MENTAL DIET: HOW TO GAIN LIFE’S ALTITUDE (PART 3)

“You need to feed your mind with clean, pure, powerful, inspirational ideas because you are what you are, and where you are, because of what’s gone into your mind.”

• Zig Ziglar.

A study by Harvard University revealed that 85% of the reasons for success, accomplishments, promotions, etc were because of our attitudes and only 15% because of our technical expertise (facts).

Your attitude is worth more to your overall success and happiness in life than your aptitude. In the domain of life, attitude is king. 

Out of the abundance of your heart flows the attitude of your life and shapes the outcome of your life. Your outward progress and its sustainability are determined by your inward growth. When you reframe your perspective you restructure your attitude.

To change your attitude, there must be a change of heart.

A CHANGE OF HEART FOR A CHANGE OF ATTITUDE

Why we do what we do determines how we do what we do and our attitude towards what we do and this attracts the quality of the outcome and consequently our reward or lack of it.

Matters of the heart are matters of life and matters of life are attitude matters. Behavioral modification void of a heart change yields no real or lasting change.  

A change of heart produces a change of attitude. Behavioral modification can never produce attitude alteration because it is superficial and has no root or substance.

The built-in bias of our hearts that renders the personality toxic – greed, envy, hatred, jealousy, avarice, self-gratification, and selfishness are the basis of a poor or negative attitude. When the heart changes the behavior changes – attitude is altered and destiny gains altitude.

However, all of us are the product of our environment either by default or by design. What’s around you? –Your environment determines what goes into you – your heart. Until you pursue greatness you can’t develop greatness within. 

STAYING POSITIVE IN A NEGATIVE WORLD

Have you ever considered why fish in their salty aquatic environment do not in themselves become salty when it is prepared and eaten by human beings? In fact, you need to add adequate salt for it to be tasteful in order to enjoy the fish meal.

Here’s the rub, the salty water in the aquatic environment inhabited by the fish does not get into the internal part of the fish and hence, though the fish is surrounded by salty water the fish is not determined by the salty water. We can draw a valuable lesson from the fish.

I believe the fish creates its own psychological environment that guards its body against absorbing the salty water in its physical environment. Martin Luther King Jr. rightly states, “You can’t stop a bird from landing on your head, but you can stop him from building a nest.”

As human beings, we have the ability or power not to allow what is happening around us to get into us. In life, it is not what happens around us or to us that really determines us but rather it is what happens within us that determines our success or failure in life. Your life will be as big or as small as your psychological environment.

The world is filled with negativity and a garbage dump mentality we must make a conscious choice to stay afloat in this ocean of negativity.

From our waking moment to the time of our night rest, we are bombarded with all sorts of garbage from diverse sources and probably even from people close to us.

How can we shield ourselves from these “missiles” of negativity that threaten to destroy our inspiration and motivation to succeed and even everything good and noble within?

To preserve our inspiration and motivation and live positively in a grossly negative world we need to protect the three gates to our conscious minds which permeate into our hearts or subconscious minds; the eye gate, the ear gate, and the mouth gate.