Making Your Attitude Your Greatest Asset

I SUBSCRIBED regularly to John Maxwell and came across an article which I must share with readers....

Motivational speakers have famously touted the slogan, "attitude is everything." While there's no doubt about the power of a positive outlook, attitude alone won't take you to the top. By itself, attitude is unable to resurrect a doomed business plan or make up for a deficiency of knowledge. Attitude can't alter reality or reverse a dire financial situation.

The "attitude is everything" doctrine becomes dangerous when a person lives on hope rather than paying his or her dues for success. The mindset, "Everything will turn out for the best," substitutes for planning and effort. Attitude has undeniable benefit, but it's not a magic ticket that compensates for failure to perform. You cannot disconnect attitude from reality and expect to be successful.

1) What Your Attitude Cannot Do For You.....

• Cannot Substitute for Competence.
  In my leadership experience, I have made the mistake of hiring for attitude and discounting ability. I erroneously thought that positive people would eventually find a way to get the job done-even if they didn't have the exact abilities for their role. Unfortunately, there's no substitute for talent. An attitude of confidence cannot replace competence.

• Cannot Substitute for Experience.
  Idealists have intense desire to change the world and often have a courageous attitude to match their ambition. However, without experience an idealist's wave of enthusiasm will crash on the shores of reality. Certain leadership positions-due to their scope of responsibility-demand the kind of wisdom that is earned solely through experience.

• Cannot Change the Facts.
  As John Adams said, "Facts are stubborn things." They may be painful to accept, but they cannot be ignored. Attitude alone cannot reverse financial numbers showing a company on the verge of bankruptcy. The reality for many companies involves difficult decisions like outsourcing or layoffs to cut costs.
  By itself, attitude cannot stem the tide of an evolving industry. For instance, newspapers must adjust their advertising strategies to confront the fact that consumers are flocking online for news. Without a fundamental shift in their business models, traditional newspapers face extinction-regardless of the attitudes permeating their company cultures.

• Cannot Substitute for Personal Growth.
  Attitude fills us with hope that we might reach our dreams. However, hope divorced from action proves false. In the words of musician, Bruce Springsteen, "A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be." Never stop dreaming, but also never cease growing if you expect your dreams to come true.

II. What Your Attitude Can Do For You

• Makes a Difference in Your Approach to Life.
  Our performance will likely match the expectations we have of ourselves or the expectations we allow others to impose upon us. In fact, it's very difficult to behave in a way that is contrary to self-expectations.
  At the professional levels, athletes are encouraged to visualize themselves having a successful performance before competing. Visualization has proved to be a productive technique for enhancing an athlete's play. Likewise, flooding your mind with thoughts of successful leadership can be pivotal in setting healthy self-expectations.

• Makes a Difference in Your Relationships with People.
  Many factors come into play when working with people, but what makes or breaks interpersonal skills is a person's attitude.

• Makes a Difference in How You Face Challenges.
  Circumstances appear to be instrumental in the creation of great leaders and thinkers, but such is the case only when their attitudes are right. Your attitude is the paint brush of your mind. It colors your world with brilliant optimism or a dark veneer of negativity. Consider these historical examples of leaders whose attitudes carried them beyond circumstances:
  

1. Demosthenes, called the greatest orator of ancient Greece, possessed a speech impediment. He overcame it by reciting verses with pebbles in his mouth and speaking over the roar of the waves at the seashore.
2. Composer Ludwig von Beethoven wrote his greatest symphonic masterpieces after he had become deaf.
3. John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress while in prison.
4. Daniel Dafoe also wrote while in prison, producing Robinson Crusoe.
   Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered by many to be among the best American presidents. Despite his polio handicap, FDR led the nation through the Great Depression and World War II.
   

I cannot always choose what happens to me, but I can always choose what happens in me. My attitude in circumstances beyond my control can be the difference maker. My attitude in the areas that I do control will be the difference maker.

Over the weekend, I'll resume the topic "The Practical Realities of the Call "

Discerning the Right Voice

HOW do we know we are hearing God’s voice and not merely the voice of our own aspirations, desires that contain godly ambition and selfishness co-mingled? How do we sort God’s voice out of the clamor of so many messages?

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet” Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking – A Theological ABC.

Without both, we fail.

Too many people in the church are doing things that “ought to be done,” but they don’t like it. It’s just wearing them down, and there’s a joylessness about the whole thing.

We failed miserably when we are doing something that “needs to be done” but doing it with no gladness. And this gladness isn’t necessarily emotional “highs” - we can suffer and sacrifice and still be glad about it. It is the sense of significance / meaning / purpose / seeing that the work as worthwhile rather then necessary. The former precedes the latter.

It’s just as wrong to do something that needs doing and hate it as it is to just do something that we like but doesn’t really need to be done. So a working theology of a call needs to include this sense of gladness, trying to find the common ground between our deep gladness and the needs around us.

Inherent in God’s call is something fierce and unmanageable. He summons, but he will not be summoned. God does the calling: we do the answering.

Jesus told his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). There is always a sense of compulsion, at times even a sense of angst and pain, about God’s call. Struck blind on the road of Damascus, Paul later wrote, “Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel” (1 Cor 9:16). Jeremiah said, “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot” (Jer 20:9).

Spurgeon saw the “divine constraint” as such a sure sign of a call that he advised young men considering the ministry not to do it if, in any way, they could see themselves doing something else.

At times, we try to “tame” the call:-

(1) Equating a staff position in a church or a religious organization with the call itself. But the call always transcends the things we do to earn money, even it those things are done in the church. The same distinction we urge our people to recognize applies to us: Our vocation in Christ is one thing; our occupation, quite another.

Our vocation is our calling to serve Christ; our occupations are the jobs we do to earn our way in the world. While it is our calling to press our occupations into the service of our vocation, it is idolatrous to equate the two. Happy is the man or woman whose vocation and occupation come close. But it is no disaster if they do not.

If tomorrow, I am fired and am forced to find employment in the gas station down the street; to turn my hobbies collection into a business through selling on eBay, etc, my vocation would remain intact. I still would be called to preach and to teach. To inspire and to lead. Nothing would have changed my call – just the situation / circumstance in which I obey this call.

Someone once said, “I may preach as the paid pastor of a church, but I am not paid to preach – I am given an allowance so that I can be more free to preach and teach” Ralph Turnbull.

(2) “Clericalizing” it. Seminary education does not qualify a person for the ordained ministry, nor does additional psychological testing and field experience. Naturally, these may be valuable and even necessary for the ministry, but none of them alone or in combination is sufficient.

No office or position can be equated with the call. No credential, degree or test should be confused with it. No professional jargon or psychobabble can tame the call of God. No training or experience or ecclesiastical success can replace it.

Only the call suffices. Everything else is footnote and commentary – Ben Patterson Mastering the Pastoral Role.

God does the calling: we do the answering. He call us to serve him and his work. Are you doing what God had called you to? Are you in a place “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Coming Next…”Recognizing the Professional realities”. Stay tuned….