Attitude!

1. What does attitude mean to you? Briefly define in your own words.
Attitude can be positive or negative. It is how you see the world around you and how to react to everything. Attitudes can be extremely influential on other people and can hurt or help yourself.
2. How does attitude affect your leadership?
Attitude affects all leadership. No one wants to follow someone with a bad attitude and people with the best attitudes often have the most leaders. People with negative attitudes often lead too. However, their followers don't trust them or believe in their cause as much as they would if the leader were more positive.
3. We talked about the following points about attitude. Explain each as it pertains to your own leadership...
Your attitude is a choice-Every day I wake up, I can make the choice to let the little things that go wrong affect me, or I can brush them off and move on. If I choose the former, my attitude will be bad all day and it will show to others. But if I choose the latter, I will eliminate unnecessary stress in my life and will be able to move on more easily from even bigger obstacles.

Your attitude determines your actions-I am not the type of person who plays better when I'm mad. Some people are like that, but not me. Whenever I am in a bad mood, all of my actions suffer and I can't seem to to anything right. But when I'm in a good mood, everything seems to flow smoothly and I feel like I can take on the most challenging obstacles in my life.

Your people are a mirror of your attitude-Attitude is contagious, and whenever you are in a leadership position among followers, your attitude can rub off pretty easily. You don't even have to be in a leadership position most of the time--whenever you're with friends or family or strangers, if you're in a sour mood, you don't seem approachable and no one wants to be around you. But if you're in a good mood, you seem friendlier and that automatically attracts other people and makes them be in a good mood too.

Respond to the following quote by Victor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning:
"The last of our human freedoms is to choose our attitude in any given circumstances."
I completely agree. Sometimes it's hard to rise above tough situations and have a good outlook on things, but it is ultimately our choice to do so. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Victor Frankl, when he wrote this, was talking about the Holocaust. One of my friends who I was talking to about this quote said that he gets mad over little things--like his alarm not going off, his car not starting, not having a cup of coffee, etc. These are all trivial things that are so miniscule in comparison to living through the Holocaust, and I think that if Frankl can have a good outlook in such a situation, so can all of us who have it fairly easy in life. I really like this quote, but what I like more is the history of the person who said it.