86 Part II: Winning Friends and Influencing People
Because your attitude is based on your values and beliefs, it affects your
abilities by making you behave in certain ways. Someone with a positive atti-
tude may always expect to get a positive outcome, and by demonstrating a
pleasant and helpful demeanour, that person influences others to behave in a
similar vein.
Next time that you’re with someone who’s prone to whingeing, experiment by
getting that person to catch your positive attitude virus. If you find someone
who is always moaning about paying their taxes, ask them if they’d rather live
out of a cardboard box and sleep in a doorway, saying that vagrants definitely
don’t pay taxes. If you know someone who regularly moans about Monday
mornings and all the work that lies ahead of them, tell them to think of how
good Friday afternoon will feel when the work is done. Or if you hear someone
backbiting another person, say something positive about the victim. Tell the
whiner that people who have a positive attitude to life are less stressed and
live longer. You may even get to see your moaning Minnie doing something
good and decide to praise them!
Memories
Your memories determine what you anticipate and how you behave and
communicate with other people. Memories from your past can affect your
present and your future. The problem occurs when your memories don’t stay
in the order in which they were recorded. When memories get jumbled up,
they bring along all the emotions of when they actually happened. By this
we mean that your current experience invokes old memories and you find
yourself responding to memories and emotions of the past rather than to the
experience you’re currently having.
Tamara worked with a woman called Sheila, and their relationship was unsuc-
cessful, to put it mildly. Sheila was a class-A bully who focused her attentions
on Tamara. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Sheila was Tamara’s
supervisor. When a very relieved Tamara found a new job, she found that
she was working, in a similar relationship, with another person named Sheila.
Because her new colleague was also called Sheila and was senior to her,
Tamara took a lot of convincing that the second Sheila was in fact a lovely
person and, until Tamara was able to accept this reality, she was very wary of
her. If her memories had stayed in the correct order, Tamara wouldn’t have
re-experienced the negative memories and emotions from the past. She made
generalisations and distortions about the second Shelia from her experiences
with the first.
Decisions
Your decisions are closely linked to your memories and affect all areas of
your life. This ability is especially important as regards decisions that limit
the options you feel you have in life – what NLP calls limiting decisions.
