‘A’ Is for Attitude

Editor’s note: This classic motivational series from William Smith originally ran in the early 2000s (Horsesmouth’s nascent years). Times and the industry have certainly changed, but we find these quick essays still convey considerable valuable advice. Enjoy!

Why is attitude important in our business? If we wait for outside events to improve our attitude, we’ll have an awfully inconsistent record. Markets drop, traffic slows, weather turns bad, friends ignore us, clients leave, and our spouse doesn’t understand us.

Yet we need to approach each day with a positive expectancy. Or maybe not every day, just each day that ends in “y.” If our attitude determines our success, then do we just wait for those days when we have a good attitude to go into work?

Thankfully, there are things we can do to manage and create a good attitude. Here are 10 quick, simple ’tude-tuning techniques you can apply right now:

1. Act positive and assumptive. Although your actions can follow your feelings, your feelings can also follow your actions. Raise your head high, take a deep breath, smile, and see if you feel anything but positive. Your mind will pick up on the cues from your body.
2. Walk the walk. When you’re going somewhere, watch how people move out of the way for someone who looks like she knows where she is going. Only 2% of people have a sense of urgency. Cultivate yours.
3. Talk the talk. When you ask someone, “How are you doing?” how often do you hear, “Pretty good for a Monday,” or “Not bad, considering.” I have an optometrist friend whose signature answer is, “Happy and enthusiastic!” No wonder he was a top athlete in high school and college, and became famous for his charitable work. Why not answer, “How are you doing?” with “Great! But it’ll get better!” or “If I was doing any better, I’d have to be two people.”
4. Hang around positive people. You wouldn’t let someone come into your living room and dump garbage all around, would you? Why would you spend time with people who do that to your mind and to their own?
5. Speak well of other people. The winners I know absolutely refuse to say anything bad about anyone. They speak highly of everyone they know.
6. Read motivational books every day. You wouldn’t go a day without eating, so why go a day without feeding your mind? If you need some motivational references, consider The Magic of Thinking Big, by David J. Schwartz, or See You At the Top, by Zig Ziglar.
7. Listen to audio. I mentioned this to a group of trainees in our New York office [back before the advent of streaming], and pointed down to a tape store we could see from the office window. One advisor-in-training went out and bought some tapes that day, listened to them on the subway, and came back the next day unstoppable!
8. Be positive with clients today. As a colleague often tells me, clients can “read and see your attitude before they hear your words.”
9. Talk to yourself. Brian Tracy, who has studied and spoken on the subject of success, says that professionals can improve their performance dramatically by simply repeating, “I like myself, I love my work,” before each client call. He also says that 95% of emotions depend on how you talk to yourself.
10. Think how. When 350,000 salespeople were asked what they thought about during the course of a day, most of them said bills, problems with orders, or worries about that day’s sales. The top 10% were thinking about their goals and how to reach them. If you think about what you don’t want, such as problems and worries, then you can be sure you’ll attract problems and worries to you like iron filings to a magnet. However, if you think about what you want and how to get it, you’ve just increased the odds of achieving your heart’s desire by 100%.