Have you ever noticed that positive people tend to have all the luck and people with a negative outlook on life have all the bad luck?

Well, it is called self-fulfilling prophecy. This means that you usually will get what you expect in life. If you expect to have a long, boring day at work and your boss to be nagging all day long, that will probably happen as you are subconsciously looking all day for proof that you were right and will take every comment your boss makes in the most negative way. At the same time if you wake up really believing that you’ll have a good day, you’ll be so positive and see pleasure in many things.

Changing your attitude can therefore change your life. But unfortunately it is not easy to achieve. Your attitude is something that you developed over time. It is strongly influenced by the attitude of your parents and friends and your outlook on life will also depend on your experiences and how you dealt with them at the time.

If you want to change your attitude you need to follow a number of steps:

1. Identify your negative behavior and attitudes
2. Practice positive alternatives

Step 1: Identify your negative behavior and attitudes

If you are being told that you are a negative person, that might come as a surprise to you. Or you might be aware that you have a negative attitude, but are not really sure about how to change it.

Your first step will need to be to identify when you are negative and how this shows itself. Do you wake up already feeling negative and are there good reasons for this? Or do you change to your negative attitude in certain situations, e.g. are there any triggers?

By identifying if specific times, circumstances or environments trigger your negative attitude, you can work on them and try actively to make them a more positive experience.

Step 2: Practice positive alternatives

When you first try to change your negative behavior to a positive attitude you might find it very difficult. Your attitude is so much built into who and how you are as a person and is based on habits. These are hard to change.

You already identified in step 1 which attitudes cause you issues and how you would like to react, feel and behave instead. Now it’s your time to start applying these.

Especially in the beginning you have to constantly remind yourself of your plan. Start each day – or each situation in which you usually show a negative attitude – with some positive reinforcement. Avoid just reacting to the situation, no matter if the reaction would be verbally, physically or mentally. Instead take a deep breath, think about how you want to react and then react accordingly.

This takes a lot of practice and you can’t expect to change lifelong attitudes over night. You might find it helpful to review every evening how well you coped with practicing your improved attitude during the day and reward yourself if you did really well. Not only does this give you an incentive to continue trying hard but it also acts as a constant reminder to ensure you are focused on what you want to achieve.

It can also be helpful to provide reminders for yourself. For example you could decide that the color yellow is positive. By applying little yellow stickers to your work desk, your mirror, your car or any other place where your negative attitudes show most strongly, you have something to focus on when you feel your attitude slipping. Focus on the yellow label and think about how you want to feel and act in this situation. Over time your subconscious will connect the color yellow with those thoughts and feelings and your attitude will improve automatically just by seeing the colored labels without you having to make an obvious effort.

Changing your attitude can be very rewarding and give you a better outlook onto life. But it is not a quick progress and you need to be sure that you are very clear on what you want to change, what the alternatives are and how you can help yourself to achieve it.

And most importantly, be patient but consistent. Things will not change over night. But they won’t change if you don’t actively work on it neither.