A good or bad attitude makes all the difference when it comes to your outlook on life. If you have a bad attitude, you might have a pessimistic worldview; however, if you keep a good attitude about life, you’ll probably live through it as an optimist.
The attitude you keep about you dramatically affects how you perceive the things that happen to you. For someone who lives as an optimist, for example, a setback might feel like a minor inconvenience. However, for someone who’s already feeling down, a setback might feel life-changing, and not in a positive way.
Attitudes in Daily Life
We started into this a bit in the introduction, but the attitude you hold influences how you perceive everything that happens to you. Optimistic people tend to see the good things in life as the norm, and the bad stuff as not much more than temporary setbacks.
However, pessimists, on the other hand, tend to see unfortunate events as the norm and good ones as unlikely ever to happen again. They go through life feeling sad and defeated instead of looking forward to the next positive thing.
However, not all of us control (or remember) how we develop our attitudes towards life. For example, if we had a tough childhood, we might automatically develop a pessimistic view as we age. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we’ve done it.
However, just because you unknowingly developed a pessimistic attitude doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it forever. While it might take some practice, you can always change your outlook for the better.
The first step towards changing your attitude for the better is to pay attention to it actively. We’ll go over this in more detail below.
Relearning Your Attitude
Relearning your daily attitudes is a long and rewarding process. It’s not something that you’ll be able to do overnight, but as you gradually make progress with adjusting your attitude, you’ll notice the changes within yourself.
The fact of the matter is that optimistic people with good attitudes have fewer obstacles facing them. They tend to get back up and try again after a setback instead of giving up, and they’re happier, more dependable, and more confident, too. Pessimistic people, in comparison, tend to get discouraged more quickly, and they tend to take things personally when they were not meant to be taken that way in the first place.
Undeniably, optimistic people are happier than their pessimistic counterparts. Would you rather go through life feeling discouraged and unhappy, or would you rather feel ambitious and satisfied, like you have the world in the palm of your hand? Your attitude can make this kind of difference in your life.
Like we mentioned above, the first step you’ll need to take is to start consciously paying attention to when you’re optimistic or pessimistic. If you don’t know when you’re actively pessimistic, you won’t be able to change it, after all.
This will take some practice, but whenever you’re feeling discouraged, down, or self-conscious, take a minute to think about why you feel that way. What happened to change your attitude to a bad one? Is your attitude change really warranted, or can you employ a better perspective here instead? In essence, what’s the source of the problem?
It might be hard for you to admit to yourself some of the reasons why you’re feeling pessimistic or discouraged. Maybe it’s easier to give up in this situation rather than getting up, maintaining a hopeful outlook, and trying again. However, changing your attitude toward a better one is not going to be an easy process.
A negative attitude holds you back in every way. It keeps you from growing as a person, from experiencing success, and from taking advantage of opportunities that come your way.
The thing that many people struggle to grasp is that an optimistic attitude won’t necessarily prevent bad things from happening to you. On the contrary, you can have just as many inconveniences or setbacks with a good attitude as you can with a bad one. The difference is in how you deal with these setbacks.
When you have a positive attitude about life, not only can you see the silver linings in bad situations, but they tend to slide off your shoulders faster, too. Optimistic people tend to move on from depressing situations and events more quickly, putting them behind them instead of dwelling on them. Pessimists tend to do the opposite.
In this way, a good attitude isn’t necessarily the key to a good life. However, it is a necessary tool to have in your arsenal if you want to get there. Once you’re used to taking notice of when you’re optimistic and when you’re pessimistic, you’re ready to start actively changing that attitude.
Growing a Good Attitude
Developing a good attitude is relatively simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. For most people, changing their mindset from bad to good is as simple as replacing their negative thoughts with good ones. For example, if you tend to have a pessimistic attitude, instead of looking at an inconvenience with pessimism, try to turn those thoughts into positive ones instead.
In the previous section, we went over the first step in this strategy. In order to turn your evil thoughts and feelings into good ones, you need to take note of when you’re having either.
Once you’re used to taking note of when you have optimistic and pessimistic thoughts, it’s time to work on changing them for the better. Of course, it’s good to have happy and confident thoughts; we don’t want to change those. Instead, it’s good to reward yourself for having them!
For example, let’s say that your boss asked you to stay late to finish extra work one day. Instead of feeling upset and grumbling about it, do your best to power through the job instead. After all, you’re likely helping your employer when they’re in a tight spot, and they probably appreciate it!
Instead of feeling inconvenienced, consider this an opportunity to get ahead instead. After all, helping your boss or even your co-workers out in a pinch is a great way to get an extra favor or even a promotion down the road.
Then, when you’re finished with your extra work for the day, make sure to treat yourself! Rewarding yourself for a job well done is a great way to motivate yourself to do the same thing in the future. You can apply this strategy to all sorts of different areas in your life, too, but it’s especially useful when training yourself to be more optimistic!
The beauty of the human mind and condition is that, when we tend to think of the same thing over and over again, it tends to become a part of us. This can be troublesome when it comes to forming pessimistic attitudes, of course, but it works in our favor when we’re working to build positive ones. You’re not stuck with your current outlook forever as long as you’re willing to put effort into changing it.
Attitude vs. Life
Undeniably, our lives are full of highs and lows. We’ll have great times that are full of happiness and memories, and we’ll have times that we might rather forget instead. No matter who you are, this is a reasonable and unavoidable part of life.
However, as we’ve started to explain, there are ways to make it better. When you have a good attitude, it’s easier to take the hard times in stride, and it’s easier to learn from them and move on, too. When you have a pessimistic attitude, however, the hard times tend to stay with you and affect your daily life in negative ways.
This is why a positive attitude is so important. Sure, if you managed to have a perfect life with no hardship whatsoever, you could probably manage to have a pretty good experience even with a bad attitude. However, a kind of living like this doesn’t exist.
So much more of life’s pleasures tend to come to us when our attitudes are positive. On the one hand, people are more responsive toward us when our beliefs are positive. We tend to make friends and retain relationships better when we’re pleasant and fun to be around. However, we tend to see more of the good around us when we keep good attitudes, too, so this benefit works two-fold.
On the other hand, when we have negative attitudes, we tend to see less of the good things around us. Whether it’s because we don’t want to see them or it’s too much effort to do so, their benefits typically don’t come into our lives.
People, in particular, tend to be less happy to be around us, too, when we have negative attitudes. People like to be around other people with good attitudes. Even people with negative attitudes would often rather be around others with positive views in most cases.
Consider some of the following examples. If you go through life as an eternal pessimist, you might ignore some of the following opportunities, or you might not even notice them when they present themselves.
- The chance to make new friends
- The opportunity to work toward a pay raise or promotion
- The chance to see the world
- Opportunities to deepen your relationships with others
- Times when your friends might need your help and support
- Things you can do to make the world a better place
You’ll notice that many of the items in the shortlist above aren’t necessary to live a long, fulfilling life. However, the above things tend to make us happy when we make time for them. It’s proven, for example, that things like random acts of kindness, community service, and helping others make us feel happier.
Attitude Awareness
Unfortunately, many of us aren’t necessarily aware of when our attitudes are bad, and even more often than that, we might not realize that there’s any other way but our own. Have you ever run into a friend or family member who seemed much happier and more upbeat than you were? Did you know a friend once who seemed down and reserved all the time for no discernible reason?
While it’s dangerous to judge people without being aware of their unique situation, attitude can often be at the center of things like this. Someone who seems upbeat, bubbly, and happy probably is that way because they have a positive attitude about their life and life in general.
On the other hand, someone who’s pessimistic and generally not fun to be around might have more going on in their life than you can see from your position. However, their circumstances could have contributed to the formation of a bad attitude, too, and this definitely wouldn’t be helping their case.
This is why realizing where and when your attitude is bad or good is so important, as we talked about before. This doesn’t necessarily mean the way you speak or act, either; being aware of your internal monologue and the ways that you feel throughout the day are incredibly important, too. After all, really changing your attitude is something that must be done on an internal level, not just an external one.
Showing your genuine feelings is a big part of having a positive attitude. While you don’t necessarily have to be authentic to have a good attitude, you might come off as less convincing if this is the case. Not to mention that lying and keeping things close to your chest, so to speak, will generally make you feel worse overall, and this can contribute to the formation of a bad attitude.
Your Inner Dialogue
You might not realize this, but most of us humans have an inner dialogue. Even if you don’t hear it in words, it often comes through in thoughts, feelings, judgments, and emotions. We don’t always express these to the outside world; instead, we often think and feel them in our minds before we consider showing them.
Each inner monologue is different. Some of us have vivid, intense internal addresses that act as a sort of “inner voice.” Others of us don’t experience our inner dialogues in words, but more as feelings. Regardless of how healthy your internal dialogue is, it’s an incredibly vital thing to keep track of if you want to build a positive attitude.
You see, our inner dialogue is a direct reflection of the attitudes we keep. If you have an overall pessimistic outlook, your internal dialogue might be filled with judgment, conceit, negative feelings, and despair. However, if you keep a positive attitude, your inner dialogue will be full of hope, happiness, and forgiveness for others and yourself.
How to change our inner dialogue, then? Well, we can improve our internal discussions in two ways. Since it’s so closely tied with our attitude, we don’t necessarily have to go out of our way to change it; it should change naturally as you work towards developing a good attitude.
However, you can also use your inner dialogue’s close relationship with your attitude to make changing both easier. This is most effective when you have a healthy, verbal internal dialogue. When you think or feel something that’s negative or linked to having a bad attitude, take a second to stop yourself. Correct your inner monologue to something positive instead of going in a negative direction with it. Do this any time your internal dialogue starts to turn negative.
This entire exercise is closely related to the monitoring of your own attitude. We keep coming back to this step as we progress in this guide, and the reason why we keep doing so is that it’s so important.
Our inner dialogues form within ourselves from a very young age. As children, we generally start out as younglings who are ruled by our innermost thoughts and emotions. If we feel curious about something, we investigate, or we ask “why” without being concerned about the consequences. However, as adults, this changes; we learn how to exercise restraint, how to tell when things are socially inappropriate, and more.
In this way, you could even consider your inner dialogue to be a more genuine version of you. This is part of why it’s so important to change our inner dialogue in order to change our attitude on life, after all.
The skills we build as children are still important, and we shouldn’t throw those away. It’s important to know when doing something is appropriate or inappropriate for a situation, for example. However, if you limit your inner dialogue to the point where it takes on its own pessimistic attitude, it’s too much.
Visualization
As you know, one of the primary reasons why we develop negative attitudes is because we’ve gone through various hardships in life. As such, many of us can’t really help that our philosophy has progressed to a negative state; sometimes, the world around us is just so harsh that it gets us down. However, the next logical step is to work on putting a solution into practice.
One great way to do this is through visualization. Visualization is something that we all do naturally to a point, but some more than others. An excellent visualization technique involves:
- Thinking about what you want to happen in the future
- Planning out the steps to make that thing happen
- Building a timeline for when you can make these things happen
- Putting your detailed plan into action
When you get started for the day, the chances are that you have at least a vague visualization in your head about where you’d like your day to go. Perhaps you need to go grocery shopping, or maybe you’d like to visit the park because it’s a nice day. Even if you don’t have much of a visualization beyond that, it’s good that you have a place to start.
However, those who have gone through many negative situations in life and have developed negative outlooks as a result might have a little more trouble with visualization. This is because visualization is heavily dependent on the things we want and things we hope for. People with negative attitudes who have been beaten down or discouraged in the past might feel too afraid to hope for good things.
However, as difficult as it might be, we encourage you to try. Visualizations can be authoritative sources of motivation, excitement, and change in your life. If you can’t bring yourself to visualize something you’re hoping for, then use it to start smaller.
Try using it to complete any sort of job you need to do. Let’s assume, for the sake of this example, that you need to clean your entire house. How will you go about doing this? Will you just start cleaning, or will you think about it a bit and plan out what you need to do instead?
First, consider where you’re going to start with your house cleaning. For this example, let’s start with your bedroom. That way, you can pick up things like dirty clothes and laundry before cleaning the rest of the house. By allowing your laundry to wash while you clean the rest of the house, it’ll be finished and ready to put away by the time you’re done cleaning up the rest of the house.
This is how visualizations work in general. Using your brain as a tool, you plan out when and how to do things in order to make them go more smoothly than they would otherwise. If you waited until the end of the day to clean your bedroom, you might be waiting on laundry long after you were done cleaning the rest of the house.
Enthusiasm and Positivity
Have you ever heard the phrase “fake it ’til you make it”? Well, this is really how it works for developing a good attitude. Well, the idea is to make it genuine as much as possible, of course, but the next best thing is to fake it until it becomes a natural part of your routine.
If you’re not usually a positive person, for example, do your best to act positively as much as possible. If you often have negative inner thoughts, do your best to bring them to a halt and replace them with positive inner thoughts instead.
Besides just positivity, though, enthusiasm is another characteristic you should be mindful of bringing into the spotlight. While there are always some things that we find it difficult to get excited about, enthusiasm will open more doors to you than you might think.
Consider conversations with others, for example. Not every conversation is riveting and exciting, and your own personal interests will affect what entertains you, too. However, try your best to sound enthused with what other people are talking about, regardless of the subject matter.
Even if you’re not terribly interested in what others have to say, listening carefully to what they’re talking about, especially if they have a significant interest, is very important. If you’re visibly bored and unable to hold a conversation with someone else about their chosen topic, you’ll come off as uncaring or standoffish. Even worse, the other person might assume that they themselves are dull, rather than just the subject matter.
Be kind to the person speaking as they talk. There are several ways to show your enthusiasm to someone else as they speak, but the best way to do this is through active listening. To be an active listener, try to do the following:
- Engage the other person by asking questions every so often
- Nod along or speak affirmations as the conversation moves forward to show that you’re listening
- Look at the other person while they speak
- Use open body language; try not to look closed off
- Don’t interrupt the other person until they finish their thought
If the topic at hand honestly bores you, there’s no reason why you need to talk about it forever. However, it’s only fair and polite that the other person gets their chance to talk about what inspires them. When they’ve taken a suitable amount of time, you can feel free to (politely) steer the conversation towards something you find a bit more interesting if you desire.
Humor
When all else fails, a great way to mask a negative attitude is to use humor! In this day and age, self-deprecating humor is well-known, understood, and relatable, as long as you don’t use it in excess. Humor, even if it’s at your own expense, is a great way to gloss over an uncomfortable situation or redirect a conversation toward something else.
The fact of the matter is that laughing (and, by extension, humor) makes us feel good. Fun makes us happy. More people like hanging around humorous people than their non-humorous counterparts. Would you rather hang out with a friend who was good at joking around or one who was serious all the time?
Do take this advice with a grain of salt, though. While humor is great for both developing a good attitude and transitioning away from a bad one, too much humor can be detrimental. If you joke too much, others can find it difficult to take you seriously, and you might have trouble taking yourself seriously, also.