I AM YOUR ATTITUDE! I AM YOUR MASTER. I can make you rise or fall. I can make you a success or failure. I can work for or against you. I control your feelings and actions. I can make your heart sing with happiness. I can make you wretched, dejected, or morbid. I can make you angry and resentful. I can make you lonely, discouraged or depressed. I can make you sick, listless. I can be a shackle, heavy and burdensome. I can be a prism’s hue, dancing bright and colorful. I can be nurtured and grown to be beautiful. I can never be removed, only replaced. I AM YOUR ATTITUDE! (author unknown)
It’s human nature to have low points — moments of doubt, or sadness, or feeling down, or road rage. We all have the spectrum of emotions bliss to sorrow, joy to misery. It’s key to remember that all emotions are choices.
We can choose to hold on to the thoughts and emotions that hold us back or we can let them go. If we’re cut off in traffic, we can fly into road rage, give them the horn or the finger (or worse), get our heart rates up, flip out, or we can take a deep breath, and let it go.
This, admittedly, can be very difficult. It’s a crowded world. There are people who have no manners, who couldn’t care any less that you have been inconvenienced by their rudeness. And yet, that’s the way things will remain whether you choose to get angry and filled with rage, or whether you let it slip right off you like water slips off a duck.
I’m not saying there’s no place for confrontation in life, but there is a time and place for everything and not every situation requires that level of intensity. If someone “steals” your parking spot, you can make a big deal out of it, or you can go find another one.
Of course even I have my moments — sometimes these are angry moments, sometimes these are overly frustrated moments — but I have come to realize that these moments are counterproductive and I need simply to enlarge the frame through which I’m viewing the irritating situation.
One readjustment I recently heard about is this: say you’ve gotten yourself into one of these moments, an angry or enraged or sad moment, and you are sitting there stewing in it but don’t want to let it linger. As incongruous as this might feel, smile. Put a big fat grin on your face. Let those dimples come out. In doing this, you are very consciously choosing to not stew. And you are also tricking yourself into feeling better.
You are becoming the master of your attitude. Think of the people that are inconsiderate or rude, not as people who are trying to screw up your day, but as people who are testing your resolve to have a good attitude.