Attitude

I respect Charles Swindoll and his view on attitude, but one thing that stood out the most in his work was the following:

I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it

So what does this mean to me? I feel that when it comes to our attitude, this statement is somewhat flipped. I think that life consists of 90%, whereas the 10% is how I react to it because no matter how much you respond to something a certain way, people will always have their viewpoint on you. You can be one of the friendliest and most fearless people by reacting to a situation that may have been negative in the most positive way. However, people have this stagnant mindset of you. There will always be someone who focuses on the negative aspects of you, where you have some people who do not focus on that, and those that focus on those negative aspects look at how you reacted to situations and not what you went through.

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What can be described as having a psychologist or therapist that sees your past for your past and understand why you react a certain way? Isn't that supposed to be the idea of understanding life? Still, in life, everybody does not embrace what they go through or what life brings to them, but sure as hell look at you when you are having a bad day, or if you are feeling sad, or maybe that you have an "attitude," and that is the problem! You do not know what that person is going through or how they had to go about life, but all you recognize is the reaction. You dictate how a person is based on their response, but not how life has caused that response. Isn't it such a challenge to look at someone from that perspective? However, it took one reaction, one negative view, one messed up action... It did not take any effort to see why that reaction came about, and I think that is the messed up cycle with just looking at people's attitudes.

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