Page 8 - GOODONE

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So then, an attitude is a collection of beliefs about the world and about

ourselves. We each have a personal file of attitudes, and these relate to
our own confidences, the goodness or badness of the world, and how we

navigate through life. It’s a kind of how-to-do-it manual we carry around
in our heads. You'll have your own manual, which you refer to about how

best to respond to worrying, unusual or novel situations. If your attitude
is your life manual, your patterns of behaviour are what you do as a result
of referring to that manual. People with fixed attitudes tend to have fixed

behaviour patterns. Rather than being open to change and responding
to new experiences in a way relevant to the here and now, they simply

repeat the same behaviour over and over again. This tendency to get
stuck in the past is inside all of us. Attitudes set early in life are familiar.

They’re easy - we play roles that we know off by heart, so there’s no need
to learn anything new. The problem is, of course, that this limits us to

audition only for the more basic roles in life. We’re confined to lifetime
performances and very insignificant theatres of activity: our personality
structures, laid down a long time ago, have set rock hard. Even though

these structures appear to be reliable and dependable, they’re based on
the false assumption that life will continue to go on in exactly the same

way as it did in the past.

But - and it’s a big but! - the only constant phenomenon in real life, is
change. It's overwhelming. Our response is largely to resist it, or

sometimes to reject the idea that change is happening at all. Your fixed
personality, your Ego, acts as a shield to protect you. It’s part of our

nature to fear change, and to respond to it with worry, self-defence and
mistrust. We deny it exists because we feel threatened. We like things to

be familiar to us. So, when we meet a new situation or set of
circumstances, we look through our filing cabinet of pre-learned
attitudes and patterns of behaviour, to find a way to cope. If we can't

find one that fits, we begin to panic. The experience of tension, anxiety
or stress, shows that a conflict is being fought between your ideal of a

constant, unchanging world and the actuality of the real world, which is