A reader asks:
My New Year’s resolution for the coming year is to cultivate a more positive attitude. It’s the end of January and I don’t think I’ve made much if any progress. Any advice?
The mistake most people make with trying to change any kind of attitude is to treat it like a knowledge problem:
- Once I read this book on growth mindset, then I’ll be more confident.
- Or, once my therapist helps me process my anxious attachment with my mother, then I’ll be able to have more agency and less self-doubt.
But that’s not how attitude works…
An attitude is your mind’s tendency to think in a certain way; and it comes from behavior, not insight. Which means changing your attitude is about doing things differently, not collecting more insights.
Today, I’m going to share three of my favorite ways you can start to cultivate a more positive attitude by changing your habits, both physical and mental.
1. Set Yourself a Zero-Tolerance Policy on Complaining
We all complain, in part because it feels good: When you complain about something being bad, it makes you feel good for being the person who sees it. It’s an ego boost. I’ve found that this is especially true for those of us who don’t think of ourselves as complainers.
Unfortunately, the habit of complaining generates a lot of negativity: if you’re constantly pointing out problems, this creates an attentional bias where eventually problems become all that you see, which leads to a strongly negative attitude.
Now, setting yourself a zero-tolerance policy on complaining might seem a tad unrealistic. Which is true: You will definitely fail to stop complaining entirely. I’ve tried myself many times and have yet to succeed.
But such a strict policy will help you do two important things whether you succeed or not:
- It will increase your awareness of your habit of complaining. You can’t change a habit you’re not aware of. So, painful as it may be, it’s essential to become more aware of how often you complain so that you can start to change that behavior.
- It will create more space during the decisive moment when you feel tempted to complain—either in your head or out loud—so that you can pause and choose to inhibit, rather than express, the complaint.
Now, keep in mind that the goal isn’t to eradicate all complaining. But even a 20% reduction in complaining will lead to a significant shift in the positivity of your attitude.
Here’s a simple, practical way to getting started:
- Create a file in the Notes app on your phone and call it “Complaints.”
- Anytime you find yourself complaining (or wanting to complain), jot down what the complaint was about and what triggered it.
- After a week or two of doing this, you’ll notice some patterns. And these patterns will help you narrow in your focus on where in life specifically you need to work on complaining less in order to have a more positive attitude.
2. Limit News Consumption to Once per Week
The news is deliberately biased toward negativity because it leads to more attention from the consumer, which leads to more ad sales, which leads to more revenue for the companies that operate the news organizations. And this is true whether you’re talking about Fox News, the MSNBC, or Joe Rogan.
So, an easy way to dramatically cut down on the amount of negativity in your life—and consequently, allow your naturally more positive attitude to shine through—is to cut down on the quantity of news you consume.
Try this for a couple weeks as an experiment:
Limit your consumption of the news to 1-2 hours once per week.
That might sound shocking at first. And if it does, I’d ask you to reflect on one question:
Does anyone benefit in a meaningful way from me being plugged into the news on a daily, much less hourly, basis?
I think you’ll find that, after doing this little experiment, you’re actually not any less informed and your mood and attitude will be significantly more positive.
3. Build Agency with Micro Assertiveness
A lot of negativity stems from unaddressed resentment.
Here are a few examples of what I mean:
- You frequently find yourself gossiping about the state of the company you work for because you resent the founder and CEO for how she runs it.
- You often find yourself catastrophizing about the state of the nation because you resent the people who didn’t vote the way you did.
- You occasionally find yourself envying your sister-in-law because she’s got an amazing career in the field you wanted to go into but didn’t.
- Maybe you even fall into spirals of self-criticism because you resent yourself for not following through on your dreams and aspirations.
See, all these forms of negativity—from gossiping and catastrophizing to envy and self-criticism—these negative thought patterns are the raw material that make up a negative attitude. And if many of them are based in an underlying resentment, then you can pretty quickly cultivate a more positive attitude by addressing the underlying resentment itself.
So how do you do that exactly?
Well, at its core, resentment is almost always about your own lack of agency: You feel helpless in the face of negative things in your life and resent yourself for not being more proactive to address them. But because that’s emotionally painful to admit to ourselves, we end up projecting our self-resentment onto other people.
For example:
- If you resent your sister-in-law for her amazing career, deep down that’s probably a manifestation of your own self-resentment for not pursuing the career you really wanted.
- If you resent half the country for voting in a way you disagree with, that’s probably a reflection of your own self-resentment at not being as politically active as you know you should be given how much you care about politics—volunteering, organizing, education, etc.
The solution to self-resentment—and all the negativity it generates—is to build more agency.
Agency is the belief in your ability to positively influence yourself and the world around you.
When you have a high agency mindset, you tend to be proactive about going after what you want rather than complaining about or feeling resentful over what you don’t have or don’t like.
And while there’s a lot of factors that go into whether someone has a high agency mindset, a simple but powerful one anyone can take advantage of is communicating more assertively.
Now, assertive communication is a big topic and can be quite challenging. So I recommend starting with what I call micro assertiveness which just means looking for very small and very doable opportunities to practice being just a little bit more assertive.
For example:
- Asking to be reseated to a better table at a restaurant.
- Respectfully telling your coworker you disagree with their assessment of a problem at work instead of just staying quiet.
- Asking your partner if they’d be okay with Italian food instead of Thai for dinner tonight even though you know they don’t especially like Italian food.
Communicating assertively will foster agency. Agency will lead to less resentment. And less resentment will allow your more naturally positive attitude to shine through.
Now, if the idea of being more assertive—even in small ways—seems intimidating, I’ve put together a short checklist of things to remember when trying to communicate assertively. It’s called The Assertiveness Cheat Sheet and you can get a copy of it here:
Download The Assertive Communication Cheat Sheet →
Putting It Into Practice…
Don’t try and do all of these everywhere all the time. It won’t work and you’ll end up with one more thing to be negative about.
Instead, try this:
- Pick one of these ideas that resonates with you the most.
- Commit to practicing for a short duration—30 days or even just a week.
- At the end of that time, reflect briefly on the experience then either repeat it or try a new habit.
Next Steps
Here are a few additional resources that might be helpful if you want to cultivate a more positive attitude: