Attitude Check

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.