How to Have a Positive Attitude For Daily Living

In these harsh economic times it can sometimes feel like you wake each morning to more and more bad news. Daily you are bombarded with ever increasing job losses, people living in poverty and cost of living. With all of the bad news that is all around you it is very easy to become bogged down by all of the negative emotions. If you are not careful you could quite easily find yourself in a pit of negativity that can feel almost impossible to climb out of.

So what can you do to decrease the negative emotions that are building inside in order to develop a more positive attitude? There are several things all of which are relatively simple to implement into your life. All you need is the willingness to recognize that you have been allowing negative influences to infiltrate your life and be ready to do something about it.

1. Appreciation – no matter how bad you think things are in your life there is always something or someone that you can appreciate. It could be your family pet, your spouse, children, your computer, cell phone, flat screen TV, your oak tree, your friends, your church etc…It doesn’t matter what it is you are showing appreciation for, the point is its important to spend time appreciating what you have that you enjoy. This will take your focus away from the things that are not good and doing this will lift your mood and help you to view your life in a more positive light.

The next time you are feeling the pressures of everyday living, sit down and make a list of all the things and people in your life that you are grateful for. Carry that list around with you for a few days and whenever you feel a bad mood coming on take out your list and read it, feel the emotion of it and realize that life is never as bad as we think it is. It is also good to remember that there is always someone worse off than yourself.

Make a conscious effort to chase the negative thoughts away, instead of constantly telling yourself that life is really hard and there is no one suffering as much as you are, take out your list and read it and remember that although your life may not be going the way you want it to right now, there is still plenty to be thankful for.

2. Realize you can choose to be happy – many people make the mistake of thinking that in order to be happy something good has to happen to them first. In other words they wait around for that great job, that gorgeous girlfriend or that super fast car, or that big house, thinking that when they get those things then they will be happy.

Let me tell you something you may not have been told before; happiness is a choice, like all other emotions happiness is under your command, you can literally choose to feel happy right this instant, you do not have to wait for some external event to take place in order to feel happiness, just make the choice now. Say to yourself I feel happy. It may seem strange at first if you have never done this before but if you do this continually for a few weeks you will find you begin to feel happy and this in turn will alter your negative outlook to a more positive one.

3. Let go of negative people – one of the worse things you can do to yourself is to spend time around negative people. These folks will literally suck the life out of you. I am sure that you know people like this, do you know someone who is always complaining, always has something wrong with them health wise, who’s problems are much more dramatic than anyone else’s, who blankly refuse to comprehend anything positive, who always puts you down and is absolutely always right? These are the people you should avoid like H1N1.

It is not possible to maintain positive thoughts around people like these and your life cannot move forward if you spend a lot of time with negative people. They do not want you to move forward, they do not want you to have the strength to do the things they are not strong enough to do, they do not want to see you develop and grow because they do not feel that they can do it so they subtly try to undermine you in order to keep you down on their level.

They will tell you that you are not good enough to do certain things or go certain places, they will accuse you of thinking that you are better than them and when you try to do the right thing they will call you a coward for not following them down the wrong road. This is their well thought out plan, and it is devised to achieve one thing, and that is to keep you in “your place” to not allow you to live a better life than they think you should have.

If you want to live a more positive life you simply must shift yourself from these people, do it gently and slowly to avoid any conflict but be sure to lessen the time that you spend with negative people.

4. Stop comparing yourself to others – one of the fastest ways to feel bad about your self is to compare yourself to others. If you actively seek out people that you think are better than you, you will certainly find them. If your neighbor has a bigger house than you, so what, if your work mate drives a car and you don’t, so what, if your sister has a husband and you don’t, so what. You simply must not base the value or success of your life on someone else’s standard.

Instead celebrate the success of your family and friends, and use their success as a positive example. If your friend at work buys a car, instead of feeling envious and spreading rumors about what he or she did in order to buy the car congratulate your friend and use their success to motivate yourself, if your friend has saved up for a car, there is no reason why you cannot save for a car.

Try to see the good and the positive in the success of others, instead of speaking badly about them, ask them what they did to succeed, pick their brains and then go out and achieve your own success. It is easy to spend your entire life envying others, but that is simply a waste of a perfectly good life, you are better than that, you are above that, you are worth more than that, so act like it.

Stop looking around at the results of others and start working on positive results of your own. When you become more focused on seeing the positive side of situations in your life you will become more equipped to handle whatever life throws at you and as you begin to cultivate a more  positive attitude you will start to experience a level of success you never thought possible.