What is Attitude?

(Excerpts from my another blog....) written on Jul 17, 2008

(a maiden attempt to write a 1 pager on a topic :-))
What is Attitude?
Attitude is everything. Our life cycles around this word called attitude. Attitude means the positive or negative way of an "attitude object": i.e., a person, behavior, or event.
Attitude exists in all walks of our life. – Be it food habits, good thoughts, approach to people, success in business, in the playground, with the family.
People have free choice of doing things as they please. But what is more important is, how is their approach, attitude towards things?
We are filled with emotions and attitudes that we inherit/ acquire from family/ friends. The way of differentiating good attitude (way of thinking) and bad attitude determines our success rate to a greater extent.
We have different attitude about self, towards other things / people and attitude on life. Attitude on self can be self-esteem, pride, self confidence. Attitude on others can be the way of looking at people / object – good feeling about the others, indifference towards others. Attitude towards life – a challenging question!. How do I view it? It is a feeling of thinking good things / happenings would always come our way because we are doomed to difficulties in life.
A Positive attitude can overcome a negative situation. It generates positive thoughts that emerge circumstantially. – A Paradigm Shift. When you shift your attitude towards positive way, you feel that life suddenly responds in kind.
A Positive attitude attracts positive things and positive thoughts in life. A Negative Attitude act the reverse. For example, if you speak negative about another person or a situation it suddenly attracts negative thoughts and circumstances in life.
Let me give an example:
We go to a shop and buy things. We are happy looking at different things. We get whatever we want in the shop. All is fine. When we go to the Cash counter and pay cash, we notice that one of the currencies that we intend to pay is torn but fixed with a transparent adhesive tape. Do we take it back and give a good currency to the cashier?. No, most of the times we do not. Here our negative attitude is reflected. On the other side, he accepts your torn currency. It shows his positive attitude.
“ Our attitude toward life determines life's attitude towards us” - John N. Mitchell