Are You Attractive?

Are you attractive?  I don’t mean in the physical sense, but are you as a person attractive?  Napoleon Hill, Author of the bestselling book of Think and Grow Rich and Keys to Success does a great job of providing guidelines to figure it out.

There are 25 characteristics that determine our level of attractiveness, According to Hill.  While they are all important, the following 5 are the ones that I believe are the most predictive of our success:

1.  Positive mental attitude (PMA): I believe that this is the most important determining factor in our level of happiness, attractiveness, and success.  Our attitude affects the way we approach every situation.  Never underestimate the power of thought.  We become what we think about.

2.  Sincerity of purpose: What is your personal mission statement? If you’ve never thought about it or written one, it’s an interesting exercise, and it really makes you think about your purpose.  Knowing your true purpose and mission will impact every single decision you make.  What is most important to you?  Do your decisions reflect that?

3.  Communication: Hill mentions several characteristics that I think can all fit into this category.  The importance of effective communication should not be underestimated.  Tone of voice, nonverbal communication, tact, word choice, and many other skills all fall under this category.  The ability to modify your approach and message so that your audience will be most receptive is the most critical communication skill.   It takes a great deal of work, but the payoff is huge.  Do you take time to understand your audience and communicate accordingly?

4.  Emotional control: There are really only two kinds of emotions – positive and negative.  Negative emotions are things like anger, jealousy, greed, revenge, etc.  Positive emotions include love, empathy, optimism, faith, and so on.  Before we can learn to control our emotions, we have to know what we’re feeling.  We then have to figure out what triggers those feelings.  Once we know that, we can learn to guide and control our emotions.  Our emotions are one of the few things we can completely control, but doing so takes time, patience, and lots of practice.

5.  Tolerance: Tolerance is the ability to be patient and fair toward those whose opinions, practices, and beliefs differ from yours.  While tolerance may be applied to race, religion, and politics, it also applies to work ethic, communication style, and personalities.  For example, most of us would not purposely act in a way that we consider wrong or ineffective.  We do what we do because we think it is right.  The challenge is that everyone can’t be right all the time.  This goes back to the question, “Is my goal to be right or get it right?”

Let’s face it, we all want to feel attractive.  We spend so much time thinking about our outward appearance, but when it comes to qualities like the ones Hill describes, how much time and effort do we spend?  Just like diet and exercise, practicing communication, tolerance, emotional control and other similar qualities takes deliberate focus and effort.  What will you do this week to be attractive?