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Attitude is like the foundation of a building: it doesn’t matter how
well the building is designed, built, or maintained; it will fail if the
foundation isn’t sound.
When you run your own business (or, for that matter, when you live your
life) there will be ups and downs, successes and failures. Your attitude
will determine how you handle them, and how you handle them will determine
your success.
Basically, attitude is about choices and expectations. First, let’s
talk about choices. Everything you do or say is a choice. There is always
a choice. Paying taxes, for example, is a choice: you could choose
to go to jail instead of coughing up the dough. Why you would do that is
beyond me, but it is still a choice.
Attitudes affect more than your choices, though; they affect your expectations.
I am a firm believer in the old axiom "Things tend to happen the way
you expect them to happen". If your attitude affects your
expectations, and your expectations affect the way things happen, then
your attitude affects the way things happen. Either consciously or
subconsciously we do things that tend to sway the outcome of any given
situation to match our expectations.
For example, if you are making a sales call and you are sure that there
won’t be a sale, you probably won’t give a very convincing argument to
buy, will you?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this: attitude is
the single most important element of success in your business and your
life.
At one point I needed to hire a salesman (selling software to large
corporations). I had been through several different guys and none of them
really had what I needed. Enter Andy.
Andy is my first wife’s brother. (It helped that I’m still on good
terms with my first wife, and that my current wife is too!) There were two
things wrong with having Andy as my salesman: 1) he had no computer
background or experience (he couldn’t even spell "PC"!) and
2), he lived in Phoenix, about 400 miles away. Talk about a round peg in a
square hole! But… he had a great attitude; that "Whatever-it-takes-I-can-do-it,
the-customer-is-always-right-and-I’ll-always-treat-them-well"
attitude that you just can’t easily teach somebody. I figured that I
could teach him about computers and my software and that the attitude
would be part of the package.
I was right. He had to learn about sales, about mainframe computers and
how programming organizations worked, he had to learn how to use a PC and
how to use the software that ran on it. He learned it all and did well…
how? ATTITUDE. He was one of those people that you just can’t help but
like, and even if someone wasn’t interested in our product they were
always happy to hear from him. These are skills that are much harder to
teach than computer and selling skills, so I was happy to invest in him.
It’s time for an attitude check. Yours and your employees’.
Is it pushing you forward or holding you back? Think about it; it could
mean the difference between success and failure.
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