Attitude Adjustments Are Job Security

Attitude Adjustments Are Job Security

It may seem cliche or trite to talk about how you should adjust your attitude for job security, but at the same time I’ve seen a run of people losing their jobs around me for the same reason. By and large, these people had developed bad attitudes somewhere along the way, and work wasn’t merely work anymore. It had become drudgery. It’s difficult to get up at the crack of dawn each day if you expect the same old mess, different day, and that’s putting it politely. If you actually view the boss as your enemy, that he or she has it out for you, and you realize that budgets are tightening in all levels of the economy, then it’s difficult to get motivated. I have been both the employee and employer, and can tell you that truly 90% of my work experience hinges on my own attitude.

The good news is, it’s cheap to change it. All it takes is a little changing of our minds, and a little determination and planning, and you can win the battle against a bad attitude. Mind you, it’s not as if we’re all living the dream. Most likely, we’re living the same struggle, just at different levels. I want to address the one thing in our lives we really can change–our attitudes. Here are three of the things I changed recently in my own thinking to gain job security:

* Keeping vs. Seeking
* Positive Self-Talk
* Success & Altruism

Let’s take that one at a time:

Keeping vs. Seeking

I had to realize that keeping my current job was far easier than looking for a new one. This goes back to the “a bird in a hand is worth two in the bush” axiom. It may seem altogether simple, but after fighting a year’s worth of depression, I gave up the fight and my lack of job performance showed it. If I couldn’t keep this job, what made me think starting over someplace else would be any different? I needed to change my thinking on keeping my current job. It became a real quest for me.

Positive Self-Talk

I had to stop using sarcastic, self-depreciative self-talk to describe the job I am in. It didn’t matter that the job itself was very repetitive, menial, or whatever. All that mattered was that I actually had a job to hold on to. After a while, I found every reason to complain against where I was at in life. Every night I’d turn on the news and one employer after another had a major corporate layoff. I had to realize that could be me at the employment office, wondering how I was going to make ends meet. My self-talk was so negative that I couldn’t find a positive thing to reflect on or be thankful for. I deliberately had to look for things to be thankful for to resist my natural sarcastic tongue.

Success & Altruism

I had to want my boss’s success as much as I wanted my own: my success at work was his success. I needed to want that for him. Instead of viewing the workplace as a black hole of my time, I had to view my boss’s success as one of my personal goals that I was working for each day. That translated into marketing ideas, getting new customers, quality assurance checks, and more communication between me and the boss. I wanted to take the initiative so I could solve problems and foresee them for him, and make his life as easy as possible. His success is literally my success, whether it translates into a more money or not.

Guess what? I still have my job, I actually love it for the first time, and I am looking forward to Monday mornings to get a fresh start. Did I tell you it didn’t cost me anything except my bad attitude? Join me, would you, and adjust your attitude for job security? Make your customers Raving Fans, and put your competition on notice as you set out to prove to the market that they need you doing the fantastic job that only you can provide. I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me just a few months ago that everything can literally hinge on my own attitude, but frankly it’s been no secret, and it’s absolutely true. Mind you, I can’t heal a sick relative with my good attitude, but I can certainly hang on to my job quite a bit longer, or at least perform my job noticeably better when I have the right attitude pushing me onward.