I’ve just started a new initiative – setting up a store on this site. Its been something I’ve been wanting to do for ages but I’ve been dithering. I was reminded by this quote of the need for action.
“If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.”
Jack Dixon Welsh Rugby Union Player.
In other words, just do the thing or it, as a certain shoe maker also put it. Which I did do for the store, over the festive break.
So one of the things I can control, in reference to this part of the title, is what I change. But for me its not so much about change but the attitude I bring to it – cue a new DanelDoodle for the occasion.
It’s not so much a reactive approach but a proactive one. You have to make your mind up and take the right attitude.
On this last point I have to concede that this approach does not work for all and does not consider the severe debilitating effects that mental health issues have on this approach.
Resilience has a close cousin – perseverance. Perseverance equally requires a commitment to purpose that keeps us moving forward into the attitudes and activities that serve to fulfil it. More on that here: Thought rocket: arc of change and bending reality
This is not just important personally but also at work as Microsoft has discovered by looking closely at resilience: The Resilience Quotient.
For managers across a wider range of organizations, the key consideration isn’t whether an employee comes equipped with resilience as an innate trait. It’s gaining a better understanding of resilience as a state—and helping everyone on their teams develop their own capacity for resilience to the best of their ability.
The article goes on to explain that resilience has characteristics of both a trait and a state. “A trait is something that you presuppose cannot be changed,” he says. “A state is something you can change about a person.” In other words, some aspects of resilience seem to be with you for life. But some are fluid.
This fluidity is what I am referring to when it comes to attitude and being able to lean into it and choose the attitude you will bring to something or take in response to something.
So for me attitude is key, resilience and persevere is borne out of attitude.
Attitude is everything and in our control
What is not in our control are things I have positioned outside the circle in the Doodle:
- Timing: Right attitude with right timing is an invincible combination. But how do we know if the timing is right? Rarely can you, unless in hindsight. So always veer on the side of having the right attitude, because our attitude is in our control, while right timing is pure chance.
- Events: ‘Events, dear boy, events’, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said, or to put it a little more pithily, shit happens 💩 When it does, find some lemonade or put on some rose tinted glasses and see things with new eyes.
- Other peoples responses: You cannot control how other people respond to you but you can control your response to them. So if someone treats you badly or responds badly to something you have done, don’t take it personally and that applies to life.