This goes hand-in-hand with confidence; together, they pack a one-two punch that can either win you the title or knock out your chances. So stop the pity party – stop it right now! It’s not doing you any good, is it? Repeat after me, and make this your mantra: a negative attitude produces negative results. A negative attitude is a habit you’ve gotten into, and it’s going to take a little bit of effort to break it. Once you do, I guarantee that new dating doors will be opened.
In order to change your attitude, you have to give up your emotional baggage. If you’re still bitter over a traumatic breakup or divorce, you can forget about attracting anyone into your life. Even if you do manage to, you’ll shortly run them off with your tendency to unfairly take out your frustrations from past relationships on them. In her article, “An Attitude of Gratitude,” author Margot Carmichael Lester says, "If you keep looking at your past from a perspective of regret and wanting - of feeling like you never got your due - you're not taking responsibility for your own role in the outcome. Taking the victim position on your past or otherwise disconnecting yourself from your experience of it gets you nothing but more bad results. As they say, 'Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.'"
Turn that bitterness around! Instead of harboring resentments about your old relationships, examine them to see what you’ve learned. Then – here’s a switch – be grateful that you had the relationship, and that you got burned. The trauma you’ve experienced has most likely taught you a valuable lesson, whatever that might be. It’s up to you to recognize what it is. Once you do, you can consider yourself lucky that because of that lesson, you’re not doomed to re-live it with a subsequent relationship. Whatever it was that sabotaged your previous relationship, now you can avoid it and move ahead instead of dwelling on it – picking at an old wound, so to speak. That’s one hurdle cleared!
Next, try as hard as you can to clear your mind of negative thoughts about dating. Ditch the things you’ve been saying to yourself about how there’s no one out there for you, that you’ve run the dating gamut, that you’re doomed to be an old maid. That kind of negative self-talk only serves to make you desperate, and potential mates tend to run – not walk – to steer clear of desperate people. So replace those thoughts with, “There is someone out there who is perfect for me! I could very well meet that person today!” Even if you don’t necessarily believe it, keep saying it – eventually it will start to sound more and more true to you.