Having the right attitude for success
Fezile Gabellah,
11th Sep 2018
Tags:
Life
Blog
Challenges
Education
Success
Work
How’s your attitude?
I have been thinking about this for a while, reflecting on my attitude towards the year I've had and towards life in general.
Although people can see your attitude through what you say and your actions, only you can acknowledge it.
You can be in denial about being lazy, or negative.
Only through acknowledgement can you then bring change.
Only through acknowledgement can you then bring change.
Attitude is not a rigid thing. You may start off with a positive attitude and then realise later on that your attitude has become negative.
I want to address attitudes we form that can hinder growth:
If something great happens that you aren’t familiar with, are you open to adjusting yourself to it and being open to learn from it? Or are you generally quite dismissive, closing down?
Maybe you struggle with a know-it-all attitude and have wondered why people aren’t free to express themselves more openly to you.
If you fail at something once, are you willing to get back up and try again? Or are you the type of person who will stay down and feel sorry for yourself, looking at everything with a pessimistic view?
What if you stopped being so hard on yourself and realised that failure doesn’t mean that you can’t achieve something? It could just mean that you need to find a new strategy of doing things.
I have never liked statistics, I am honestly not a numbers person. I had this attitude that if I don’t like something I need to avoid it and I stopped trying.
But when I was in university I needed to pass a module so that I could advance to the next semester.
The first month I flunked, but I really wasn’t bothered with it. I sat at the back of the lecture hall and I was constantly on my phone. I had decided that I wasn’t good at this and I was totally negative towards the subject.
The sad thing was that I wasted four hours every third day, when I could have learnt something.
I ended up compensating for those hours by spending an entire weekend trying to learn something that I had the opportunity of learning if I had changed my attitude!
I began to change in the third month.
I remember how a friend of mine told me that in life we will be confronted with situations we don’t like, but we have to tackle them so that we can move into the next phase of our lives.
He sat me down and made me realise that statistics was one percent of my medical degree. It could be a minute one percent, or a massive one, as it might have meant repeating the year.
Sometimes the things that hold us back aren’t massive things.
Sometimes the things that hold us back aren’t massive things. You may have a negative attitude towards one of your teachers, but as small as that is, she forms part of you advancing to the next grade.
In the end I had three months to learn statistics ( I will never do that to myself again). I cried almost everyday. I was trembling during my exam and I really wanted to shout at myself for wasting all that time. Needless to say, I passed but I only scraped through.
I wish I had paid more attention to the subject matter back then. I didn’t realise that I would need it to be able to read articles to help me make informed decisions for my patients!
Maybe you don’t have to deal with statistics, maybe it’s a relationship, career choice, or just life in general. The big question is what is your attitude towards those things?
Try to fix your attitude before you kick yourself later.
Try to fix your attitude before you kick yourself later.
