You have walked into a room feeling like a million bucks and walked out feeling like loose change.
Nothing happened to you. You just caught what was floating in the air.
One grumpy customer at the door. One crew member who showed up like a storm cloud with legs. One doom scroll before your feet even hit the floor. And the whole day tips over. You think your attitude belongs to you. Most days it is on loan from whoever is standing closest.
Everything You Are Surrounded By Creates You
Here is what almost nobody tells you. Attitude is contagious. And that is not the bad news. That is the best news you will hear all week. Because if a bad attitude can spread to you, a good one can spread from you.
You are never neutral in a room. You are the thermometer or the thermostat. A thermometer reads the temperature and reports it. A thermostat decides what the temperature is going to be. Most people are thermometers. They walk in and let the room tell them how to feel. Leaders are thermostats. They walk in and tell the room how it is going to be.
Now let me call out a few folks, because you already know exactly who I am about to describe.
You know the one who walks into the morning meeting and drops the temperature ten degrees just by sitting down. The one who answers “how are you doing” with a nine minute weather report of everything wrong in their life. The energy vampire who leaves every conversation a little heavier than they found it. Some people bring joy wherever they go. Others bring joy whenever they go.
I am not naming them to dunk on them. I am naming them because here is the truth. Most of them have no clue they are doing it. Nobody ever showed them a better way. That is where you come in. And you cannot lift a person while you are busy catching their bad mood.
So Let Me Hand You The Asset Nobody Talks About.
Your product can be shopped. Your attitude cannot. Price can be beaten. A good attitude cannot. I did not build Window Ninjas on the cheapest quote in town. Somebody was always a few bucks cheaper. I built it on how a customer felt the second we showed up. You can shop my price all day long. You cannot shop the way I make you feel. Nobody can undercut that.
People will always act based on your attitude. How you act toward others is how they will react toward you. Walk up to that door with “Fantastic. Awesome. Hell yeah, I would be happy to take care of that for you.” Watch the whole thing reorganize around you. That is not fake. That is leadership you can hear.
Now the part that stings.
You are the average of the five people you hang surround yourself with. And you are the byproduct of everything that surrounds you. The condition of your mind creates what happens to you. And whatever you pour into your head all day through that little glowing screen is shaping you too, mostly for the worse. The people around you are infiltrating your attitude right now, whether you signed off on it or not.
And your body follows your mind. Think it long enough and you start to feel it. Feel it long enough and you start to live it. The doctors have a fancy word for that. I just call it proof that your mind runs the show.
So protect your attitude like the money maker it is. Then do the harder thing. Give it away.
Let me tell you where I learned this. I did not learn it as the thermostat. I learned it as the worst thermometer you ever met.
At seventeen and eighteen, my attitude was garbage. I was the storm cloud with legs, dragging the room down and blaming everybody but the guy in the mirror. My skill was fine. My attitude was in the ditch, and I could not even see it.
Then one day a man with a great attitude looked me dead in the eye and told me the truth. He said my attitude was crap. Then he told me how much potential I was pouring straight down the drain.
Talk about an eye opener!
You cannot get more direct than that. And that is the whole point. Direct is key. That man did not coddle me. He did not tiptoe around my feelings. He cared enough to be honest, and that one gut punch changed the entire direction of my life.
Impact Others Lives And Change Them
Here is what eats at me today. We have got too many people walking the streets and sitting in cubicles scared of their own shadow. Scared of a world they were built to conquer. Nobody around them will say the hard thing, so they never get the wake up call I got. That fear becomes its own bad attitude, and it spreads just like every other kind.
So when you see somebody with real potential pouring it down the drain, do not go soft on them. Be the one who cares enough to be direct. That is not being mean. That is being a thermostat for a person who has been stuck on cold their whole life.
Because your job is bigger than fixing your own attitude. Your real job is to walk into a room and change it. Change your crew. Change your customer. Change the kid slumped at the dinner table. You have that power every single time your hand hits a doorknob.
And when everybody else is losing their minds, that is when a thermostat is worth the most. Any thermometer can read a calm room. It takes a real leader to set the temperature while the place is on fire.
So stop being the thermometer that just reports how bad it is.
Be the thermostat that decides how good it is going to be.
Walk in. Set the temperature. And drag somebody up with you.
Keep Shining.
