AUTHOR HIGHLIGHTS ATTITUDES THAT CAN NEGATIVELY AFFECT PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
AUTHOR HIGHLIGHTS ATTITUDES THAT CAN NEGATIVELY AFFECT PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS
By Tia Carol Jones
Ricky Brown believes that your attitude determines your altitude. A former commercial pilot and flight instructor, Brown was also called to the ministry. What’s most fulfilling to him is changing lives. Brown and his family live in Atlanta, where he runs Speak Life, Inc., and serves as a pastor on staff at a church there.
In his book, “The Five Hazardous Attitudes: Ways to Win the War Within,” Brown has five fables illustrating the five hazardous attitudes -- anti-authority, invulnerability, machisimo, impulsivity and resignation-- so that people can learn a costly lesson from the characters without having to pay for that lesson themselves. The book is about self-awareness for business and ministry leaders. He said the person with the hazardous attitude is often the last one to know.
Brown said the five hazardous attitudes are something the FAA requires pilots to recognize before they get their license. He said aircraft accident investigators have found one or more of these attitudes have been involved in almost every plane crash.
“It’s only logical that if an attitude can crash an airplane, an attitude can crash a company, a career, a business, a marriage or even a ministry,” said Brown, who added that pilots aren’t the only ones who sometimes crash.
It took Brown 10 months to write the book. He interviewed psychologists and did research. He said he really wanted psychologists to have their fingerprint on the book. The inspiration for the book came from a friend who died and when Brown read his National Transportation Safety Board report, he had at least five opportunities not to fly. He nailed down a writing schedule, devoting an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening to writing the book.
The book was marked by Brown’s vision and direction, but he didn’t include any specific personal experiences in it. He did, however, say that the one attitude that was the most challenging for him in his life was resignation. He said that resignation causes people to prematurely end what might otherwise be successful. He said during the pandemic, things were so hard and he was living in Chicago with his wife and daughter. Things in Chicago were more strict, restriction wise, than other places, and Brown was trying to lead a church and be a leader in the community, it was a time when he had to fight off feelings of resignation.
“The biggest takeaway from the book is that it doesn’t matter how talented you are, it doesn’t matter how gifted you are, it doesn’t matter how much education you’ve achieved, if a leader has a hazardous attitude and they lack self-awareness, there is a crash waiting for them in their future,” Brown said.
Brown suggests people read the book in a community – a book club, a small group – around other people that they give permission to point out the areas in their life they don’t see.
Brown is the President and Founder of Speak Life, Inc. He founded it a couple of years ago, inspired by Jon Gordon and Patrick Ciccone. Both men do leadership talks at large companies around the world and are also followers of Christ. As a pastor, Brown wanted an organization that would be able to take a positive message to the marketplace and have a component of teaching others how to do it, too. Speak Life serves corporate clients and does executive coaching, as well as addressing areas in corporate America that are prone to suffer from a lack of self-awareness.
Brown said the key to understanding the reason why people tend to not be able to avert an avoidable crash in life is due to community. He said, “we hurt in isolation, but we heal in community.” He was invited into a self-awareness cohort where they studied the lives of leaders who had a great public fall. Those leaders talked about what led to their fall.
“The reason why that’s so powerful is because everyone is trying to teach you how to succeed and how to get ahead, but no one is teaching you how to fail so you can avoid doing those same things,” he said.
Brown said the person who made it to the top and fell all the way back down to the bottom can teach people twice as much. He said as much as there is a platform for those who have climbed the ladder, people should listen to those who have fallen and gotten back up.
“This book gives a voice to those who have fallen back down, so that we can avoid unnecessary crashes in life,” Brown said.
“The Five Hazardous Attitudes: Ways to Win the War Within” is available on Amazon and at www.architectyourattitude.com.
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