littleoddforest.com  | forestprints.com about us View our updated newsletters and browse to other great shopping links! Our retailers worldwide. got a question? Need help using our site? Download our free wallpapers and more!

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

your attitude

A good attitude is an asset in personal, professional life
By Jane R. Elgass

If you’ve got a good one, chances are you brighten other people’s day. If you’ve got a bad one, you may be alienating colleagues at work and even your friends. And a bad one may be costing you a promotion or appointment to a new position. It’s all about attitudes.

“Studies have shown that people want to be with those who have a good attitude,” Pam Wyess told participants in her Human Resource Development (HRD) class May 27. “In fact, for some employers, a good attitude is sometimes a more important consideration than skills. You can train for skills, but it’s difficult to work a bad attitude.”

Wyess, who learned a lot about attitudes and how they can affect one’s life during 11 years with the Ann Arbor Police Department, now shares that background with others through the HRD course, “The Choice Is Yours: An Introduction to Attitudes in the Workplace.”

“Attitude has a lot to do with interpersonal communications, self-esteem and your perceptions of others and theirs of you. Yes, you’re going to have bad days, but you should give thought to your attitude and try to focus on the positive,” Wyess said. “A good attitude makes you feel better. Others see this and judge you by that. People want to work in an upbeat environment, and attitudes play an important role in shaping the work environment.”

Your attitude is communicated to others in three ways, Wyess explained—7 percent by words, 38 percent by tone of voice and 55 percent in non-verbal ways, such as posture.

All of us, at one time or another, express the three different types of attitudes: positive, negative and neutral. “Those with a neutral attitude are sometimes the most challenging to deal with,” Wyess noted, defining those individuals as “spectators in the game of life.” We often try to avoid contact with those carrying a negative attitude, “the critics of the game of life.” And we are drawn to those with a positive attitude, “the players of the game of life.”

A positive attitude doesn’t just happen, Wyess noted. “It’s something you have to work at all the time.”

So how do you adjust your attitude toward the positive and maintain that attitude?

“Listen to yourself talk and listen to the voice within,” Wyess said. “You have to pursue happiness. It won’t come knocking. You have to find the good things in each day, and you have to stop shooting yourself, stop berating yourself for something that didn’t work quite right.”

Thomas Edison, once asked what it took to discover the light bulb, said it was a thousand-step process. But he didn’t look at that as a negative, Wyess noted. Something new was learned at each step. Insanity, she added, comes from doing the same thing over and over again, expecting new results but getting the same results.

“Evaluate your ‘should dos’ and translate them to ‘to dos,’” Wyess advised.

To maintain that sunny disposition, try starting each day with a pep talk to yourself; make it a habit to enjoy the good moments; express, rather than suppress, your feelings; and surround yourself with a positive environment, by decorating your home or office with things that give you pleasure.

“You control your attitudes,” Wyess said, citing the familiar, “He makes me so mad!” “No one can make you ‘anything.’ You make the choices.” When a situation arises that prompts this kind of reaction, consider the source and put it in perspective, Wyess advised, adding that you should not “give power to the person who frustrates you. Regardless of what happens to you, it’s what you do that is the issue.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dealing with attitudes

OK. You’ve mastered maintaining a sunny disposition most of the time. But how do you deal with those around you with negative or neutral attitudes?

“It’s really a matter of determining how much it bothers you,” said Pam Wyess, outlining a five-step process for those attending Human Resource Development’s course on “The Choice Is Yours: An Introduction to Attitudes in the Workplace.”

# Determine your involvement. Is this person important to you? Has this attitude been demonstrated before? Does it bother you? Are you willing to invest time to try for a change? “If you answer ‘no’ to any of these questions, remove yourself from the situation,” Wyess said. “If you answer ‘yes,’ go on to step two.”

# Seek to understand the other person. Try to determine what caused the behavior. Seek that person’s thoughts on the matter and confirm your understanding of them by restating them. Then determine if you want a change in that person’s attitude and behavior. If ‘yes,’ go on to the next step.

# Try to influence the individual’s attitude by acknowledging the behavior that bothers you and discussing it with the person.

# Resolve the problem through mutually defined solutions. “The more the other person contributes to the solutions, the more the likelihood of success,” Wyess noted.

# Recover from the experience. Regain your positive attitude, follow through with commitments you’ve made to the other person, and then be sure to acknowledge changes in that person.

Labels: my work is my life

rambled at 2:32 PM

0 blabbers:

Post a Comment

<< Home


{ it's not fashion, it's a lifestyle }


I flickr here.


Bookmark and Share

i design stuff, make stuff, and love all good designs. i'm a Lifestyle/Stuff Designer! i am crazy about all things oddly cute and out-of-the-ordinary, and am blissfully assisted by LOF fairies and elves, we LOVE what we're doing and want you to love what we do too!

miau.hiss.scratch.

creative artistic endeavours, design, fashion, furniture, interior decor, handmade, fabrics, prints, anime, films, laughing aloud a lot, being happy, the great outdoors, being hyper, music, reading, bootie-shaking, traveling, human behavior, being passionate about life, good company-food-drinks, getting rich doing what i love to do, castles, cats, car trips, nice smells, cuddling, shoes, watches, bikinis, all things cutely horrifyingly strange, beach, ferris wheels, the zoo, living beyond 98 years old, dreams, noodles, child-like behaviour, sarcasm, lego, barbie-mutilation
too little TV. Dark children's fantasy movies, good vampire/werewolves movies, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Studio Ghibli/ Tim Burton/ Luc Besson's stuff, Lars & The Real Girl, Death At A Funeral, Inglorious Bastards, Transformers, Tenacious D, 11:14, The Hunting Party, Wall-e, Banlieue 13, LOTR Trilogy, Howl's Moving Castle, Pan's Labryinth, Chronicles of Narnia, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, The Hangover, The Wedding Crashers, Harold And Kumar, Hotel Rwanda, Pirates of the Caribbean, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, Spiderman, Mulholland Drive, Being John Malkovich, Requiem for a Dream, Spirited Away, The Cat's Return, Harry Potter Series, Billy Elliot, Punch Drunk Love, Matrix I, Eating Air, Ghost in the Shell, Dark City, Amelie, 28 Days Later, American History X... too many
anything that gets ma booty shakin' and head bobbin', most drum & bass, some lounge, some jazz, some bosanova, some house, most dance, some hiphop, some rock, some grunge, some 80s, some 90s, happy music (??)
the news, all good design books/mags, most fantasy/ imaginative/ weird/ funny books, Marjane Satrapi, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Paul Smith: You Can Find Inspiration in Everything - (And If You Can't, Look Again), Angela Carter's Book Of Fairy Tales, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Memoirs Of A Geisha, LOTR, Terry Brooks, Dean Koontz, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King, Harry Potter, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton, interesting business/ motivational/ inspirational books

SINGAPORE

Minikin
8 Grange Rd., Orchard Cineleisure
#02-02

LOFT
16A Haji Lane

Pluck
31/33 Haji Lane

Totally Hot Stuff
The Cathay, 2 Handy Road
#02-13

PaperMarket
Raffles City Shopping Centre
#B1-31

Esplanade Shop
Esplanade Mall
8 Raffles Avenue Unit 02-02

Doinky Doodles
33 Bali Lane, 2nd Flr

MALAYSIA

Kitsch
1F-19, First Floor
Bangsar Village II.
Kuala Lumpur

UNITED STATES

Hello Bluebird Boutique & Gallery
609 Penn Avenue, West Reading
Pennsylvania

Swish
427 Wandering Trail, Franklin
Tennessee

Enid
221 W. Main Street, Fredericksburg
Texas

The Treehouse Green Gifts
2935 College Ave, Berkeley
California

Day Trip Society
4 Dock Square, Kennebunkport
Maine

Mackenzie Boutique
550 Deep Valley Drive #171, Rolling Hills Estates
California

Frosty Darling
177 East Broadway, Salt Lake City
Utah

Tiger Lily
206 South Calumet Road, Chesterton
Indiana

MOCA
The Museum Of Contemporary Art

250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles
California

Naka
171 West 9 Mile, Ferndale
Michigan

Rusty Crickett's
615 15th Street West, Bradenton
Florida

Tough Love
3114 Hillsborough Street, Raleigh
North Carolina

Mrs. Twiggy Winkles Toys
4811 East Grant Road, Tucson
Arizona

Tear It Up
895 South Cooper Street, Memphis
Tenessee

Bliss Home + Art
24 Market Square, Knoxwille
Tenessee

Nich
29 South High Street, West Chester
Pennsylvania

In Full Fig
www.infullfig.com

AUSTRALIA

Ruck Rover General Store
Shop 4, 595 Beaufort St. Mt Lawley
Perth

Sandy
Shop 483, King St., Newtown
Sydney

Queensland Museum Gallery Store
Stanley Place, South Brisbane
Queensland

Moppit
312 Queens Parade, Clifton Hill
Melbourne

Kawaii Kids
www.kawaiikids.com.au

Moo Woo Handmade Cards & Gifts
www.moowoo.com.au

GERMANY

KITSCH
Obere Stadt 50
Weilheim

FrduleinPfefferstielzchenDesign
Kirchhellener Str. 20
Bottrop

CANADA

ROSE BOUTON
387 rue St-Jean
Québec

BELGIUM

Mieke
Baudelostraat 23, Oost Vlaanderen
Gent

Rose Rouge
Tempelstraat 21
Ieper

Spoonful Of Sugar
Bennesteeg 1 b
Gent

CYPRUS

Giving Tree
Arch Kyprianos 32, Strovolos 2059
Nicosia

SWEDEN

Poppel
Prästgatan 50A, 831 33
Östersund

FRANCE

Silly Melody
14 Bd Saint Michel
Paris

RUSSIA

CRABLAB DESIGN
www.crablab.ru


*FEATURED SELLER ON ETSY!



Support WWF

As Seen on DelightfulBlogs.com
Featured In Crafty Synergy
As Seen On Modish
As Seen On Mixed Plate

Featured In Indie Fixx Wedding Gift Guide
Get Helloindie!
LOF At Trunkt!

Apartment Therapy
The Inspired Room
Desire To Inspire
Pikaland
PlushYou
Softies Central
Modish
Design Is Mine
Design For Mankind
Freshly Blended
Decor8
Colour Lovers
Craftzine Blog
Drawn
Scoutie Girl
Paper N Stitch
liquidpaper
Creature Comforts
Design*Sponge
chicadecanela
The Small Object
The Sampler
Blissen
Heidi Seeker
Sublime Stitching
Stylefinds
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SPCA
Cat Welfare

Locations of visitors to this page

My Little Odd Forest at Blogged

  • some happy news
  • that inner voice
  • nine eleven
  • irritated
  • waffles is ill
  • waiting for me!
  • more press and features
  • bye for abit
  • i love my snake scarf
  • spanish sweetness

Blogarama

Blog Directory, Find A Blog, Submit A Blog, Search For The Best Blogs

singapore blog directory
sgBlog.com


DMShop: Where Design is Found


Website Designed & Produced By Lynda Lye, Forestprints Design.
Copyright © 2004 - 2009 Forestprints Design. All rights reserved
Violaters shall risk eternal banishment from the forest.