Attitude

A bad attitude is like a flat car tyre.
You're not going anywhere unless you change it.

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Attitude 0:02

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and today you'll learn all about your attitude and if you are ready. We'll start the show. Happy New Month everybody. If it is a new month for you right now, you could be listening to this in two weeks or two years time for all I know. But on day of release, it's a new month and it's a Friday as well. So you'll have my Friday bonus episode out this morning too, actually. Maybe you're gonna save this for the Mayday Bank holiday Monday next week. If so, happy Monday. That's not a phrase you hear very often, is it, happy Monday? Aside from the band, obviously. It's usually Happy Friday, isn't it? And that's a bandwagon. I jump on. If you follow me on social media, you'll see my little Happy Friday posts. But on Monday it's always a motivational one. I even email it out to people on my mailing list. You might have received one this week that said, When a child falls down 50 times when learning to walk, it never thinks to itself maybe I should give up. And I do like reminding people of that 'cause our attitude towards things really is one of the biggest factors in whether we stick at something long enough to get where we want to go. I once heard someone say that a bad attitude is like a flat car tyre, and you're not going anywhere unless you change it. Now I don't normally like those slightly twee motivational sayings, but that one did sit quite well with me 'cause it reminded me of a quote that for some weird internet reason, people seem to think Winston Churchill once said it, even though he didn't. And that's, that attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference. But what actually is attitude? Well, in psychology terms, our attitude is basically the mix of beliefs, feelings and behaviours that we have towards something. Whether that subject is political, religious, or anything else, whether it's about another person, a dog down the road or ourselves. And that links quite nicely to that famous CBT triangle where thoughts affect feelings. Feelings affect behaviour. And behaviour then reinforces thoughts. So if we had a bad attitude and need to change it, then recognising the influence of this ever looping triangle is really important because then you can start picking off one by one the influencing factors as to why your attitude is holding you back. Because attitude, whether it helps us or hinders us, is often about habit. Usually it starts with repeated thoughts, and if those thoughts get repeated often enough, they can stop sounding like thoughts, and they start sounding and feeling like facts. That's when they become beliefs, which have bigger emotions attached to them. A passing thought can come and go quite quickly, but when the same thought keeps turning up again and again. It starts to carry a bit more weight, but when a thought gets repeated enough times, It can turn into a belief like something good might actually happen here. And that creates a feeling, maybe hope, maybe confidence, maybe just enough courage to take the next step, and that's what starts to influence behaviour. With even a bit of hope, you're more likely to take opportunities. More likely to say yes to the things you actually want and no to the things that you don't. And over time, that starts to look like a more optimistic attitude to life. But of course, it works the other way too. If the repeated thoughts are negative, they can turn into beliefs that something bad is going to happen or that you can't cope, or that there's no point trying. And those beliefs can feed anxiety, low mood, panic, avoidance. All sorts. And then your behaviour starts lining up with that. You avoid opportunities. You say yes when you wish you'd said no. You say no to things that part of you actually wanted. And bit by bit, that becomes a pessimistic attitude to life. And it's worth saying that this isn't about blaming yourself for having a negative attitude. A lot of pessimism starts as self-protection. If life has taught you to expect disappointment, criticism, or rejection of course part of you is gonna brace yourself for that. That makes sense. But what made sense once doesn't always keep helping us now. I know it's hard to break the habit of a lifetime, but knowing that when your attitude is holding you back, and your thoughts and emotions are the foundations of your attitude, it can maybe show us that we have more control over our life than we might have thought. But rather than sabotage our life with those beliefs, we need to use our thoughts to our advantage and create a new attitude from new thoughts, new feelings, new behaviours. Until it's repeated so much, it just becomes who we are. It feels natural to have that optimistic attitude. Now this isn't me saying just think positive and everything will be fine 'cause that's nonsense. Bad things happen. Some situations really are hard, but our attitude still affects what we do next. And I know it's hard at the minute to try and stay grounded. 'cause the news is just one thing after another, isn't it? War, interest rates, political nonsense. Crisis after crisis. And it's hard to ignore it. I'm quite an optimistic guy, really, and even I can feel myself being drawn back to the BBC homepage or something, and it's not with an optimistic, oh, let's see if Trump's backed off yet, expectation. So the pessimists who have been programmed through repetition to filter their world for the things that go wrong and the reasons to feel hopeless must be soaking up all the crap for most of their waking hours at the minute. If that's you, notice what you are doing and turn away from it where you can. We probably only need one short news update a day to know what we need to know. That's it. A few minutes, once a day. That's usually enough. After that, we are not staying informed. We're just marinating in it. You're not going to learn anything new the following hour, and if you miss out on something important for 23 hours and you find out something the next day, so what? It won't change anything. We often trick ourselves into thinking that the more we know about something, the more control we have over it, but that only works for ourselves. The more we know ourselves, the more control we can have over ourselves. But it doesn't really work for the outside world. There are people in this world who are optimists, who can carry on regardless, and there are pessimists who give up on their dreams. And a huge part of the difference between the person who keeps going and the person who gives up is attitude. I wonder if you've seen someone who seems to be fired up and motivated. They know where they wanna be and they know just how to get there. And I wonder if they were doing something that you would love to do too, and you just somehow knew that they were going to achieve it, but you also felt that deep down you weren't. I wonder if you held yourself back with that thought. Because the thought created the defeatist attitude. A negative belief that created a pessimistic feeling, that created an unmotivated behaviour. If so, that's okay. Notice that. Learn from that. Move on from that. Grow from that. One of the few sort of internet memes that people do get right about Winston Churchill is something he said in the House of Commons in 1948. He said, those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So by changing your thoughts, you begin to shift your beliefs. That helps change how you feel. That changes what you do, and then what you do gives you evidence that things can be different after all, and round and round it goes. But this time in a direction that actually helps, especially if you know just what to do and just how to do it. Say someone has got it into their head that people probably won't like them. That belief creates anxiety. So when they're around other people, they hold back a bit. They avoid eye contact, maybe they don't say much, which then means the conversations feel awkward. And afterwards they think, see told you. But what actually happened there wasn't proof that they're unlikable. It was proof that anxiety got in the way. And if they start changing one small part of that, maybe they speak a little more, ask one more question, stay five minutes longer than usual. Then they start getting a different evidence back. So if you do see someone who you just know is going to achieve their goals, let that person inspire you rather than belittle you. Let it be evidence that it can be done. That action can be taken that leads you to the life you want. That the only difference between the two of you is the attitude. And you can get that attitude, not just by overriding negative thoughts and reminding yourself that you can do it. Not just by acknowledging those feelings either, but by realising they may not even have started with you. That helpless feeling, that inferior feeling, it might belong to the past, it might belong with the people or experiences that first taught you to feel that way. And sometimes part of healing is giving that back, realising it was never the truth about you in the first place. But not just doing that. But by taking deliberate action too. Taking the steps. You can listen to all the podcasts in the world, watch all the YouTube videos you can about personal development and self-improvement. But truthfully, it does nothing without you also taking action. Don't get me wrong, it's important to get prepared, working out what to do and how to do it. That's action too. But it doesn't stop there. 'cause if it does. Then you've got that flat tyre attitude and until you change it, you are going nowhere. So, sure, make the plans, work out the steps to take you there, but then you have to actually take those steps. I'm being deliberately vague here 'cause this applies to almost anything. Learning a musical instrument, changing career, starting therapy, leaving a relationship, moving to another country. Anything where growth asks something of you. People don't realise it, but we are constantly changing. Our brains are altering and growing with every experience we have, with every decision we make. But we so often think we have to keep replaying the past, keep being who we were, and that's how we get stuck. We get stuck with who we were and it just becomes who we are forever. But it doesn't have to, we don't have to be stuck. With deliberate action, you can nudge yourself towards being the version of you that you want to be. And with the right attitude and the repeated behaviour that comes from it, you can get far closer to the life you want than you might think. But I repeat, it takes deliberate action probably daily. It's not a one-off thing. You could buy a lottery ticket the once, but you're still relying on external factors to make it worth anything. And it's close to impossible that one single lottery ticket is gonna change your life, it's gambling at the end of the day. 'cause you can't influence the outcome. So we need to spend our time on the things that we can influence the outcome of. Our physical health, our mental health, our appreciation of our experiences, our connection to others, our sense of value in this world, our contributions to it. We can influence these things, and they all have a far better positive effect than a lottery ticket could. Even if we did win. There are plenty of miserable wealthy people after all. So we know wellbeing isn't just about money, it's about richness in other areas of life. Things that contribute to a positive sense of self. And our attitude to ourselves and the world helps shape our sense of self, and that sense of self is congruent. It just means it feels real, genuine. Like the version of you that the world sees is actually you. To feel comfortable enough in your own skin that the version of ourselves that we show the world is the real version of us. Maybe not a hundred percent of us, obviously. We all bring out different parts of ourself depending on who we're with and where we are. But even if there are 10 different parts of ourselves that we pull out for different circumstances, they're all still genuine. I think it's important to grasp this because we can think of ourselves as fake or a fraud. Or worse, it leads to this lonely sort of feeling because the real us isn't being seen. Our true self is invisible. And that's not a nice feeling. We want a good solid sense of self. Because without that, we can lower our self-esteem, our opinion of ourself, our sense of what we deserve or are entitled to. Like I said, if there's someone that already has those traits that you admire, think about those traits. Think about the attitude that you want to absorb into your sense of self, into who you are. Recognise that if life has slowly taught you to feel awkward, inferior, or undeserving, then life can also teach you something different. Those feelings were learned, which means little by little they can be unlearned too. Into feeling relaxed, deserving, and empowered. It just means creating a better version of yourself in your mind. Start there. Start in your mind. Picture the version of you that you want to grow into. The way you'll hold yourself, the eye contact, the tone of voice, the boundaries, the behaviours, and be okay with integrating, however slowly it needs to be, those traits into your life. Alien, as it might feel at first. Fake as it might feel to almost pretend to be more optimistic or calmer or more confident. Just remember that you're practising You're learning. Someone learning to play a musical instrument isn't pretending that they can play it, they're learning it, and it's okay if they're struggling as they do so. In fact, struggling is often where growth happens. If everything stays easy, and familiar, we don't stretch and that's how we get stuck. So if this feels awkward, that doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It probably means you're learning and that's the best place to begin. So. Let's leave it there for today, and if you fancy a bit more from me, do come and join me on Patreon. It helps me spend more time making these episodes, and it also helps me do some charitable stuff in the background as well, which I'm very glad about. You get a full length podcast every Monday morning from me, a hypnotherapy recording too, and naturally my adoration, which alone is worth the six pounds a month. Even with VAT, it's hardly a king's ransom, is it? It could even save you a fortune in therapy, for all I know. Many folk have told me that from listening to my Patreon podcast, they've moved from weekly therapy to fortnightly therapy, which is quite the cost saving. So if you'd like a bit more support with your mental health, whether that's anxiety, self-esteem, low mood, or you're just trying to get your head straight in a very busy world. Come on board. The link is in the episode description, as always. Have a lovely day and I'll speak to you again very soon. Take care, folks.