A Contagious Attitude is Worth Catching

Provided by: National Fastpitch Coaches Association

Attitude is a choice. Attitude determines your altitude. Great slogans, but are they true?

Do you play better when you are confident, enthusiastic, and aggressive? Do you play worse when you are frustrated and not confident?

SURE. BUT IS attitude really a choice? If you think about the minutes that you've been awake over the last couple days, are you, in each moment, choosing to have the best possible attitude for getting what you want? If you are normal, you are choosing a lot less than half of the time. But just because most humans fail to choose most of the time does not mean they cannot. You can get an edge if you know exactly how to do it and are willing to make positive attitudes your habit!

Where does attitude come from? Knowing this with precision will help you tap into your personal power, control the controllable and approach your potential. Your attitude comes from what you think about, the way you' re looking at things, your perspective, what you are focused on and your self-talk. These are all different ways to say the same thing.

Imagine you are competing, and on the first pitch of your at-bat the umpire calls a pitch that was a foot outside. "Strike one." A normal perspective would be to think, "That stinks, it should be 1-0." A better option is to ignore the mistake, but an even better solution would be to say to yourself, "That won't defeat me." Or, "I'm tougher than most, because I know how to control what I can control." Or, "I'm glad he missed it on strike one, not on strike three." Or even, "Thank you, Mr. Umpire, for being blind so that I can show off my mental toughness skills."

Funny? Yes. Inappropriate? Not at all. Why is it funny? Because it is so far from most people' s reality. Self-talk is a choice, so choose wisely!

Great athletes know that to control the controllable, they have to think thoughts that are not only true, but are also useful. If you have an eight-ounce glass with four ounces of water in it and you are thirsty, you can choose to call half empty (pessimism), you can choose to view it as half full (optimism) or you can choose to say it is both (realism). All options are true, but only calling it half full will create the attitude that is most beneficial.

LEADERS DO NOT view a situation as bad or good, they know that it is part of the journey. They know that experiences are both bad and good. They adopt a philosophy of life that says, "adversity is always good for me as long as I literally survive." Learning to apply this perspective is a key to maintaining a confident, positive attitude.

Personally, Viktor Frankl helped me figure this out. His book, Man's Search for Meaning, is a graphic autobiography from a horrible time in history.

Frankl tells how he was taken from his home with his pregnant wife and parents, put on a train, and sent to a concentration camp. Inside, he lived without minimums of nutrition, sanitation and liberty. He had to do slave labor all day and he eventually found out that his pregnant wife and parents had been killed.

He was depressed (and if you want to get thoroughly depressed, you can read the book, too) and noticed that the depression was affecting the quality of his work. He did not care about the work for the work's sake, but he cared about getting it done, because when you are inside a concentration camp and you do not work well enough, you get punished, which usually meant killed.

IN COMPETITION, "need" is a bad word. Winning is lots more fun than the alternative, but you do not need to win. Frankl literally needed to not be depressed, and he found a way.

He did it by emphasizing in his mind the hope that today would be the last day on the inside. Statistically, it probably would not be, but it was possible, and by relentlessly emphasizing that shred of honest optimism in his thoughts, his attitude and work, his chances at survival improved.

When he noticed this impact, he told his comrades to focus on the hope that this was the last day on the inside, and he saw the death rate decrease as a result. The thesis of the book is that they can take away every other human freedom - and they did - but the last of the human freedoms is the ability to choose one's own attitude in any situation.

The point of the book for me is that life's not fair. If Frankl can find a way to have a good attitude in a concentration camp, I can certainly do the same when my blessed life hits a bump in the road.