Did you know that your genetics determine for a great part your attitude toward life and overall thinking? Because of this, having a positive attitude comes more easily to some people than others.
You might think that this isn’t fair and why on earth did you get the bad gene pot when it comes to thinking positively and enjoying life more easily? Yes, you are right, it’s not fair, but we can’t do anything about your genetics, so there must be another way to make things better!
Thankfully, your happiness and outlook on life aren’t only determined by your genes! Other parts play a big role as well, parts that you have more control over.
The two other parts that determine how happy you feel and the way you experience and perceive life are your life circumstances and your thoughts and behaviors.
You can definitely change your thoughts and behaviors and even your circumstances are often changeable for the better (although the circumstances alone won’t give you long-term happiness).
Give it a go and get you some of that positive attitude!
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13 Awesome Tips to Develop a Positive Attitude
If you didn’t get lucky with your genes and are more prone to feeling negative and unhappy, you might need to step up your game and put in some effort to develop a positive attitude and live a happier life. Please don’t get discouraged by the effort part, it will all be worth it.
These 13 tips will help you change your thoughts and behaviors to set them for happiness!
1. Boost your mood with gratitude
A little gratitude every day goes a long way. Begin your day by practicing gratitude and start with a positive attitude. It’s all about getting into the right mindset from the beginning.
If you start your day scrolling through social media, you will feel your energy leaking away, and suddenly, you have lost an hour of your morning, feeling sad about some things you saw on your socials and more negative towards the rest of your day. This won’t help you get a positive attitude at all.
Ending your day with gratitude is also a wonderful habit. You can reflect on the past day and the things that have happened to you that you feel thankful for. They don’t have to be big things but try to see the beauty in the little things as well.
When you are practicing gratitude regularly, your mind will notice things to be grateful for more often and easily. This way, you are training your mind to look at the positive things in life and appreciate everything you have.
You can use a blank notebook to do your gratitude practice or get a gratitude journal with prompts to help and inspire you. You could also say these things out loud but then you won’t have a book to look back into when you need a mood boost. The best practice is to do both, write them down, and read them out loud.
2. Set goals to keep you motivated
When you are feeling demotivated, you are not feeling good or happy at all. If you want a positive attitude, it’s a good idea to set goals in different areas of your life to increase your motivation.
You will feel more positive and confident when you are making progress and eventually reaching your goals. Make your goals achievable and divide them into little chunks to celebrate your achievements more often. You can also keep a tracker to see the progress you are making, to make it more visual and motivating.
This is a basic and affordable weekly planner where you can keep track of your habits and goals every week. You can create an online vision board to set as your computer or phone background to see why you are doing what you’re doing every single day.
You could also buy a more advanced planner with extra pages to create a vision board, pages with your yearly goals in the different areas of your life, and monthly and weekly goals like this awesome planner from Clever Fox! This planner goes all in to focus on your goals.
3. Start with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Another good tip to change your negative mind to a more positive attitude is to practice cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. This is a technique that is often used by therapists to help change your way of thinking.
CBT is often used to help treat anxiety and depression, but if you have a negative thinking pattern, you could benefit from it too!
There are plenty of workbooks available on Amazon to practice self-help. They are great to guide you through the steps you need to take to change your hard-wired negative thinking patterns.
If following tips on the internet and self-help books don’t help you enough and you suffer from anxiety or depression, please consult a therapist to help you!
4. Take good care of your body
Taking care of your body is a necessity! How are you supposed to feel good and have a positive attitude when you neglect the needs of your body?
The basics are pretty simple, eat healthy, exercise regularly, practice good personal hygiene, and get enough quality sleep. Your body will thank you for it.
It’s not that difficult to take good care of your body but with modern times and our busy schedules, our body often gets placed on the back burner. Try to create a work-life balance that will allow you to make yourself and your body a priority, it will be with you till the end of times and you have to nurture it.
If you are feeling all kinds of bodily discomfort, your mind tends to go there and focus on the negative and the things you can’t do.
Prevention is key to staying healthy and happy in life.
5. Stop the comparison game
Comparison can be a bad habit and will steal the joy you have. For example, when you get a promotion at work and are still making less money than your sister, how do you feel about it, less excited than when you got the news of the promotion right? Or if all of your friends are marrying and you are the last single, you probably don’t feel great about this either. See what I am talking about?
The only one you should compare yourself to is the past version of you!
When you only look at yourself, this is a way you can measure growth and see if you are achieving the goals you have set for yourself. It doesn’t really matter what everybody else is doing, as long as you are making progress. And even this can be tricky, progress isn’t always linear and sometimes you go down before you go back up and come back stronger.
So stop (or try to stop) comparing yourself with others, you can only use others as an inspiration if you like and get something from the positive attitude they are having, but if you find yourself putting yourself down, stop doing it altogether.
Look at your progress and accomplishments and be proud!
6. Try to limit or avoid sources of negativity
Negative news is everywhere, unfortunately. Some people are more sensitive or highly sensitive and can’t tolerate bad news at all. It touches them to their core and makes them suffer together with the victims of the news.
Limit those negative sources as much as you can or avoid them if that’s possible. A great example of a negative source is the news. How often are they talking about positive events in the news, like 10% max? All the rest is pure horror, shooting here, drug overdose there, climate change that’s killing the polar bears, … all terrible things.
Social media can do the same, be conscious about the pages you follow and only pick things that can contribute to your happiness.
To keep a positive attitude, it is best to focus on your environment and not carry the problems from the entire world on your shoulders if you can’t do anything about them. If you can do something about them and make a change for the better, by all means, do your thing, but you shouldn’t feel pushed to do things when you have no time, means, or energy to do so.
The message is, to help where you can without forcing yourself and avoid negative news that you don’t need to hear to keep a positive attitude.
7. Be kind and help others
This is also a great rule of thumb: always be kind!
If you don’t have something nice to say, it might be better to not say anything. If everyone would follow this saying, the world would be a better place that’s for sure.
Helping others and being kind to people will make you feel better about yourself as well. It’s like a boomerang! Of course, it won’t feel great to help ungrateful people because this is a negative interaction, but most people will appreciate your help and thank you for it.
You will feel better by doing good, go ahead and try it! One good deed a day will help your sadness go away.
8. Build and cherish strong connections
Human beings need connection, even the most introverted people on the planet will benefit from a strong connection to someone.
Ideally, you can surround yourself with positive people because their positivity is contagious and will help you with developing a positive attitude. Share fun experiences and have good chats with your loved ones to get a new outlook on life.
Talking to others can change your perspective on how you see things and this can help you to look at things from another, maybe better way. If you always wear black colored glasses, it’s fun and helpful to have someone with pink-colored glasses around!
Having loving friends and family, and maybe even nice coworkers can give you a sense of belonging and this will make you feel good.
Don’t take those connections for granted and keep investing in them to keep them strong!
9. Find your passion
Being passionate or extremely interested in things is a driving force. It feels wonderful to be all up in things, the time seems to fly by and your focus was never better. You feel driven and you have a positive attitude.
It’s not always easy to find your passion or special interest, but if you keep looking and trying new things, chances are you will find it! And your passion can be anything, nothing is too weird or strange if you like it and feel like you’re in the zone doing it.
You can be passionate about anything, but passions that often come to mind are music, art, cooking, dancing, writing, performing, animals, nature, etc. What did you like to do when you were a child? Maybe you want to try it again and see if it is still fun to you or try something new to see what’s out there!
When you are passionate about something, you are full of life and plenty of energy flows through you. A beautiful place to be.
10. Spend time in nature
Nature is calming, nature is restful, nature is energizing, and nature is mesmerizing. Spend some time in nature to grow your positive attitude.
Spending time in nature will bring you back to Mother Earth, put your shoes away and step barefoot on the grass to feel the sensation and the connection to the earth.
Nature will calm you down and put every little stressor in life in perspective if you take a good look around and capture all the beauty of it.
Be mindful of your surroundings, and take a look at all the details from the nerves of leaves to the stripes on the bees.
Admire the creation of nature and keep getting yourself out there to just be in the present moment and soak up what nature has to offer. It will calm down your nervous system and allow you to change a negative mood to a positive attitude.
11. Plan things ahead and consciously
While acting spontaneously can be fun, and even like a lot of fun if you are the type of person that still undertakes things, it often also leads to doing nothing at all. Some types of activities need planning, you have to have a plan in advance if you want to do everything on your list.
When you want to travel for example. Some people are great at just booking a ticket or starting driving and having fun where they end up. But a lot of people don’t go on that trip because they have no idea what’s there to do or how to plan everything. So start planning things you want to do so you’ll end up doing them and hopefully enjoying them as well!
When you have planned things ahead of time, fun things, you have something to look forward to, and this can contribute to your positive attitude! Having things to look forward to is nice and puts me in a good mood just thinking about it.
It doesn’t always have to be big things like travel, making plans to do things with friends, looking forward to your yummy lunch, or even consciously planning to watch a show of your favorite episode can have you thinking about it positively during the day.
12. Keep learning new things
The moment we learn new things, we evolve and grow and that is one thing that we all want to do during our life.
When you look back on everything you learned in life, you might feel a sense of pride and accomplishment, which is nice and contributes to a positive attitude. Learning new things will make you feel like a more complex and interesting person, which is great!
We like to learn new things, get better, and eventually master the craft to maybe pass our knowledge on to the next generation.
It’s very natural to keep learning. We start learning from the first moment when are born and it all seems to go fluently, when we get older, it gets more difficult to learn new things but it is still worth the effort!
13. Let your inner child out
Let your inner child break free once in a while to feel more positive and to grow your positive attitude even more.
Running around the house, dancing and singing like no one is watching, playing with sand when you’re at the beach building the biggest fort, painting without knowing where you’ll end up… Those are great examples of being spontaneous, just doing what you feel like doing at a certain moment without fearing the judgment of others.
It’s about letting go of expectations, about to-do lists, and just having fun! You can still do this as an adult!
Conclusion
Having a positive attitude comes easier to some people than others, but if you adapt your thoughts and behaviors into more positive ones, it’s achievable for everyone!
Use these tips to grow your positive attitude and focus on the positives in life to become a happier person!