“A bad attitude is like a flat tire;you can’t go anywhere until you change it”-Zig Ziglar
Why Attitude Is Important and 11 Tips for Maintaining a Positive Attitude
Maintaining a positive attitude throughout your personal and professional life can help you find healthy coping mechanisms for stressors and challenges. With a positive attitude, you may be able overcome obstacles more easily, find more opportunities to express gratitude in your life and even forge actionable paths toward achieving your dreams. While fostering a positive outlook on a day-to-day basis can sometimes feel challenging, especially when you experience tension in your life, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to undertake. In this article, we discuss what attitude is, why it’s important and outline 11 helpful tips for maintaining a positive attitude.
What is attitude?
Attitude is the way a person thinks or feels about a specific person, place, action or experience. Similar to individual perspective, attitude encompasses a person’s particular emotions and the way in which they act toward someone or something. Attitude is a specific disposition that combines factors like beliefs, opinions, moods and emotions. Sometimes, attitude is referred to as an outlook or mental state that affects the way people perceive the world around them and the way they experience life, work, relationships and more.
Attitude is a combination of emotions, beliefs, opinions, and moods that can affect how people perceive the world and experience life. It can also impact how people communicate, collaborate, and perform their daily tasks. Ultimately, attitude can shape success and happiness.
Some say that a positive attitude can help people feel more confident and overcome obstacles. It can also help people enjoy their work more and advance their careers. For example, a positive attitude can affect whether someone gets a promotion or raise, and the kind of reference they receive from an employer
Some traits that people with a positive mental attitude may embody include: Resilience, Courage, Optimism, Gratitude, and Acceptance.
The best #1 way to practice gratitude is be Thankful to God daily. and… to add to that you can additionally keep a gratitude journal, where you can regularly write down things you are thankful for!
Why is attitude important?
Attitude is important because it can influence your ability to move through the world. For instance, maintaining a positive attitude can help you achieve measurable success in your personal and professional life.
Your outlook can greatly impact your health, social life, earning potential, productivity, ability to overcome obstacles and more. With a positive attitude, excelling in these various domains of life can become a much simpler endeavor—creating enormous benefits that can significantly improve the quality of your life. Comparatively, if you maintain a negative or skeptical attitude, you may not be able to access the same benefits.A positive attitude may enable you to reduce your stress level, cope with challenges in a healthy and productive way, achieve actionable goals and maintain overall mental and physical wellness. Therefore, it’s important to purposefully seek methods of maintaining a positive attitude throughout your interactions with others, time spent at work and in your personal or recreational time. While this can be a challenging task, especially in the face of life stressors, it can help foster noteworthy advantages in your daily life and lead to increased satisfaction in your career, relationships and more.
Tips for maintaining a positive attitude
Maintaining a positive attitude can sometimes feel challenging, especially when you experience stressors or come across obstacles. Despite this, being purposeful about cultivating positivity in your life can lead you to experience significant benefits, such as professional success and increased overall life satisfaction. There are a number of concrete strategies available which you can implement in your life to nurture a positive attitude and potential growth. Here are 11 different tips for maintaining a positive attitude:
Start your day off right
Beginning your day with purpose is an incredibly powerful way to cultivate positivity in your life. Instead of rushing out of the house without eating breakfast, try to wake up earlier in the morning and use the extra time to make it one of the best parts of your day. You may choose to start your day with any activity that brings you joy, relaxation and energy.Participating in exercise, cooking yourself a healthy breakfast or listening to an audio book are all strong ways to start your morning. When your morning is more relaxed and productive, you’ll likely head into work with a calmer mindset and the initiative to take on the day.
Curate a positive workspace
It can be challenging to stay positive at work if you don’t feel comfortable in your office, at your desk or wherever you spend the bulk of your day. Try to lift your spirits by curating a positive workspace with calming decor, photos of loved ones, flowers or even aromatherapy devices. These items can help foster a peaceful environment, even at work. When you’re surrounded by reminders of positivity in your life, it’s more likely that you’ll be able to maintain a positive attitude as you move throughout your day.
Generate a routine you can follow
Having an unpredictable schedule can lead you to feel more stress and less comfort in your day-to-day life. To avoid such pitfalls, try to come up with a daily routine that you can follow as you commute, work and attempt to unwind afterwards. Creating regularity in your life can give you a feeling of balance and decrease the possibility of experiencing fluctuating emotions that may lead to a downturn in your attitude.
Reframe your interactions
In your interactions with other people, it can be helpful to reframe your outlook—try to assume the best of others and spread optimism as you converse with them. If you become a champion of others in your life and provide them with generosity in your interactions, it can lead you to develop deeper, more positive connections. Whether it’s with your coworkers, manager, friends or your significant other, shifting your mindset while interacting with other individuals can help elevate your positive attitude.
Practice using positive language
On a regular basis, try using positive language to describe yourself, your experiences, your aspirations and the other people in your life. Exuding this energy can help promote positivity in all realms of your professional and personal life. Not only will purposefully using positive language make it easier for you to transform your outlook internally, but it can also encourage others to view you positively, too.
Avoid gossiping
Gossip exists as a standard social activity in many workplaces. Despite this, it’s not a healthy or positive behavior to engage in—rather, gossiping leads to higher stress situations where others may feel unstable or unsafe. To maintain a positive attitude, you should avoid getting involved in gossiping. Not only will this keep you from contributing to a negative work environment, but it will give you the ability to focus more keenly on your own work.
Show your appreciation for others
On a regular basis, take the time out of your day to reflect on the things and people you are grateful for. From here, try to acknowledge your gratitude by telling others how you feel. Increasing the amount of appreciation you express toward others in your life can be a great way to bolster your positivity. When you visualize and describe the factors of your life that help you experience joy, you can more easily develop a healthy outlook and maintain it throughout your day.
Be kind to yourself
As you move through your day, try to find opportunities to be kind to yourself. It’s incredibly important to take care of yourself, both physically and mentally—feeling good on a day-to-day basis can help enable your positive attitude. Try to practice self-care by engaging in activities that help you unwind at various intervals throughout the day. By allowing yourself the ability to find joy in your day, you can more easily maintain a positive attitude overall.
Take breaks when you need them
To stay relaxed and maintain a positive outlook throughout your day, try to take breaks when you need them. If you start to feel sluggish, irritable or overly challenged, it’s a good idea to step away from your work and engage in some restful activity, such as taking a walk. Though you may be inclined to skip breaks if you’re busy or want to make it home earlier at the end of the day, by doing so you miss an opportunity to nurture a healthy and positive relationship with your work.
Have something to look forward to
If you find it challenging to stay positive during the workday, it can be helpful to plan a joyous or relaxing activity for the end of the day. This activity will give you something to look forward to as you engage in your work and can even serve as a reward for being particularly productive or focused that day. Making such plans can help you cultivate a healthy balance between your personal and professional life, leading to more positivity in general.
Practice mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness can help significantly improve your ability to maintain a positive attitude. When you focus your awareness on the present moment, you can more easily accept, acknowledge and move through any challenges you’re experiencing. This is a useful method of maintaining positivity during times of high stress or on days you don’t feel as engaged. source
THE POWER OF ATTITUDE
Where in your life could you use an attitude adjustment?
When we talk about The R Factor, we talk about how you Respond to any Event to get a better Outcome. For better or worse, your attitude affects your performance and your response.
Your attitude has a profound impact on the way you lead people. It affects the way you sell and the way you serve customers. Your attitude has a direct impact on how you communicate and collaborate with others, how you contribute to the culture of your work environment, and how you perform your daily tasks and responsibilities. Ultimately, your attitude shapes your success and your happiness. Other things being equal, the person with the best attitude will win. Other things not being equal, the person with the best attitude usually wins. Unfortunately, many people cling to beliefs and attitudes that restrict rather than empower their performance.
The reality is that you determine your attitude. Your attitude is one of the few things in life over which you have total control. Harvard psychologist Williams James: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.” If you want to perform at your best, and if you want to maximize your happiness and fulfillment, then you must take control of the life-shaping power of your attitude. Please understand: developing and sustaining a positive attitude is not merely a quick-fix motivational technique. It is a disciplined skill that must be practiced and learned.
What is Attitude?
Attitude is the way you look at life. It is the way you choose to see and respond to events, situations, people, and yourself. Your attitude is not something that happens to you. You choose your attitude. Your attitude is created by your thoughts, and you choose your thoughts. You are the architect of your frame of mind. You decide how you will perceive and process the events of life and work. You make the decision if your mindset is positive or negative. If you want to feel better you have to think better. In order to be positive in the way you feel, it is necessary to be disciplined in the way you think.
Performance begins within you. Your mind has enormous power. Indeed, your mind is your most important performance resource. How you see and respond to the events of life and work is shaped by your mindset and patterns of thinking. Therefore, an essential key to success is to train your mind and use it wisely.
E + R = O
Event + Response = Outcome
A distinguishing characteristic of consistently successful people is their ability to maintain a positive and proactive attitude. Successful people think differently than average people. Successful people produce better outcomes because their R Factor is guided by a positive and proactive mindset. Their mind is not cluttered or distracted by pessimism, negativity, or cynicism; as a result, they are able to focus all of their mental energy on exploring solutions, taking effective action, and learning how to get better.
What is Negative Attitude?
A negative attitude is the result of negative thinking. It is a lack of mental discipline. It focuses on the problem and stops looking for solutions or opportunities. A negative attitude can only survive on a steady diet of negative thinking and negative self-talk. A negative attitude is habit-forming, and it has an impact on you and the people around you. A negative attitude affects you physically. A person with a negative attitude will almost always lose to a person with a positive attitude. Sadly, many people with a negative attitude are stuck in a doom loop because they have a negative attitude about improving their attitude. This is not a good place to be!
What is Positive Attitude?
A positive attitude is the result of a disciplined and deliberate way of seeing, thinking, and responding to life. It is a mental discipline. It is intentional. It is mental toughness. A positive attitude is not naïve, and it does not sugarcoat problems. Rather, it sees and acknowledges problems and then focuses on finding solutions and opportunities. It looks for the opportunity within the problem. A positive attitude is habit-forming, and it has an impact on you and people around you. A positive attitude affects you physically. A person with a positive attitude will almost always outperform a person with a negative attitude.
Disciplined Thinking
In order to have a positive and proactive attitude, you must be disciplined and deliberate about the way you see and think about events, situations, people, and yourself. The way you think drives the way you feel; therefore, consciously managing the way you perceive and process events is essential to a positive attitude.
A key element of mental discipline is paying attention to and managing your self-talk. Self-talk is what you say to yourself about situations you’re facing. It is how you choose to interpret and explain the events you are experiencing.
Managing your self-talk is critical because words carry thoughts, and thoughts create feelings.
Here’s how it works: Your attitude begins with what you choose to focus on and the words you use to express your focus. A person with an default-driven, negative mindset will focus on a situation and say something like, “That’s a stupid idea. It will never work.”
A person with a discipline-driven, positive mindset will look at the same situation and say something like, “That’s an idea. I’m not sure if it will work, but let’s explore it further and find out.” Note carefully the difference in language between these two mindsets.
The default way of thinking uses phrases like “never” and “always.” The disciplined way of thinking uses language like “possible” and “maybe” and “explore.” Because attitude is so immediately responsive to language, the negative words will trigger negative feelings, and the positive words will trigger positive feelings.
Manage Your Focus
The way you think drives the way you feel. When faced with a difficult or frustrating situation, you can choose to focus on the problem, engage in negative self-talk, and focus your emotional energy on worrying and complaining; or you can acknowledge what is challenging, discipline yourself to see the big picture, engage in productive self-talk, and focus your emotional energy on finding a solution or on enduring the challenge.
Make a note (this is important) that a positive attitude does not ignore problems. It does not gloss over hard issues or disregard what is challenging.
In fact, a positive attitude actually sees the situation more accurately and thoroughly because it does not lock-in on the negative aspects of the situation.
A negative attitude tends to be narrow, limiting, and rigid. Once a negative attitude finds what it is looking for (which it almost always does), it stops looking and stops thinking. A positive attitude, on the other hand, tends to give greater perspective and insight because it stays fully engaged in the search for a solution.
If you think managing internal thoughts to produce a positive, proactive attitude is merely a hyped-up motivational technique, consider the research that confirms the effectiveness and power of this mental discipline. The works of Martin Seligman (see his book Learned Optimism) and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see his book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience) are good beginning references. Here is a snapshot of what Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his studies:
“How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living,
ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experience.
A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness. The most successful people, the happiest people, are those who learn to take charge of what happens in the mind.”
Simple disciplines for improving attitude…
- Be self-aware of your attitude. Don’t just let it happen. Pay attention to it.
- Refocus, reframe, and respond when your attitude becomes impulsive or negative.
- Be aware of the things that tend to trigger a disruptive attitude in you. Anticipate. Plan ahead.
- Manage your internal stories and scripts. Master the art of productive self-talk. Is your language helping or hurting? You talk to yourself more than to any other person in your life. Get good at it.
- When there is a problem, acknowledge it. Then immediately focus on finding solutions and opportunities for action. Immediately.
- Ruthlessly eliminate BCD from your life: Blaming, Complaining, Defensiveness.
- Turn off the TV. Invest in yourself. Don’t waste your time watching other people’s lives.
- Start every day with a time of reflection and preparation. Be disciplined and intentional about the way you start your day. Put yourself in a discipline-driven frame of mind.
- Be patient. Be tough. It takes time to build a winning attitude.
- Keep things in perspective. Never lose sight of the big picture.
Where in your life could you use an attitude adjustment?