Attitude Overview

When someone has a negative attitude, it's because they've been practicing it for a long time. Instead of just telling them to be more positive, we need to invest time in helping them cultivate a positive attitude. This will require nurturing and encouragement, such as praising them for their strengths and giving them a choice to improve. It's important to understand that attitudes are a set of conditioned habits, and changing them takes time and effort. One of the most common requests in the coaching world is how do you help someone with a negative attitude? First let's add some context to it. Someone with a negative attitude, and this is going to sound a little bit weird, but they've been practicing that attitude for a long time. So when you have someone who needs a upgrade in their attitude, and let's just assume it's negative and sometimes maybe it's just neutral and they need to adopt a more positive attitude, remember an attitude to a certain extent is a set of behaviors, they're conditioned habits. So when you meet someone who's always negative or always positive, that typically is as a result of people creating those habits. So one of the biggest mistakes we make with someone with a negative attitude or someone who doesn't have a positive attitude, we call them in the office and say, you've got to cut it out and you've got to be more positive. If that worked, we probably wouldn't have a coaching industry. So it depends on your willingness. It depends on the person, your coaching's willingness, but someone with a negative attitude or someone who needs to be more positive, it is going to be an investment of time. An attitude is a choice. Our job isn't to reprimand the attitude from a coaching perspective. Now you might have to from a management perspective, but from a coaching perspective, our objective should be high level to help them cultivate a positive attitude. This will take time. So remember, there's a right brain in the left brain and we often share that there's a positive brain and a negative brain. Nobody goes home at the end of the day and your spouse or significant other family member says, how was your day? And you say, neutral. You know, I actually didn't have a feeling all day. We typically have good days or bad days. Now, we often gravitate to the negative, sadly. Recently, our company did a presentation in front of 200 people. And we asked people, and this should give you a hint of what you need to do to cultivate attitude. We asked people, when an employee is called into the boss's office in the corporate world, what's their first impression? And we had people write it down. I went back to the question. I said, if you wrote down something like, oh, I must be in trouble. What did I do wrong? Stand up. Everybody in the room stood up. So call people into the office for the good stuff. Praise them specifically for the things they do well. Don't fake it. Make sure it's authentic and they're really doing something positive. Because what you're doing is you're nurturing their brain to move towards the positive side of their brain. See, when you're negative, and you have a negative attitude, you don't have to try as hard. See, coming up with excuses and reasons why people or things won't work is easier for people. Nurturing people's mentalities is a daily endeavor. Put a note on their desk. Acknowledge them in a staff meeting. Now, that doesn't mean we ignore the areas where they need to improve their attitude. Yet you're giving them a choice. And that's what a great coach does.