Change Your (L)Attitude

"Whether you think you can succeed or think you can fail, you're right." - Henry Ford

Fear Mor had his "Eat with Senior Management" lunch yesterday - one of those items in which senior management has lunch with employees after they've been at the company for a certain amount of time in order to get a sense of what employees are thinking. Being who he is, Fear Mor popped off the question of what the future of the company was, where we were going. What he was met with was silence, followed by stumbling and groping for answer - generalities without any specifics.

Not a confidence builder in any sense of the word.

But important - an important reminder that for any of us as individuals, we cannot (in the end) rely on any other humans to do what we need to do. The question is fair of leadership of any organization - what's our purpose, where are we headed - but the question is equally fair of myself as well - what's my purpose, where am I headed.

It requires a fundamental rethinking of how we view our own lives - a change of attitude, if you will, about the responsibility each of us shares for our own lives. In other words, the responsibility for where I am, and where I am going, is in the end my own.

This is a hard thing for many (including myself) to accept as responsibility is often associated with the power to execute. "I can't do anything about that" one may whine "because I am only a lowly employee/student/person and don't have the power to influence the direction or purpose of my company/school/relationship".

In many cases I'd actually agree with that sentiment - we don't the power to change the place where we are or many of the conditions under which we live or work. But we do have the power to change both our attitude (in the fact that we are responsible for where we're going) and our latitude (where we work, go to school, with whom we have relationships).

I'm not saying it is easy, nor am I saying that changing our attitude or our latitude can happen overnight. But neither is it an accurate and fair statement to say that we cannot change them at all.

Both our attitude and our latitude are either controlled by ourselves or others. In one case we act as free individuals, in the other we act as slaves.

What's your (l)attitude this morning?