19 Dec Attitude

In my last posts I talked about the values in Rieusset and our work philosophy. Today please allow me to deviate a little from the path I was on because I want to emphasize an aspect which I not only believe to be basic but fundamental to our daily activity in the company as well as on a personal level: attitude. When I say I diverge from my path it is because today I am not going to center the post on Rieusset, since although we are working on it, it still isn’t a reality.

When you look up the word attitude in the Oxford English dictionary you find:

1. A position of the body indicating a particular mental state: ‘the boy was standing in an attitude of despair.’
2. A settled way of thinking or feeling about something: ‘he was questioned on his attitude to South Africa.’ ‘Being competitive is an attitude of mind.’

It is therefore a capacity we humans have which allows us to face the situations we encounter in life. And that is what I wish to deal with in this post – how we position ourselves when faced with the vicissitudes we come across since not all of us respond in the same way.

Allow me also to specify that we are talking about attitude (related to ‘act’) and not aptitude (related to ‘apt’). When talking about aptitude we are talking about the ability or willingness to carry out an activity, but when we talk about attitude we are talking about the state of mind for facing what comes at us, as we have said in the preceding paragraph.

And why do I want to talk about attitude? Because what we achieve depends on us. How many times do we hear that we didn’t achieve something because this or that happened? Or even, have you heard about the others? I have the strange feeling that if some day we find the others we will find the solution to everything. Hasn’t this ever happened to you?

We don’t always take a step towards solving the problems we find, and the excuses, I repeat, the excuses for not taking that step are many and diverse. From it’s not my responsibility to I didn’t realize. In the majority of cases a better attitude from our side will make it possible to solve many things much more simply and quickly than without it.

But where do we find that attitude?

Quite simply, in ourselves. “Simply” and I put that in quotation marks because it isn’t easy, we have to want to do it, do it and, if possible, do it happily.

And if you think you don’t have a good attitude, do you know that you can train it?

I recall an article in La Contra section of La Vanguardia newspaper from 28 February 2014 where, in an interview with Lluís Soldevila –a consultant and trainer of management skills and high performance attitudes–, he said that “if you exercise your brain in diverse modular attitudes for 21 consecutive days, you will automatically adopt the ideal attitude in anything.”

So what do we have to do? Just one thing: ACT!

We can choose between being spectators and letting others decide for us, or being main players and deciding what we believe we have to do. Because, let’s make one thing perfectly clear, which is “one is what one does but also what one doesn’t do.”

Surely you have heard more than once that “you never know what you can do until you try.” So let’s try it. Even at the risk of making a mistake. Absolutely. “Errors don’t exist; they are merely decisions from which we have to learn something.”

Buy how am I going to be able to change something when everything is so complex? Well, by acting on that which we can influence. We can’t prevent rain but we can take an umbrella so as not to get wet.

Attitude is so important that if we measured how much we are worth we would see that attitude is a booster that can make us better or worse.

Victor Küppers, trainer and lecturer, explained in one of his conferences the following formula for establishing a person’s worth:

(CONOCIMIENTOS + HABILIDADES) * ACTITUD

(KNOWLEDGE + SKILLS) * ATTITUDE

And he told us that, evidently, for everything in life you need knowledge and skills and having these sums up to being a better person. But what really sets us apart from the rest is the attitude that we adopt since attitude is the multiplier.

What is going to be your attitude?