Do you ever feel like it’s time to do all the things you want to do, become the person you know you can be, just generally stop wasting time? Well now might be just the time to do it.
For some of us, a big barrier to making the impact you want to make or the life choices you know you could achieve is the assumption or belief that you are shy or ‘introverted.’ If you were asked to name your top 5 list of shy introverts I’m guessing the name Salvador Dali probably would be missing. In fact he was a ‘morbidly shy’ person in his youth who could barely be in company of others without blushing.
But one day Dali was advised to ‘pretend’ he was an extrovert. To ‘act as if’ he was a flamboyant, confident and celebrated painter. And guess what? He soon became one.
Dali had clocked that regardless of how self-conscious he felt inside, by adopting the ‘attitude’ of a successful artist – the clothes, the body language, the persona – he began to transform into exactly what he wanted to become – a successful, notorious and celebrated artist-extraordinaire. His work may have been surreal but his extroverted persona was as real as real could be.
As this article in Psychology today discusses “You Become What You Pretend To Be.” The secret is attitude. Your attitude influences your behaviour and your behaviour influences your attitude. If you start to act ‘as if ‘ you are the person you want to be then you will change your physical behaviour. You then begin to feel and think differently in the emotional and intellectual dimensions and before you know it your ‘intentional dimension’ will have integrated with the other three dimensions and you will believe in yourself and all that you have become. It’s still you. Just you with ‘attitude!’
From my earliest school day memories, ‘Having an attitude’ was often endowed with incredibly negative connotations. ‘Having an attitude’ usually meant ‘that child doesn’t work hard enough, they’ll never be an A grade student.’ But perhaps it’s time to challenge those disapproving finger-pointy curmudgeons of one’s rebellious youth and start to adopt an attitude. An ‘attitude’ of confidence, of success. The attitude of whatever you want to become.
Attitude might just be the new A grade. The time never looked better to get some serious attitude and start working it very hard.
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