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[Phil Bonelli] Alright, our employability skill #2 is your attitude. Attitude really is everything. In life, you may have already noticed there are so many things outside of your control. Sometimes the way that I feel today I might not be able to control, who my parents are, maybe where I go to school, what happens to me, the Weather. All these things I can't control, but I can control my attitude. What is my attitude? We've all heard that word we've probably been told to stop having a bad attitude at some time or another. The attitude is just the way that you react to or reflect on the world. I had a coworker and she got stuck on the way up to the office in the elevator for 17 minutes. So this is obviously not a very happy experience. She didn't want to be stuck. She was probably in a hurry, had lots of things to do. She got out after 17 minutes and went about her day and I'll never forget I was speaking to her afterwards and she told me how she was having such a bad day and that she got stuck in the Elevator and I’ll never forget the first thing that popped in my mind is what a great day you're having, really, because you're not stuck in the elevator anymore. You could still be in there, it's just all your attitude and how you decide to look at things and things that happen to you. So which one of these are you? Both glasses have the same amount of water. I can look at it and say, wow, this glass is half full. This is great. There's water in there that I can drink. I'm so excited to have this or I can look at the very same glass and say this is half empty. Woe is me. Look at all the things that I don't have.

When you, in work or any sort of Relationship, if you focus on being grateful, being focused on the things that you do have and that you're thankful for, and be focused on having a positive outcome, that's a positive attitude, and that is a good thing every day of the week. Attitude is, is definitely one of the bigger motivating factors within an individual because if you have an attitude that if you have a preset notion or preset attitude that something is going to go Well, I think that you have a lot more opportunity to be successful within that situation. Whereas if you're negative about something, there's it's pretty hard to be, it's pretty hard to see success in something that you are negative in before it starts. And that goes, obviously, that's just positive and negative, but in any sort of mentality or attitude that you may have going into something, it can affect how everything goes forward. So for me, when I was in high school, I was very positive about how my future is going to be. I was very optimistic and very wide eyed, just excited, you know, and and I wouldn't have changed that for anything.

I was very optimistic and I was excited for the future and I still am. But I was, I also had friends that were very negative and they were very kind of, I don't want to say depressed or anything like that, but they were very pessimistic about what was going to happen. And you can kind of see that in the decisions that they made. In the present moment, but also going forward into the where they went to college and stuff like that. And they later regretted it and they caused a lot more financial burdens in different burdens that you may not really realize when you make the decision. So having that attitude that it is being optimistic and knowing that it's. Life is a beautiful thing and knowing that the future can hold a lot of positive stuff if you if you have that mindset going into it. Yeah, I think that's that's a big problem I see here a lot. You know people when they're struggling, they just get caught in that struggle and their own, like sort of, like down on themselves, but you can't have an attitude.What you really have to do is just have a good attitude about it, which is really easy for me to say now that I've actually gone out, been in difficult situations where I just had to shut my mouth and just do it.

Just get through that tough thing an a lot of people think, you know complaining helps, you know, complaining makes me feel better, but what does it do to the people around you? And then the other people complaining around you? What does that do for yourself? So you have to think about how your actions are affecting other people. And then also how they're affecting you Subconsciously? You don't realize that when you're complaining and having a bad attitude about a situation that is actually making your situation worse, and what you can do is a lot of times I find here that people just complain about how things are run, how things are done, you have to work hard to get in a position where you can change things, and that's really what I've adapted for myself. And that's how I sort of fixed my attitude because I know within myself I'm going to fix this one day, and I'm going to work hard so I can be the difference. My attitude, I can definitely tell my, my work ethic when I'm doing something, either for a class or for something outside. If I am gung ho about it, and just on it, my caliber of work is a lot better than if I'm doing an assignment because I'm forced to or if I'm, you know, in some sort of meeting because I just have to be and I can't make that click and be that motivational guy. It's just it's an output. Just my efficiency is either up or down depending on that attitude, and so it's something important to go into. Into a meeting or into an assignment, or into some sort of duty. If you're working with a team, your attitude is reflected by theirs, if that makes sense.

So I mean birds of a feather flock together is a popular saying, but if I'm gusto about something or if I have some sort of important I don't know if I'm if I'm there for the right reasons then that will help them be there for the right reasons and vice versa. So I want you to consider the following. If you were to look at a newspaper and see an obituary of yours, what would you want it to say about you as a person? Attitude is obviously very important and I'll tell you something besides being important, having a good attitude is just a lot more fun. As we wrap up attitude, I want to tell you about two kinds of mindsets, fixed mindset and a growth mindset. When you have a fixed mindset, you're very limited in opportunities that you have that may arise in the future. You may have this narrow pathway that this is what's going to happen, and there's nothing else is going to hinder the road for me in my future. But as we have seen in this year, it's there's so much stuff that can happen that you have no control over, so having that growth mindset and knowing that you can leave every door open. And depending on what situation may arise, you may cross this one. You may go through this door. Depending on what comes from that situation. So the biggest thing with having a fixed mindset is you don't actually realize it.

You think you're at the top of your game doing everything you're supposed to do, but you don't realize why you're stuck. You're stuck. You're not going anywhere. You don't really know why. That's when you have to start focusing on having a growth mindset where you're constantly analyzing, you Know, what you think and why you think it. Why you're making these decisions and then incorporating other peoples opinions too, you know, listening to people around you. My dad told me something. He said that you have to walk in the room assuming that you have something to learn from, every single person that room. It may be completely false, you could be the smartest person that room, but if you enter that room with that mindset, you will leave learning something new that you never knew before, and that's how you sort of use growth mindset to get you moving in your career and like get you moving forward.

I think the growth mindset that's obviously going to be the more applicable to having a career that that you grow within that career. I've had tons of people that have mentored me mention the fact that you're never really done Learning, right, and anybody that thinks they are might not know as much as they think they do, and so as a leader, or as somebody that's in charge of something, it's important to recognize that you'll never have all the answers, but you're learning just as much as the people that you're leading. It might be about different different things, or different topics, or a different type of learning, but that mindset of knowing that you're going to walk into somewhere and learn something is important in the eyes of people that you're leading, if that makes sense. We all have skills. We all have challenges. We talked about that life is full of challenges and problems. We all have a certain amount of effort that we put in or don't, we all are going to be getting feedback at some point another and we're all going to have setbacks.

So let's look at how a fixed mindset and a growth mindset look at these things. A fixed mindset, skills are just something that you're born with. You either have them or you don't have them. I'm good at this. I'm bad at this, etc. I don't really have any responsibility in it. It's set in stone. It is what it is. When it comes to challenges for fixed mindset challenges are something to avoid. They could reveal my lack of skill. I don't want to have a challenge. I want to be around a challenge I might lose on I might get rejected, I might look bad. They might reveal that lack of skills, which I don't control - their fixed. And a fixed mindset tends to give up easily. What's the point anyway? When it comes to effort, effort for fixed mindset is something unnecessary.

Something you do when you're not good enough. So in a fixed mindset, I've got the skills or not. So why put in the effort if I've got the skills that will just happen if I don't have the skills to get it done, what's the point in trying? When it comes to feedback, I get defensive because my skills and my whole persona are fixed. If you say something negative about that, I kind of feel anger and defensiveness. When you say critical feedback to me and I take it personal. When it comes to setbacks, I'm going to blame others and get discouraged. People with a fixed mindset, they want to shift things away from other people.

They can't really handle that that negative feedback. So if there's a set back, then they want to throw other people under the bus. Now let's counter that with a growth mindset. A growth mindset, skills come from hard work. You can always improve. Now we've all got things that some of us are better at and some are worse at. But if there's something that I'd like to be able to do or want to be able to do, I can work hard at it and I can improve. I'm not fixed in my skill level from birth. Challenges should be embraced. They help me to grow if I'm not taking on challenges, I'm not growing.

Think of a muscle. If you don't lift weights or do pushups or do some sort of exercise, your muscle will atrophy as opposed to grow. So you need challenge and when there is a challenge because I'm powered by a good attitude and I want to grow, I can be persistent and overcoming it. Effort is therefore essential, effort’s essential. I know that everything with the growth mindset everything takes hard work, but I can improve. I can grow and it's a path to mastery. I know the more that I work, particularly the more effort I put into overcome challenges, the better that I get. And I'll tell you I have seen that so clearly in my life. If you continue to do your best, continue to put in effort, have a good attitude, you will just grow and grow and grow. The things in my career that would really be a major challenge for me early on, I don't even think twice about now because I've grown with a good attitude and putting in effort. Feedback, therefore, since I can grow and I want to grow, feedback is useful. I want feedback. It's something to learn from and it helps me find areas to improve. Now, if somebody tells me that there's something I'm not very good at, or I messed up at, doesn't mean I enjoy hearing that it might hurt my feelings a little bit, but I still, Seek that out.

I want it 'cause I want to get better. Tell me what can I do better because of a growth mindset and I know that I can improve. Therefore when it comes to setbacks I can take that as a wake up call. Wow, this really got in my way. I was working towards this goal. Something happened. Perhaps I wanted to play in a sports team and 2020 at school in the season got shut down because of COVID. That's a set back. What am I going to do? Growth mindset. I'm going to work harder and get ready for the next season and come back even better than I would have been. In summary, an attitude, a good attitude is a crucial employability skill. I would never want to hire anyone with a bad attitude because I wouldn't want to be around them for one thing and a good attitude is just something that brings you more joy in life.

Here's a great thing - an attitude, just like your effort, is completely within your control and I would encourage you to help you to have a good attitude. Try to think about having a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset and try to spend time thinking about the things that you are grateful for, the things you're thankful for that you have as opposes dwelling on the things that you don't have, 'cause a good attitude is going to help you get those other things that you'd like to.