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Mental Health America

of Hendricks County

Attitude Adjustment Scale

Please rate you current attitude. Read the statement and circle the numbers where you feel you belong. If you circle a 10, you are saying your attitude could not be better in this area. If you circle a 1, you are saying it could not be worse. Now, be honest!

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

(Positive/High) (Negative/Low)

1. If I were to guess, my feeling is that my boss would currently rate my attitude as a:

2. Given the same chance, my co-workers and family would rate my attitude as a:

3. Realistically, I would rate my current attitude as a:

4. In dealing with others, I believe my effectiveness would rate a:

5. My current creativity level is a:

6. If there were a meter that could gauge my sense of humor, I believe it would read close to a:

7. My recent level of patience and sensitivity shown to others deserves a rate of:

8. When it comes to not allowing little things to bother me, I deserve a:

9. I would rate my enthusiasm toward my job and my life during the past few weeks as a:

A score of 90 or over is a signal that your attitude is ‘in tune’ and no adjustments seem necessary; a score between 70-90 indicates that minor adjustments may help; a score between 50-70 suggests a major adjustment; if you rated yourself below 50, a complete overhaul may be required.

How to Adjust Your Attitude

1. Employ the Flipside Technique: Humor and attitude can work side by side. When a ‘negative’ enters your life, ‘flip’ the problem over and look for whatever humor may exist on the other side. Laughter has been proven to be therapeutic.

2. Play Your Winners: The more you verbalize the happy, exciting events in your life, the more important they will become for you. Those who focus on the negatives in their life will wonder why they never ‘win.’

3. Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!: Free yourself from clutter! Some individuals unknowingly clutter their lives with unnecessary problem-producing possessions, people or commitments and then complain about the complexity of their lives. Try to discover how you might make an adjustment to simplify your life.

4. Insulate! Insulate! Insulate!: It would be impossible to think that all negative factors could be eliminated. Everyone at some point must learn to live with certain ‘no-win’ situations. Everyone has ‘lived through’ working for a difficult boss or managed to cope in spite of a family problem that has no solution. Work on ‘insulating’ your focus against the ‘impact’ of the problem. Find ways to push them to the outer perimeter of your fours in order to reduce them in size and keep them at bay.

5. Clarify Your Mission: Most people with a purpose are more apt to have a positive attitude than someone without direction. It need not be an all-consuming mission that reaches for the stars, but it should be sufficiently strong to provide a steady, on-going challenge.

What is a Positive Attitude?

On the surface, attitude is the way you communicate your mood to others. When you are optimistic and anticipate successful encounters, you transmit a positive attitude and people usually respond favorably. When you are pessimistic and expect the worst, your attitude often is negative; and people tend to avoid you. Inside your head, where it all starts, attitude is a mind set. It is the way you look at things mentally.

Like a camera, you can focus or set your mind on what appeals to you. You can see situations as either opportunities or failures. A cold winter day can be either beautiful or ugly, a department meeting as interesting or boring. Perception… the complicated process of viewing and interpreting your environment… is a mental phenomenon. It is within your power to concentrate on selected aspects of your environment and ignore others. Quite simply, you ‘take the picture’ of life you want to take.

Attitude is never the same. It is an on-going, sensitive, perceptual process. Negative factors can slip into your perspective at any time. This will cause you to spend ’mind time’ on difficulties rather than opportunities. If negative factors stay around long enough, they will be reflected in your disposition. The positive is still there, but it has been overshadowed by the negative. It is a challenge to push negative factors to the outer perimeter of your thinking. Those who learn the ‘trick’ will reflect it, and others will notice.

Of course, no one can be positive all of the time. Excessive optimism is not realistic. Friends and business associates will probably fell it is plastic. After all, a positive attitude is not an act; it must be genuine. Sometimes, when things get really tough, a positive attitude may be impossible, or even inappropriate.

When things are going well, a positive attitude becomes self-reinforcing and easy to maintain. Being human, however, insures that something will always happen to test your positive mind set. Some person or situation is always on the horizon to step on your attitude and challenge your ability to bounce-back. (Attitude: Your Most Priceless Possession, Elwood N. Chapman.)

EAP Director’s Note, Leesa Smith, M.A., LMFT

Attitude is important at home, with friends, family and in the workplace. A positive outlook provides the courage to address a problem and take action before it gets out of hand. By refusing to become angry or distraught you can assemble the facts, talk to others, determine your options and then come up with the best solution. If you find yourself in situations where you aren’t able to grasp a positive outlook about a problem, call and talk to someone. Talking out a problem oftentimes helps everyone gain a different perspective that can assist in a resolution. Attitudes are contagious!! Is yours worth catching?