How to Develop a Positive Mental Attitude

Positive thinking is the discipline of take conscious control over your thoughts in order to eliminate or minimize negative attitudes and replace them with positive attitudes. This requires time and practice, but can be achieved through the use of certain training drills.

Instructions

• 1

  Learn about common negative thinking patterns. These include filtering, personalizing, catastrophizing and polarizing, according to the Mayo Clinic. There are many more common negative thinking patterns that you should gradually become aware of.

• 2

  Become aware of your own thoughts. The best way to do this is to ask and answer the question, "What am I thinking about right now?" several times each day. Over a period of months, this process will become automatic.

• 3

  Identify your own negative thinking patterns, not necessarily limited to the four types identified by the Mayo Clinic. A thinking pattern is not necessarily "negative" simply because it is unpleasant--it is negative if it serves no useful purpose or is harmful to you in some way. Record these patterns.

• 4

  Identify triggers that activate negative thinking patterns. Negative thoughts may be triggered by external events or people, or by thoughts or memories that immediately precede the negative thinking pattern. Record these triggers.

• 5

  Examine your negative thinking patterns and compose positive thinking patterns to replace them--for example, instead of thinking of interruptions of your work as nuisances, think of them as opportunities to practice developing flexibility by quickly switching your mental focus from one topic to another. Record these positive thinking patterns and memorize them.

• 6

  Intervene in your own thinking on a minute-by-minute basis to identify negative thinking patterns and replace them with the positive thinking patterns. If you have effectively identified your triggers, intervene as soon as the trigger occurs so that you can head off negative thinking patterns before they occur.

• 7

  Monitor your vocabulary and use this same process to change your speaking patterns, because your speech affects your thoughts and vice versa.