefs turned me on myself. I had no worth without a man; I had no peace without control over his moods and behaviors; I had no safety when he defied society’s expectations. If I kept on with this approach, I would soon lose myself completely, along with any shred of sanity or serenity.

And so I began the hard work of turning my attitudes around. I didn’t know how to be positive, but I didn’t want to live in deep fear anymore. I had to find a bridge from my accustomed ways of thinking to new ideas. I eventually found a set of practices that helped me work on attitudes, but each of us must find our own way to change.

Changing Attitudes

Although each of us must follow our own specific path, there are some general principles that guide changing attitudes. It’s important to:

• Consider that our perspective is not necessarily the only way to see things
• Be open to changing the way we think
• Let go of having to be right
• Embrace our humanity – everyone makes mistakes and it’s not the end of the world when we do
• Have compassion for ourselves and for others – stop listening to that harsh judge in our heads
• Take responsibility for our responses to the world – when we stop blaming others, we can find a lot more relief and serenity

In future posts we’ll look at ways to put these ideas into action. Changing attitudes takes a lot of practice – a theme we’ll be returning to here again and again. I couldn’t make an immediate shift from believing I had to manipulate and control my way through life to letting life unfold and trusting I would know what to do when it was time to do it. That shift has taken huge effort, a number of years and many tears as well as some laughter – largely at myself.

If you’ve had experiences with turning your attitudes around for the better, please share the process and the methods you’ve used. Everyone has to create their own path to peace, but we can all gain from others’ experience, and incorporate ideas that might work for us.

Next in the series, we’ll continue looking at attitudes, and also begin a discussion of the characteristics needed to effect internal change.

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