When we’ve spent so much time struggling with hardships and seeing negativity all around us, it tends to take a toll on our attitude and outlook. That includes our attitudes toward ourselves, others, work, play, the future, and life in general.
A negative attitude holds you back, though. It affects all your personal and professional relationships, as well as the most important relationship of all: the one with yourself.
Developing a more positive attitude is an important step in moving past hardships and achieving your goals. It makes you much healthier—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—and it improves your relationships. It also allows you to focus better and to be a constructive force in the lives of those around you. It snowballs, too, in that the more positive your outlook, the easier it gets to become even more positive.
We can all become victims of circumstances, and we don’t have control over all their effects. But we do have control over our attitude. It’s well within your power to create more positivity in yourself. Here are a few ways to accomplish this.
Ways to Become More Positive
- Remind yourself every day that you have control over your attitude.
- Take a minute each day to identify something you’re thankful for.
- Take another minute each day to tell yourself something good about yourself.
- Focus on the good things in your life.
- Keep a journal of the good things that happen to you.
- Surround yourself with positive people.
- Steer clear of overly negative people.
- Talk positively, with positive words.
- Expose yourself to uplifting movies, books, music, websites, etc.
- Seek out humor and use your own humor.
- Choose to be happy, rather than wait for something external to make you happy.
- Seize onto small pleasures.
- Shrug off minor inconveniences.
- Don’t complain about things, especially those you can’t change.
- Have solutions when you point out problems.
- Think about how to improve results when things don’t go as planned.
- Remember that everyone gets rejected and choose to learn from what went wrong.
- Stop, take deep breaths, and count to 10 when you start to react in anger.
- Become aware of negative thoughts and refuse to succumb to them.
- Don’t beat yourself up; teach your inner critic to be constructive, not negative.
- Force a smile until it becomes natural; others will smile with you and make you smile more.
- Identify your strengths and put them to work for you.
- Identify your weaknesses and work on them.
- Indulge your curiosity and make efforts to learn things you don’t know.
- Be proactive about getting what you want.
- Stop expecting things to be easy; anything worthwhile isn’t.
- Stop expecting things to be quick; anything worthwhile takes time.
- Visualize yourself succeeding before you get there.
- Celebrate successes and share sources of happiness with loved ones.
- Get some exercise every day.
