Your Attitude Influences

Hey team. All right, so today’s Monday Message. Here we go. We’re going to be talking about your attitude, and how it can change others. How do you do that? Well, your attitude is much like catching a cold. You get it by getting close to somebody. When somebody comes near you or you go near somebody else, your attitude or their attitude can change or influence you, or you can change or influence theirs. It doesn’t matter where you’re at. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work or at a ballgame or at home around your kids, or maybe even at the hospital or the shopping mall.

Your attitude can change others.

There’s this doctor, his name is Dr. Frank Crane. He says that when you throw a ball against the wall, this is a kind of law of physics. When you throw a ball with force against the wall, it will rebound with the equal amount of force. Well, the same is true for you. If you throw out a good attitude, a good attitude is going to be thrown back at you with force. The same force.

If you throw out a negative attitude, it’s going to bounce back at you with force. You can influence others, and sometimes, as leaders, we really have a lot of influence. We throw out a good, positive attitude or a positive smile to our entire team, and all of a sudden, the entire team smiles back. So, I throw out one smile, I get 12. That’s the difference, that’s awesome.

That’s huge to be able to influence people in this way.

So, how are you influencing people, or more importantly, how are they influencing you with their attitude, or how, more importantly, maybe it is more important that you’re changing their attitude? Do we have bad days? Do we have days that we feel down? Absolutely. But if you consistently are looking for a problem, if you’re consistently looking down and you’re saying, ‘Wow, man, like, well, the sun is out, probably gonna get sunburned,’ or ‘I saw clouds in the sky, I’m gonna get drenched with rain, it’d probably rain for weeks,’ if you got that kind of attitude, yeah, you’re gonna find problems in everything. Even if it doesn’t rain all week, you’re going to be like, ‘It rained three or four days, I knew it was gonna rain a lot.’

If you’re constantly looking for bad, you’re gonna find it.

Years ago, I did this little activity with a bunch of young men and women in a youth group. I took a bunch of apples, put them in a bag, and let them become mushy and they started to turn brown and rot and stuff. And then I took a really good, crisp, beautiful Granny Smith apple and I set it on top during the talk that I had with them. I talked to them about what kind of people they hang around and what kind of attitudes those people have.

And I explained to them that the longer you hang around them, you end up becoming more and more like them. I picked up the apple halfway through, and it was covered in mushy stuff and everything. It just looked really kind of bad and stuff like applesauce was all over it. I wiped it off and I said, ‘You know, if you’re around people for just a little while that are down, you feel like you need to take a shower and you need to wipe stuff off.’ And I had this all over my hand. I said, ‘But if you stay there too long and you let their attitudes infect you, then all of a sudden, you will rot. You’ll become useless to those around you.’

And the same is true at work. You can find a problem. There are problems around Northwest Enforcement that aren’t perfect. You might not like the pay, you might not like the hours, you might not like the drive, you might not like the location, you might not like the traffic. You might not like…

There’s all kinds of things to not like. But if you turn it around and you look at things in a more positive way…

I’ve had times in my life where I felt like things were not going the way I wanted them to go, and most of the time, the things that turned it around was just my attitude turning it around. Most of you know that here, just a couple of weeks ago, by the time this airs for me (I’m recording it the day after), I had surgery. But I had cancer come back into my life. I had another cancer surgery yesterday. Yep, that’s me. And most of you know this, but not everybody seeing this video might know that. But it did, it came back.

Now, I could have had a different attitude.

I could have had a different attitude at the hospital. ‘Why am I having to go back in and have cancer surgery again? Oh, poor me.’ Instead, I went in, and I told the nurses I was living the dream. I smiled at them. I told them to have a blessed day. The young lady that put the IV in and stuff, she missed the vein the first time, and I told her, I said, ‘It’s okay.’ I said, ‘My veins run away from needles.’ And she smiled and laughed, and I told her to have a blessed day. And it was okay.

The lady that helped me get up and get ready so that I could use the restroom after my surgery, I told her to have a blessed day, and I asked her how her day was going, and I was concerned with her. I just had surgery. I just woke up. But my attitude, I saw it on her face. She goes, ‘I only got 20 minutes left of my shift.’ And I said, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s something.’ I said, ‘That’s amazing. You get to go home and relax and hang out with the fam.’ And she looked at me and she turned her head and she goes, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Your attitude can change people. It can affect people. Heck, it can infect people, again, positive or negative. It depends on you.

All right, you have a wonderful week. Be positive, be valuable, because nothing else will do. I will see you next week.