In high school, a friend of mine drove a Porsche. His dad was a wealthy doctor and gave him a beautiful sports car as a birthday gift when he was old enough to drive.
My friend and I would drive all over town, cruising in his gorgeous, shiny “chick magnet,” listening to bands like A Flock of Seagulls and Duran Duran on the cassette tape player.
We would spend hours and hours driving around the Sonic after high school football games, trying to get noticed. The best way to get noticed was to catapult the vehicle from a state of inaction to that of incredible speed and to do it rapidly, to change it from a state of potential energy to a state of movement and kinetic energy.
And we didn’t accelerate slowly. A very strong punch on the gas pedal increased its velocity along the highway. The energy of the vehicle was all within our control.
Your attitude is just like a Porsche. You have control over it. Is it inactive and negative? Or is your attitude positive and energized, adding speed and energy to your life? Regardless of your circumstances, you can catapult your attitude to a positive state in an instant.
When I was a youth and involved in Boy Scouts, I would recruit friends of mine to join because it was so much fun. I recruited a friend of mine from my parish, Patrick, and I remember how he loved to go on the monthly camping trips.
On one camping trip, Patrick dove headfirst into a body of water without knowing how deep the pond was. He broke his neck and became paralyzed from the neck down. He was only fourteen years old.
My mom would take me to visit Patrick in the hospital, and I couldn’t stand seeing him there. I couldn’t stand it at all. He was in a bed that would rotate his body from side to side so that the pressure of his body would be distributed evenly over his back, since he couldn’t move anything except for the muscles on his face.
Patrick spent the entire day looking up at the ceiling. When he was awake, he would be staring at the same ceiling, day after day, month after month, and year after year. I cannot begin to comprehend how agonizing this was for his family, and I cannot even begin to understand how he could have made it as long as he did.
Patrick died just a few years later when we were both in our mid-teens. The whole experience of knowing him formed deep within me a desire to live a purposeful life.
Because I knew Patrick and saw his situation, I made a commitment to live my life to the fullest, not letting a day escape without experiencing a sense of loving others, passionately experiencing the bountiful gifts that God has given me, and being grateful for every single precious breath.
It is indeed possible to catapult your attitude from negative to positive instantly. I call it the “Attitude Turbo-Charge.”
Your attitude certainly determines your outcome. Your sense of positive serendipity plays a large factor in the energy that you attract into your life. The challenge that we face as subjective, irrational, emotion-charged mammals, though, is to cope with disappointments and not let them influence our attitude.
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Scott Love, guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog and owner of The Attorney Search Group, trains, motivates, and inspires recruiters to achieve greatness in the profession. Visit his online recruiter training center for tips, downloads, videos, and articles that can help you increase your recruiter billings.