Attitude

Attitude is not a negative word.  It’s true you can have a bad attitude towards something;   but equally you can have a good attitude towards something, for example business networking.  For ‘attitude’ read ‘approach’, if you like.  How good is your approach to networking?  Do you need to approach this work differently?

Attitude is passive, whereas approach is usually active.  It is the passivity of one’s attitudes which we need, at times, to shake ourselves from.

Our attitude towards something is the interaction of our feelings and emotions about that thing and our thoughts and beliefs about it.  It is a third thing.

The statistician George Box said,

All models are wrong, but some models are useful.

The behaviour cycle model is useful, but it’s not accurate in showing the arrows in the way it does.  In reality, there should probably be a double headed arrow between each box and every other box.  This may be truer, but it is a lot less helpful, since it loses the important information:  it hides the ‘prevailing wind’.

So, I show attitude as a double headed arrow between feelings and emotions and thoughts and beliefs.  Attitude is not a sum of those things in isolation to each other.  Rather, it arises from the effect of feelings and emotions on our thoughts and beliefs;  the effect of thoughts and beliefs on our feelings and emotions;  and the seemingly infinite regression between the two types of thoughts.

Attitude is not feelings + beliefs.  Attitude is feelings × beliefs.

Related material:
>  The behaviour cycle

by Jeremy Marchant . © 2017 Jeremy Marchant Limited . uploaded 31 may 2017 . image:  Free images
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