It’s hard to feel positive about work when you have to work to the pay bills. So, you may wonder if there are any positive attitude in the workplace activities you can try to alleviate some of that negativity.
But, you deserve to enjoy the job you do, even if you need to search for the reasons why. It all comes down time your mindset, which feels vague and difficult. The good news is that we break it down into 23 tips and activities you can do to develop a positive attitude in the workplace.
This post is all about building a positive attitude in the workplace activities.
POSITIVE ATTITUDE IN THE WORKPLACE ACTIVITIES:
1. Focus on developing a growth mindset
A positive attitude starts from the belief that you can change and improve. The foundation of every positive outlook is that there’s a reason to think positively.
In the case of developing a positive attitude at work, you are recognizing the possibility of improving your attitude and that of your coworkers. However, positivity can easily become toxic if we don’t recognize that part of a growth mindset means accepting failure.
If you’re not failing, then you’re not learning or giving yourself the chance to really learn by making mistakes. So, embrace failure as a part of your positive attitude.
2. Engage in personal growth inside of the office and outside of it
When you adopt a positive at work, it will likely affect other areas of your life too. However, it’s easy to forget that, as much as want to grow and learn in our careers, we need to continue learning as people.
Even if you love your job, you’re working a forty-hour week because you need to pay the bills. If you didn’t have bills to pay, you would likely not work as many hours if at all.
So, when you think about personal growth, you have to think about it in terms of your personal life just as much as your career. When you’re not at work and when you retire, you’ll still be left with yourself.
That means that you need to bring a growth mindset into your personal life as much as you bring it into your work life. Ask yourself how you want to improve yourself and see that personal growth happens as a person.
3. Strive toward a work-life balance
You work to live, not live to work. It’s easy to get stuck in the “live to work” mindset because that’s what we’re told from a young age. If we’re not productive and clogging up our time with lots of projects, we’re wasting our time.
Any time we rest is wasted unless we’ve earned it through some random and always vague amount of productivity. In other words, we need to rethink our relationship to work.
We can recognize how much we love to work, if that’s the case for you, while also recognizing that you love to live your life too. You want to go home to your dog, partner, or dinner. It makes sense and that’s the way it should be.
Avoid letting your focus on growth at work cloud your ability to enjoy your life. This is an essential part of a positive attitude in the workplace because you’ll burn out without nourishing your personal life just as much as you nourish your work life.
4. Stay in the present moment and experience it
It’s important to recognize that positive thoughts can be harder to access than negative thoughts. Sometimes, being negative and focusing on the pain is okay because that’s the reality.
However, if we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of our pain and negative attitudes likely come from us focusing on the past or future.
Instead of noticing what’s going on in the moment, we’re thinking of better ways we could have said that thing yesterday or how we haven’t achieved everything we wanted to yet.
In other words, we’re focusing on all of the stuff that is either outside of our control or has yet to happen. This leads to negative thoughts because we criticize ourselves and the world around us. So, let’s focus on the moment and experience it.
5. Nourish your body with nutritious, healthy food
There are no good or bad foods. You probably grew up hearing that certain foods are bad for you or they’re “guilty” pleasures. Maybe your parents told you that you weren’t allowed to eat certain foods because they weren’t healthy.
Some foods are more nutritious than others and some will fill you up better than others. But, there is no bad food.
Every food can play a role in making you feel good, whether that’s physically or emotionally. Part of mental health is the food you eat, so balance your diet with all types of foods. This includes both the foods you were told to eat as a kid and the ones you were told not to eat.
6. Think outside of the PowerPoint slide
Get it? It’s like “think outside of the box” but work edition. We can get stuck in our own heads. So, when we talk about thinking positively and increasing our positive experiences at work, it’s difficult.
Most of us assume that positive people come by it naturally and there’s no point in going there if we aren’t like that. But, that couldn’t be more wrong.
Positive people are positive because they put work into it and find creative ways to think positively. The first step is to remember that a good attitude starts with noticing the good stuff around you and being grateful for it.
7. Continue doing the hard work at the office
Unless your stress levels are unmanageable, keep doing the same work you’ve been doing. Perform at the high level you always achieve and keep enjoying your job. If you struggle to enjoy your job, that’s understandable and frustrating.
It can be hard to focus on a positive attitude when all you get from your job is negative emotions. It doesn’t give you much to work with. But, it’s also more than nothing.
The fact that you want to think more positively about your job and in the workplace says that you have the motivation, which is half the battle.
So, when you think about steps you can take towards a more positive mindset, consider befriending coworkers. Sometimes, all you need is a friendly face that makes work more enjoyable for that positive attitude to happen naturally.
8. Seek out positive content to consume
Notice the type of content you consume and how it affects you. Think of your social media, email, texts, and any other type of content that pops up on your phone.
Recognize how it makes you feel and make a note any time there’s a pattern. Cut out the negative content or save it for later in the day when it won’t change your mood. Look for the good news that can make your day and avoid the stuff that will break it.
9. Identify and challenge cognitive distortions
Cognitive distortions are any split-second interpretations we make that hurt us. They hurt us because they’re false interpretations based on our biases and skewed perspectives on the world.
They can make it difficult to think positively when our brains are predisposed to making harmful interpretations about the world.
Luckily, we can fight it. In order to notice more positive things and accurately see them as positive things, we need to fight our distortions. This means we work on noticing any time something in our environment makes us think negatively and ask why.
10. Spend time with a family member every now and then
Hang out with the people you love and who love you. One of the best ways to get into a better mood is by spending time with people we value. These are the people who remind us that we work to pay our bills and how important our personal life is.
A positive attitude at work starts with getting perspective on our work. Rather than living to work, we work to live and that’s enough of a reason to pursue a positive attitude at work. Work gives us the freedom to live our personal lives fully, as long as we remember why we work.
11. Foster your emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence means that we understand our own emotions and the emotions of other people. Plus, we need to learn how to regulate our emotions in a way that doesn’t end up hurting other people.
This is crucial for the workplace so that we don’t end up yelling at a coworker and possibly getting fired. There’s no reason to work on harnessing our positive energy if we don’t put a little effort into managing our emotions.
It’s too easy to lose control and forget why we bother with a positive mental attitude. So, we need to learn coping mechanisms and meditation techniques to better understand, respect, and regulate our emotions.
12. Notice and be grateful for the silver linings
One of the easiest ways to start increasing your positive emotions is to notice the good stuff. Identify the positive interactions, events, and surprises in your day.
The simple act of working on noticing what has had a positive impact on you will help you see the world in a more positive light and bring that positive attitude to work.
For an extra challenge, try identifying the positive stuff that happens at work. Set the goal of finding three positives for the day and reflecting on them before you go to bed.
13. Try some positive thinking exercises like positive affirmations
Our brains are infinitely trainable, which is exciting. We can train ourselves to think positively by simply choosing it. It takes time and effort, and mental illnesses can make it difficult if not impossible. But, the fact is that our brains can change through the process of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity refers to the process of creating new neural pathways in our brain and working to strengthen them. In other words, our brains are constantly changing, learning, and atrophying. We lose neural pathways as easily as we build them.
So, if we focus on choosing to notice the positive thoughts we have and we do that for a while, our brains will get better at it and make it easier for us to think positively.
14. Create a daily work routine to get in the rhythm
Schedule breaks into your day. Find times when you can go for a quick walk, stretch, call your partner, or do a quick meditation. Identify the best times to refresh yourself while you’re at work and stick to them.
Plan your day around the luxurious lunch you prepared for yourself and enjoy every second of it. If coffee is your thing, then you deserve to enjoy every second of the walk between your desk and the coffee cart.
Then, you deserve to enjoy the coffee from the first sip to the last sip. Pick the activities that will rejuvenate you throughout the day and do them for your own good and the sake of maintaining your positive attitude in the workplace.
15. Cut negative people out of your life when possible
It sucks to be in a good or even neutral mood and have someone in a negative mood ruin it for you. Everyone is going through their own life events, and we’ve all been there.
But, sometimes we need to prioritize ourselves and let someone know that we need space from them. If they’re someone from work, we don’t even have to tell them that. We can just not be around them and focus on our positive behaviors.
16. Take your lunch break no matter how much you have to do
Always take your lunch break. You need the mental space between you and your job no matter what you tell yourself.
You’re working eight hours a day and that means that you have to motivate yourself to work throughout the day, especially when you’d probably like to take a nap, drink wine, or watch a TV show. So, respect yourself enough to take a break. Your work will be there when you get back.
17. Assess your job satisfaction continuously
Ask yourself how much joy you get from your job. Look for it with your team members and any friendships you have at work. Identify in happy moments you experienced by working in a positive work environment.
Think of the job you do every day and if you get joy from interacting with customers, completing projects, or talking to your boss.
There are tons of ways to enjoy your job, which means that, if you don’t, you can find ways of making it more enjoyable. If you can’t leave, try making friends so that something brings you joy when you think about work.
18. Sharpen your problem-solving skills and accept feedback
Every job requires you to problem-solve. In other words, you need to get creative when the typical solution doesn’t work. You find a new problem and it needs a new, innovative solution. The only problem is that this leads to trying new things and possibly failing.
As we know, the only way to learn and try new things is to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not branching out far enough to learn something that could be life-changing. Failure doesn’t have to look like losing your job or messing up a big project.
It could be that you say something you think is true, your coworker lets you know it’s not, and you learn from that. Accept feedback as a part of your desire to adopt a positive attitude because you’ll encounter failure and feedback all the time.
19. Enjoy a good laugh with your coworkers
Laugh and have fun with your coworkers. Any good supervisors or bosses will understand that their employees should enjoy being around each other. So, have fun with the people you work with as you get the job done.
You deserve to have a job you like and surround yourself with people you want to be around. Working is always going to feel like work, no matter how much you love what you do.
You spend too much of your time working for it to not feel like work. But, that doesn’t mean you have to be miserable the entire time you work.
20. Start the day off right with a morning routine before work
If you struggle to get to work in the morning, you’re not alone. It’s difficult to trudge back to work for another day to make someone else money or wait for retirement. But, you can still find ways to make that trudge a little less painful.
Since your goal is to develop a positive attitude in the workplace, you can start by devising a routine. This does not need to be complex or difficult. Instead, the more simplistic and manageable it is, the more likely you are to do it.
Identify the steps you already take in the morning and work on adding one thing you’d like to do. Think about skin care, exercise, reading, tea, or anything else that brings you joy. Introduce that into your morning routine and give yourself a gift on a daily basis.
21. Plan team-building activities to get to know your coworkers
There’s nothing better than working with people you love to hang out with. Try out a scavenger hunt or play some board games. Be careful to choose board games that will keep the nastiness and competitive spirits away from the office, but have fun.
Team building activities are a great way to get to know the people around you and remind you that you can look forward to being at work even if you hate your job. And, hopefully, you don’t hate your job.
22. Learn new skills and get excited about them
Positive attitudes are all about learning and growing. So, make sure you keep learning and growing. One of the best ways to make both of those happen at the same time is to learn a new skill. Choose something that already interests you and get excited.
Let yourself look forward to learning this new skill. Whether it pertains to your job, a possible side hustle, or an unexplored passion of yours, get invested in it. Put time and effort into it because you deserve to have a positive attitude in the workplace and outside of it.
23. Value your personal life as much as your career
Always value your personal life and career equally. It’s fine to want your career to grow and excel so that you can be financially stable and fulfilled.
But, you need to put the same energy into building stronger relationships in your personal life and coping with difficult situations as they come up.
Put energy into yourself whether you are productive that day or not. You deserve to feel good about yourself no matter how much progress you make towards a bigger and better career or even just a positive attitude for the day.