Your Attitude Sucks

I practice observation. I have trained myself to see everything or at least try to. I look for the little nuances in a person’s behavior, body language, and vocal tone. They can tell you a lot if you look for it.  They can tell us if someone is happy, sad, mad, frustrated, mean, or kind. Your actions create perceptions that all initial emotions are based on.

A groundbreaking study was done at UCLA on contributing factors to effective or ineffective communication. The results pretty much tell the story. It found that 38% of effective communication comes from people’s perceptions of your vocal tone. 55% of personal communication effectiveness comes from your body language. That leaves a paltry 7% of effective communication coming from the spoken word. I’m not very good at math, but this is pretty easy. If my calculations are correct, 93% of effective communication has nothing to do with what we say. 93% of effective communication comes from how we say what we say and our body language.

Has a spouse or friend ever asked you how they looked in a particular outfit? Your response was to the effect of, “Yeah, that looks great.” To which the response from said spouse/friend was, “Well, it sure doesn’t sound like you mean that.”

If that scenario isn’t scary enough, consider how people might perceive you in business, strictly based upon your perception derived from how you walk, talk, smile, frown, sit, eat, listen, and everything else that can create a perception.

If you want to be seen as a leader in any form, whether as a business owner, entrepreneur, executive, spouse, friend, or parent, you need to be aware of the perception you are creating, or have created, in everything you do.

The number one element in creating people’s emotional opinions about you is their perception of your attitude. Whether people think that you’re a good person because you “seem” to have a great attitude or that your attitude sucks is all about what people see and hear from you.

I use a powerful tool to prove the importance of these auditory and visual cues that drive your perception. The Carnegie Triangle is a concept that I use to associate leadership and success. The concept highlights the importance of attitude, skills, and knowledge as fundamental building blocks for achieving goals and making a positive impact. Some will say that this is the “Triangle of Success”.

Try this exercise sometime with your team, a group, or heck, all by yourself. You start by making a list. The process requires you to spend some time creating a list of all the elements you can come up with that you might relate to a great leader or a successful person. The Carnegie Foundation suggests that sixty traits are a good list. In workshops, as a Master Business Coach, my groups have come up with as many as 82 traits.

Once you have this list, we will write on the board three words: ATTITUDE, SKILLS, and KNOWLEDGE, the keys to the Triangle of Success. Now here’s where the story is told. One by one, I move from the first trait on through the entire list, assigning an A for Attitude, an S for Skill, and a K for Knowledge.  The results have been the same over twenty years of doing this exercise. On average, 85% of the traits are assigned to Attitude. Just 15% of all the traits are assigned to Skills and Knowledge. People quickly and convincingly figure out the importance of one’s attitude and its power to create good or bad vibes. Participants usually don’t argue because they have just made all the assignments.

In many cases, I’ve observed that the sudden realization that one’s attitude solely dictates one’s level of personal and professional success can be profound and unsettling. I firmly believe that success, in all its forms, seeks people with a strong, positive attitude. Success finds people who look for possibilities rather than just getting by. Success finds people who know there will be better days and deal with the things they can control rather than those they can’t. Success finds leaders who strive to find their people doing something right rather than wrong. Success finds leaders who are coaches rather than inspectors.

So, if your attitude sucks, do something about it. Work at it and build on traits that will drive you to change. Otherwise, get away from me. I don’t need it, and neither do anyone else. Attitude begins and ends with your actions and how they’re perceived. Remember that someone is always watching.