How’s your perspective lately? It might be time to check your mindset for 3 bad attitudes that are holding you back. You might not even be aware that these negative attitudes have crept into your daily life. If you don’t make a conscious effort to change, you could be missing out on opportunities to become happier.
Bad Attitude #1: Guilt Grenade Launcher
Guilt is manipulation, often a type of defense mechanism. If you pass it off to someone else, you relieve yourself of the remorse that follows. Why would you purposely want to make someone feel bad, just so you can feel better? What is the positive result of dealing with an issue by actually NOT dealing with it?
Guilt hits hardest on people with low self-esteem. It leads them to blame themselves for things that go wrong or to accept responsibility for circumstances that they didn’t create. What it DOESN’T do is resolve the situation that led to guilt.
Guilt is common with passive-aggressive personality types. “Oh, it’s ok you forgot my birthday. It’s not a big deal.” “Don’t worry about me. I’ll just go see that movie some other time.” These comments are masterfully designed to toss guilt like a hand grenade. Stop yourself before tossing the guilt grenades and dodge the ones thrown at you.
Bad Attitude #2: Blame Gamer
Shifting the blame to someone else is a waste of time. The Blame Game has no winners. All the energy put into shifting blame could be better invested in damage control and ensuring the problem doesn’t recur. Rather than sit around finding someone to blame for what went wrong, gather your team and say, “We all make mistakes. Let’s focus our efforts on figuring out how to avoid having this happen again. What can we do differently in the future?”
The need to put the blame on other people shows a lack of self-confidence. Everybody makes mistakes. At some point, it will be you on the other end of the pointing finger. Before the blame comes your way, step up and accept responsibility. You’ll be a positive role model for accountability by not pointing out mistakes made by others.
Remember, the right to do something does not make doing it right. As the proverb goes, “A person may stumble and fall many times in life, but they are not a failure until they say, ‘Who pushed me?’”
Bad Attitude #3: Approval Junkie
Do you need a steady diet of affirmation, praise, and approval? A strong need for approval from others signifies overdependence, which can cause you to do things against your own best judgment in order to feel accepted.
Ask yourself why you need to be told that what you’re doing is right. Do you question your own value? That’s the attitude that you’re communicating to others. And if you don’t value yourself, how can you expect others to do it?
The praise that is sprinkled or heaped on you is like water on a stone. It doesn’t sink in. You always need more, because deep inside, you don’t believe in yourself.
Get rid of this bad attitude by recognizing that there is no amount of praise that is equal to your own self-worth. Put your energies into building that up so you don’t need to rely on getting it from other people, who are frankly tired of having to boost your fragile ego.
Negativity is always around us. It interferes with our productivity, erodes our confidence, blocks our creativity, and brings us down. We can’t avoid it, but we can learn to recognize negative attitudes, let go, and correct them. Start today by replacing negativity with a more positive, healthy mindset.
