The Detailed Guide On How To Develop A Positive Mental Attitude

Say you’re on a hike with a friend. Everything's going great- the air is fresh, the view is pretty, and you’re having fun.

But then something happens that changes  all of that. Your friend suddenly collapses right next to you, and starts panting uncontrollably. You panic. You're not sure how to help. So, you reach for their backpack to check for supplies, and you discover what had really happened:

For some reason, your friend had been carrying a 30 kg dumbbell with them this whole time!? Silly, right?

Except what if I told you you’re probably doing the exact same thing in life right now? Just like your friend’s imaginary dumbbells, harboring a negative mental attitude can weigh you down, exhaust you, and make each step of life harder than it has to be. 

That’s why it’s so important to ditch those weights, and instead cultivate a positive attitude that will lift you up and help you achieve more than you ever imagined.

And lucky you! This is exactly what I’m here to help you with today.

In this post, I’ll share everything you need to know about positive mental attitudes- what they are, why they’re important to achieve success, and how you can develop them. Let’s get started!

What Is A Positive Mental Attitude?

Alright, first up let’s define positive mental attitudes (PMA), and clear up some common misconceptions along the way.

One definition comes from Dr. Zarghuna Naseem, who defines PMA as “A frequent experience of positive emotions, optimism, hope, and happiness.”

Pretty straightforward, right? Let’s look at another one. This one’s by Dr Pam McGarth, and she adds a bit more flavor by describing positive thinking as “A generic term referring to an overall attitude that is reflected in thinking, behavior, feeling, and speaking. Positive thinking is a mental attitude that admits into the mind; thoughts, words, and images that are conductive to growth, expansion, and success.”

The highlight here is that she refers to how broad this concept really is by calling it “generic,” AKA not easy to pin down!

And Why is that? Here’s why: what often walks and talks like a positive mental attitude is often a negative attitude in disguise. 

Here’s what I mean: let’s say you get rejected by your dream university even though you worked really hard on your application. If your immediate reaction to this is “I guess I should look at the bright side…,” you’re not being positive, you’re being toxic to yourself. True positivity is allowing yourself space to feel your emotions.

Or how about the opposite example? Let’s say you hadn’t put any real effort into your application, but  hoped for the best anyway. Again, even though it looks like it, it's not positivity; it's the wolf of wishful thinking tricking you by wearing grandma positivity’s clothes.

So defining positive mental attitudes can be complicated. But don’t worry- we can tackle this together. 

I’ve put together a list of top traits found in genuinely positive people to help you spot them from a mile away! 

10 Characteristics Of A Positive Mental Attitude

Here are the 10 characteristics or traits that you can use to identify a positive attitude in others and in yourself: 

1. Acceptance: Positive thinkers accept that things don’t always go the way they want them to. Whatever cards they are played, they will work with them constructively.
2. Gratitude: Positive thinkers always recognize and appreciate the good around them- both big and small. 
3. Optimism: People with positive mental attitudes always hope for the best and they choose to focus on the positive aspects of their situations.
4. Resilience: People with positive mental attitudes always make sure they bounce back from setbacks. Their positive outlook on life gives them hope in difficult times.
5. Persistence:  Positive thinkers continue working toward their goals even when their plans are met with obstacles or delays. Their opportunity-oriented mindset allows them to quickly think of ways to leverage new situations so they keep making progress toward their goals. 
6. Mindfulness: People with a positive attitude stop themselves from worrying about things they can’t control. They choose to focus on the present through mindfulness. 
7. Confidence: People with a positive outlook on life keep themselves in high esteem. They appreciate their worth and they are confident in their ability to overcome any challenges they might face.
8. Kindness: People with a positive attitude show compassion and kindness toward themselves and others.
9. Adaptability: People with a positive attitude are open to change. They’re able to navigate unfamiliar situations because they believe things will eventually turn out in their favor.
10. Motivation: People with a positive attitude stay motivated during both trying and friendly times. They don’t let negative thoughts talk them out of doing what needs to be done.

3 Examples Of Positive Mental Attitudes In Action

So far, we’ve dealt with the concept of positive mindsets in theory.  Now, let’s get some practicality in the room, and see what positive mental attitudes look like in action: 

Scenario 1: You Get Rejected From Your Dream University

Let’s start with an example you’re already familiar with; getting rejected by your dream university. 

What would a someone with a positive mindset do in this in this situation?

You can probably guess what a negative person might do- thinking things like:

“This is so unfair. Why do things never work out for me!?”  or “You know what? I’m done trying so hard. I clearly don’t have what it takes.”

Someone with a positive mental attitude? Well they would approach this situation in a completely different way. Here's one example: 

1. They'll first take the time they need to feel the initial shock, process their emotions, and acknowledge what has happened.
2. Then, they would probably start bringing themselves to accept the situation for what it is.
3. Once they feel ready, they'll start asking themselves what their best course of action might be, and whether there are any hidden opportunities in this situation.
4. While they work on this, they'll be mindful of the fact that they're not robots, and that emotional recovery isn’t linear. So when the blues hit again, they'll allow themselves the space to feel them, and start all over.

Scenario 2: Your Manager Gave You A Big Project On A Tight Deadline

Now let’s say you’re an employee somewhere and your manager pulls the classic: 

“Hello, please do [a HUGE project] within [an unreasonably short deadline]? Thanks.”

What do you do here? 

Well, one way to go is to sit around and keep complaining about the unfairness of the expectation.

OR you could approach the situation with the right mindset (a growth mindset) and tell yourself:

“You know what, this is going to be tough to achieve, but if I can push myself and get this done, It’ll be a great way to set myself apart from others. Also, if I can do the job well despite these odds, my boss will realize I can work well on my feet and probably send more important projects my way.”

(This is of course always making sure you don't jeopardize your own well-being though.)

Scenario 3: You’re struggling to get your startup off the ground

Now let’s say you’re swamped with work trying to get your startup up and running.

One way to go is to let the panic and self-doubt take over and render you unable to get anything done. 

What’s the other way?

Something along the lines of: “This is going to be challenging for sure. But that’s how I know it’s going to be a great learning experience. I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? It won't work out, and I'll emerge more experienced than ever before. Not to mention, it could work, and wouldn't that be so worth it?"

Why Is It Important To Cultivate A Positive Mental Attitude for Success?

Okay. Now that we have a solid grasp of what a positive mindset is, let’s ask ourselves the big question:

Why go through the trouble?

I mean it’s not like simply thinking positively guarantees things will go your way, right? Well, yeah- it doesn't.

But what a positive attitude does always guarantee is that you’ll always create better outcomes for yourself in adverse situations than you would otherwise. And why is that?

That's because adopting a positive mental attitude helps you:

• Perform better in all situations
• Cope better with difficult situations

And no, you're not supposed to just take my word for it- I'm going to show you my work. Here are six science-backed benefits of cultivating a positive mental attitude.

1. A Positive Mental Attitude Improves Academic Performance

If you’re a student, this will be great news for you: a positive mental attitude can help bring your grades up.

A really interesting experiment that proves this was conducted in the 1960s by psychologist Robert Rosenthal and school principal Lenore Jacobson.

What did they do? Well, they went through the rooster of an elementary school in California, and randomly picked a few names off of it.

This group of randomly selected names was labeled “bloomers.” Now the researchers did something sneaky: they approached the teachers of this elementary school and pretended like they had conducted some sort of complicated analysis, and that according to its results, these "bloomers" were most likely to be successful in the future.

All that was left to do now was sit back and watch the magic happen.

The researchers tracked the academic performance of the whole batch of students for the whole academic year and found that the students who had been labeled "bloomers" showed a significantly greater improvement in academic performance compared to their peers. 

Something really interesting happened here.  

The teachers’ positive expectations from "bloomers" actually ended up improving their academic performance. Simply believing a certain group of students were special, changed these teachers' attitudes toward them- making them extra careful to ensure these children got all the help they needed to reach their true potential. And with that extra help, these bloomers actually ended up doing better than everyone else.

But what about a student’s own positive thoughts? Do they help bring up academic performance as well?

According to the study published by Carol Dweck in 2007, yes they do!

In this study, researchers measured seventh-grade students’ beliefs about intelligence over two years i.e., whether they believed intelligence was fixed or could be grown like a muscle. 

Simultaneously, the researchers kept track of those students’ academic performance in math. 

What do they find? Students who had a growth mindset about intelligence saw their math grades improve over the studied period, and, surprise surprise, students with a fixed mindset about intelligence experienced a downward trajectory. 

2. A Positive Mental Attitude Improves Your Performance In Sports

But it’s not just academics where a positive attitude can help you shine. As it turns out, a little bit of positivity can help you out in sports as well!

And Dr. Blaslotto’s basketball experiment is here to prove it.

So what happened? Well, Dr. Blaslotto wanted to find the effect of positive thinking and visualization on people’s performance in sports. 

He divided the volunteering participants in his study into three groups. For the next 30 days, he made group 1 practice throwing a basketball through a hoop, and group 2 only visualized making successful free throws (without physical practice). Group 3 was instructed to do neither. 

Once the 30 days were over, group 1 members had improved their accuracy by 24%, group 2 by 23% and group 3 showed no improvement. 

The mere act of regularly visualizing themselves successfully scoring the hoop was enough to improve group 2’s performance by almost as much as group 1- the group that actually practiced scoring the hoop every single day.

3. A Positive Mental Attitude Improves Your Work Performance

A positive attitude can help you stand out at work too! 

A famous meta-analysis conducted by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a positive psychology professor at the University of California, shows that employees with higher levels of positive affect have superior job performance and productivity compared to other employees.

Additionally, it showed that employees who experienced positive emotions were a lot more likely to get favorable evaluations from their supervisors and achieve more in their careers. 

And I mean it makes sense, doesn't it? A mind oriented toward growth and opportunity will only see growth and opportunity, and a mind oriented toward negativity will only see negativity. Or, as Henry Ford put it "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't- you're right."

4. A Positive Mental Attitude Improves Your Friendships & Relationships

Want to become a social magnet? Turns out a little positivity will help with that too. 

In a study published in 2002, Martin Seligman asked 222 undergraduate students from the University of Illinois to fill out multiple self-report questionnaires measuring happiness and personality traits. 

Additionally, information regarding the participants’ social relationships was collected.

The analysis found that the happiest participants had the highest quality social relationships compared to their less happy peers. 

If you think about it a little, this finding is really not that surprising. Who doesn't want to be around happy people?

5. A Positive Mental Attitude Improves Your Health

Our minds are more powerful than we think- they can even make the difference between living a long and healthy life or a life of pain and sickness. 

One of the most interesting studies conducted about this is Sheldon Cohen’s 1999 common cold experiment.

What did Sheldon and his peers do? 

Well they used standard questionnaires to measure the positive and negative emotions of 334 healthy adults. Then, all of these participants were exposed to one of two common cold viruses and immediately quarantined for monitoring. 

I think you see where this is going…

Participants who reported higher levels of positivity weren’t just less likely to catch the common cold, but they were also less likely to develop the symptoms for it if they did!

Talk about mind over matter.

6. A Positive Mental Attitude Will Help You Lead A Happier Life

Finally, positive thinking also leads to happiness and overall well-being.

None of us are surprised here but in the spirit of backing everything up with science, here’s an experiment to prove it. 

In 2003, Robert Emmons and his peers published a study that aimed to find out whether positive thoughts (specifically gratitude) can help make people happier. They started by measuring each participant's happiness levels and then divided everyone into three groups. 

The "gratitude" group was asked to keep a daily journal of things they were grateful for, the "hassles" group was asked to keep a daily journal of things that had irritated them, and the control group was asked to simply record what events took place in the day. 

After several weeks, the participants’ happiness levels were measured again. 

The gratitude group reported increased levels of happiness against their baseline, the hassle group reported a decline in their happiness levels, and the control group reported pretty much the same levels of happiness as before. 

How To Develop A Positive Mental Attitude: 6 Tips

Now you know what a positive mental attitude is and why it's so important to build one. Now it's time to talk about how to actually do it. As with anything worth having in life, it won’t come to you without sincere effort and consistency. 

But don't worry, we can tackle this together as well. I've put together a list of 7 powerful and actionable things you can start doing today to begin rewiring your brain for positivity: 

1. Keep A Gratitude Journal 

One of the simplest and most effective ways to develop a positive mental attitude is to bring your mind to focus on all the positivity around you instead of the negativity.  In other words, start appreciating the good in your life. Be more of a glass-half-full kind of person. It will both make you feel a lot better about your life and it’ll make others want you around- no one likes negative people. 

A great way to get yourself to be consistently grateful is to maintain a daily or weekly gratitude journal- and don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be something complicated, you can record entries like “three things I’m grateful for today” or “three things that went my way this week.”

As we discussed earlier, Robert Emmons’s study scientifically proves the effectiveness of gratitude journals, so don’t worry- this will actually help. 

2. Track Your Thoughts & Improve Your Self-Talk

Another great way to orient your mindset for positivity and develop positive self-talk is to become more conscious about the different kinds of thoughts that pop up in your mind everyday.

Thought tracking worksheets are a great way to get started. What's a thought tracking sheet, you ask? It's exactly what it sounds like! It's a piece of paper with pre-set prompts that help you jot down your thoughts in a structured way.

There are a great variety of templates you can find for these worksheets, but if you want to keep things simple, structure yours this way:

• A brief summary of the situation you're dealing with
• Your thoughts about the situation
• A positive, negative, or neutral label for those thoughts
• In the case of negative thoughts, write down an alternative constructive thought you could have regarding the same situation.

Of course, it would be impractical to do this for every single thought that pops into your head, so only do this practice for particularly evocative thoughts. 

3. Visualize Positivity

As we saw in Dr. Blaslotto’s basketball experiment, visualizing positive outcomes can in itself be a powerful way to increase the likelihood of achieving those outcomes. So, you’ll find it worthwhile to set aside five to ten minutes a day to meditate and actively visualize yourself to achieving your goals in life.

4. Start Daily Positive Affirmations

Positive affirmations will make a great addition to your daily routine as well. Give yourself a daily reminder that you are worthy of happiness and love and that you’re capable of achieving whatever you set your mind to. 

Don’t worry if doing this feels a bit fake at first- it always starts out that way. Eventually, without even realizing it, your persistent reinforcement of these positive beliefs about yourself will seep into your mind and help you view yourself in a better light and help you develop positive self-talk.

5. Surround Yourself With Positive People

One of the fastest ways you can get rid of your negative thinking habits and replace them with positive thinking habits is by spending more and more of your time with people who already have a positive mental attitude. 

Remember the 10 traits of people with positive mental attitudes we discussed earlier? Use those to assess how positive or negative people around you are. Then, try to spend more and more of your time with the positive thinkers in your life and limit the time you spend with negative thinkers. If spending time with negative thinkers seems to be unavoidable, try changing the topic whenever they’re speaking negatively about something. The less exposure your brain has to that kind of negative attitude, the better. 

6. Practice, Practice, and Practice

As I said earlier, if there’s anything worth having in life, it will require consistent and sincere effort on your part to achieve it. There are absolutely no shortcuts, so make sure you hold yourself accountable and actively work on developing this habit. 

But remember that it’s okay to ask for help. If you’ve already tried to form the habit of positive thinking using any of the techniques listed above, but dropped the habit after an intense week phase of motivation, be honest with yourself about that and ask for help. 

Consider asking a friend or family member to help keep you accountable. If you're looking for more than just an accountability buddy and want a professional to check in with you daily and come up with a personalized plan to ensure you stay on track, you can try our app for free and get your own coach to keep you in check.

7. Seek A Therapist’s Help

It’s important to note here that negative thinking can’t always be cured through any of the techniques I’ve listed above. Sometimes, negative thinking is chronic and results from mental illnesses like depression, for example. In those cases, it’s important to seek the help of a licensed professional. 

Food For Thought Questions

‍

1. What opportunities do you think you’ve missed in the past month because of negative thoughts?
2. How do you think you will feel about your life if you only compare yourself to those who seem to be doing better than you?
3. What are three things you’re grateful for today?
4. What is one problem you’re currently dealing with that could be an opportunity in disguise if you stopped looking at it from a negative mental attitude?

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is a positive mental attitude?

A positive mental attitude (PMA) is a mindset or “orientation” characterized by positive thinking, resilience, and optimism. It is a mindset that enables people to stay constructive in their approach to difficult situations and make the best of them. 

What are the traits of people with a positive mental attitude? 

There are many traits that you can identify positive thinkers with, some of the most apparent ones include optimism, gratitude, acceptance, confidence, and adaptability. You can read about these and other identifying traits of positive people in detail in our discussion above. 

Why is it important to develop a positive mental attitude?

There are two broad reasons why it's important for you to develop a positive mental attitude. The first is that people with a negative outlook on life end up leading stressful and unsatisfying lives.

The other reason is that positive mental attitudes help you perform better in every situation i.e., academics, sports, entrepreneurship, work, and more. Additionally, they help improve your social relationships, your health, and your overall well-being. 

How long does it take to develop a positive mental attitude?

There’s no fixed timeline for developing a positive mental attitude. It depends from case to case. Besides, personal development isn't a destination- once you’ve developed a positive mental attitude, you need to keep putting in the effort to maintain it. 

Can everyone develop a positive mental attitude?

Broadly speaking, everyone can train themselves to think more positively than they already do. However, in cases where negative thinking stems from mental illnesses like depression, you should always consult a licensed professional. 

Conclusion

Re-wiring your brain for positivity isn’t easy, but I promise you it’s one of the best gifts you can give yourself.

Plus, the good news is you’ve already taken the first step by reading this post!

It shows you care for your well-being, and you’re willing to do the work to lead a better, happier life. So, I say give yourself a nice pat on the back and keep the momentum going. Keep reading up on positivity and draw wisdom from the many wonderful resources you’ll find online. 

But please, please, please be careful. Don’t fall into the self-help trap of believing you’re working on becoming positive by simply reading up on it: implementing what you learn about positivity consistently is what’s going to make all the difference. Remember that. 

I wish you my very best on your journey to a positive life, and I hope this post helped bring you a step closer to this goal. Good Luck!