Attitude (A) Impacts Quality

Your attitude (A) is a measure and a predictor of the quality and productivity of your life activities including your relationships. It is the first sign that hints to your choice of impending actions. It can show not only what you believe but how you feel about it; confident and enthusiastic or insecure and negative. Consider your own predicament.

• Are you anticipating a victory over unhealthy addiction, or are you mad about how your life seems to be spiraling out of control?

• Are you hopeful and confident that you'll be able to find the root problem and the correct solution to defeating it, or are you unhappy because life hasn't met your expectations, and you're unsure why?

 

Attitude is seen and heard. It tends to reveal to others what is in your heart. Some people are aware of their inner most needs and feelings and use them to attain their hearts intentions, but other people often misidentify or ignore what their heart longs for because they don't like the feeling of being vulnerable. Vulnerability is a stimuli that can awaken your awareness to an unmeet need and opens up a pathway for change to enter your life. That is one reason why humility and vulnerability are needed for a lifestyle change and why defense mechanisms surrounding your heart stifle change. When discussing attitudes, it’s important to call attention to the role it plays in influencing your choice of behavior as well as the tendency for other people to use it to judge your outcomes. Wirga and DeBarnardi use the basic ABC (Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence) model to show how outcomes are dependent on healthy thinking (2002).  

• Defense mechanisms surrounding your self-concept is detailed in the “ ... Self-protection” topic of this tab. 

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Choosing to Make Lifestyle Changes

​Making a choice to give up an unhealthy addiction creates a tidal wave of transformative lifestyle changes that could overtake you. However, by deciding to turn to God as your Highest authority, you find you can swim over the waves (James 2:14). The gratitude you feel towards God for showing you the way to the shore, energizes and strengthens your journey and provides you with a new lens with which to see yourself and the world around you

(1 John 3:1,  2 Corinthians 1:10, Psalm 56:12-13). When you are a Christian and you intentionally choose to act out your spiritual decisions in public (acting consistently with Godly instruction among a diverse group of people), you’ll experience internal peace while working (John 14:26-27). The cognitive dissonance theory predicts that if you choose to hide your Christianity from the public, this peaceful feeling will erode with time because your personal integrity is not encouraged by like-minded friends that act consistently with Christian values (Psalm 34:14, Isaiah 26:3, 32:17, John 4:34, Colossians 3:5, 1 John 1:6-7, McLeod, 2018). The cognitive consistency theory applied predicts the outcome will be lasting change. 

• Will you consider the subject of God, not just spirituality, and not just acknowledge Him, but follow His roadmap to a productive life? If yes, are you ready to accept the benefits of transformative change in order that you have a new normal lifestyle?

• Read more about how pride hinders transformative change in Appendix 1K. 

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The Holy Spirit Enables Christian Cognitive Consistency 

One of the most overlooked and underutilized principles in Christianity is the role of the Holy Spirit in believers. Christian cognitive consistency is a willful (intentional and purposeful) decision to express your loyalty to God (as opposed to self) by shining His Holy love, despite public opinion (Psalm 33:18, Matthew 6:33, Romans 12:2, Romans 13:8-10). It's your values and belief in God that makes you willingly to prioritize the expression of your faith above your desire for popularity. Using your faith means you are willing to bind yourself to God’s standards of holy, just love (Ephesians 5:1, 1 John 4:7-8, Kaufman, B. E. (1999)). You will voluntarily curb your own behavior to reflect God's love when you trust God as the Creator, Provider, King and Sustainer of all life (Proverbs 3:5-6, 2 Corinthians 5:1, 7:1). With the simple decision to trust God, you invoke the power of the Holy Spirit (D) to strengthen you to carry out God's principles in your life (1 John 3:9, Ephesians 3:16, John 14:26, Romans 8:13). The Holy Spirit energizes and empowers you, and every Christian, to express God's type of love; mercy and grace given within the boundaries of holiness and justice (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, Galatians 5:22-23, and see Appendix 2 H). The reason that individual's experience a fluctuation in the movement of the Holy Spirit in their lives, in this physical world, is due to the impact of your attitude/disposition on your decision results.

 

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​​Eternal life starts the moment you turn to God, ask Christ into your life and accept the gift and guidance of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:3-8). Once a Christian, you begin to see life through a new perspective and as you learn more about God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, your attitude will brighten because of hope

(Matthew 5:6, 1 Thessalonians 5:8). The Spirit encourages you to learn about and to pursue the things of God by listening to the Word of God so you find the motivation to want to change your behavior to become obedient to Christ (Romans 6:1-14, Galatians 2:20, 5:24, Colossians 3:3, 1 Peter 2:24). A life-long Christian learner has an ever-evolving relationship with Christ, holds an optimistic view of the future, and​ ​is willing to try new biblical concepts and behaviors to realize the advantages of eternal life today (John 17:17, 1 John 5:20,

https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-eternal-life.html). 

 

You need to consciously decide to accept the boundaries of God’s Holy love and make the necessary adjustments to, not just your beliefs and attitude but, your behavior too, in order to experience the outcomes documented in the Christian Bible (Luke 9:23-26, 2 Timothy 2:15). The Bible communicates both conditional (if/then clauses) and unconditional outcomes (doing despite circumstances). God’s principles are not time-bound, but they do follow basic cause and effect logic. For example, when it comes to prayer requests, God is not the variable in the correlation between your prayers and His answer being yes, but it's conditional based on your heart-felt and accurate beliefs and resulting perspective (Genesis 1:26, Ephesians 5:17, Colossians 3:16-17, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, 1 John 4:16, 5:14). With this Christian mindset, you are now able to choose to train your body to act out physically what is true in your spirit so the behavior you display will produce like outcomes or consequences. 

• For more on the concept of Christianity and cause and effect logic, see article from the Apologetic Press.

• Read Appendix 1H to learn more about using Godly wisdom to walk with insight.

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It’s learning to practice each characteristic of the fruit of Spirit that makes this change visible in your 

B - behavior too (Galatians 5:22-23). Reading the Bible and learning to implement the definition of pure, holy Love renews your mind to God’s truth which reframes your thinking. With a renewed perspective, your attitude ignites the Holy Spirit's power and you now have the capacity to practice God's Holy love at an ever-increasing rate throughout life (Romans 5:1-5, Colossians 3:1-2, Hebrews 6:10-12). If you are a life-long learner and are in Christ, you will embrace change and work through the accompanying performance tension connected to learning the new skills/behavior associated with implementing Holy love rather than human love (Colossians 1:9-12, 23). Otherwise you'll become frustrated by Christian cognitive dissonance; a renewed mind but unchanged physical, worldly habits and stagnation. 

• Change is the subject of the next few pages and also discussed in the Appendix 1O and Appendix 1P.