Book Review: Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude

I’ve read quite extensively in the area of positive attitude and self-improvement over the years. In financial services a positive attitude is absolutely critical to your success as well as your clients. You also need a good sense of humor too!

I’m a big fan of Jeffrey Gitomer and his books. My most recent book review is his Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. It’s not a book about investing or finance, but a book about how to find and keep a YES! attitude your whole life. I’m doing this review because I feel that having this mindset is important to pretty much everyone. The whole point of the book is this: You become what you think about.

The book is a pretty easy read. It is divided into 5.5 Sections.

Element One: Insight to Your Inside Attitude sets up what positive and YES! attitudes are. It also gives you a self-test to find out how really good, or poor, your attitude has become. I struggle with not being positive all the time. This section really helped me to know what I need to work on.

Element Two: Attitude Self Awareness This section is really about a single concept. Self Awareness, well attitude self-awareness. It is the combination of internal attention and your focus. Really getting to know what outside factors affect your attitude, whether that’s work, family or just thinking you have bad luck. It also reviews how attitude affects you in business.

Element Three: Attitude Actions is some really simple things you can do now to change your attitude. The actual actions like, smiling, being nice, and saying nice things. Gitomer gives us numbers examples of things we can do to change to a more positive attitude. One is to avoid watching the local news! Take that time and read or prepare for your following business day.

Element Four: Attitude Attributes is a chapter that will help you define what positive attributes you already have. What you think you’re good at, as well as what those around you think are your best positive traits. There is another self-test to really dig in and rate your attitude.

Element Five: Attitude Achievement actually gives you the formula for YES! Attitude. It gives you many ideas that you can do to change. Consider it the Attitude for Dummies section! If you didn’t really do any of the small exercise earlier in the book, this is the short course.

So if you find yourself with a bad attitude or want to improve your outlook on life, this book is a great read. Easy to understand and written in English. It will help you identify exactly what you need to work on and a framework for getting there. I highly recommend it! I’ve read it many times over. It’s really difficult to get, and keep a positive or YES! Attitude. But you can do it!