How to Attract Success with a Positive Attitude

Movies like The Secret have popularized the Law of Attraction and the power of intent, but does a positive attitude really change the opportunities for success that you encounter in your everyday life?

Absolutely! While you might be flooded with the "brick to the head" types of rewards that The Secret suggests (like focusing yoru intent on a picture of a bicycle, and having it "magically" appear in your driveway), a positive attitude will have a profound effect on your personal and professional success.

Here are three ways that adopting and maintaining a positive attitude will create more opportunities than you ever thought possible:

1) A positive attitude will help you recognize opportunities as they appear in your life. It's important to understand that all sorts of opportunities surround you every day, but most of them pass by unnoticed.

The ones that we do notice are the ones that are in alignment with our attitudes. There's no "magic" to it, really... just a matter of focus. If you maintain a positive attitude, you will naturally notice people, opportunities, and circumstances that have the potential to positively effect your life. Conversely, if you adopt a negative attitude, the only circumstances and people you will notice are negative ones. Either way, those things that are not in alignment with our attitudes are "filtered out" by our minds.

To use a rather mundane example - have you ever been car shopping, and thinking of buying a particular model (for this example, let's say a Honda Accord)? Chances are, it probably didn't take long before you started seeing Accords everywhere. You noticed them in traffic, you saw them in parking lots, you encountered advertisements for Accords... suddenly they seemed to be everywhere you looked!

Now, did a swarm of Honda Accords really start placing themselves where you would see them? Of course not! They were there all along, but you just started noticing them when your mind was focused on the possibility of purchasing an Accord.

People, opportunities, and circumstances work in much the same way. When you adopt a positive attitude, you'll start noticing positive opportunities and people. They were there all along, but you didn't see them until you changed your mental focus. If you did see them, you probably didn't notice the potential they had to positively effect your life.

2) A positive attitude attracts positive people. We naturally gravitate toward people who exude happy, positive vibes. Given the choice, would you rather spend the day with someone who saw the world as being full of possibiliities, or with someone who moped around and blamed everyone and everything around them for their failures and unhappiness?

Attracting the company of positive people will open up even more opportunities for success. The people who gravitate to you will be open to helping you - making a contact for you, inviting you to an enriching event, lending their efforts to help you achieve your goals - simply because you have lifted their spirits with your positive energy!

3) A positive attitude will give you more energy and allow you to accomplish more. Worry, anger, self-pity, and other negative emotions are HUGE energy drains - how easy is it to get out of bed in the morning and attend to the activities that will contribute to your success, when you're feeling sorry for yourself and dwelling on all of the negative aspects of your life?

A positive attitude makes the difference between dragging yourself out of bed, even more tired than when you went to bed, and springing out of bed before the alarm goes off, ready to meet the opportunities each day has to offer.

The extra energy you get from maintaining a positive attitude lets you work more efficiently, take on new activities, and create the circumstances for your own success. And when it's time to turn in for the night, you'll feel even better knowing that every action you took throughout the day contributed to that success.

Ready to create your own proof? Then try this simple exercise:

Decide for one day that you're going to maintain a positive attitude - no matter what. You don't have to worry about "how" - simply making the committed decision to spend one day with a positive mental focus will take care of the "how".

When negative thoughts arise (and they will), acknowledge them and let them go. Don't judge them - this will only serve to facilitate further negative thinking, because you'll mentally "beat yourself up" for having the negative thoughts in the first place. Instead, view them as if you're watching a television commercial, or looking at a billboard. This helps you emotionally separate from your negative thoughts, so you can easily let them go. Doing this only leaves room in your day for positive thoughts.

Your day doesn't have to be perfectly positive - in fact, even the most positive people still encounter negative emotions and thought patterns - but making the mental commitment to maintain a positive focus will place you far ahead of people who allow themselves to constantly be mired in negative thinking.