Here’s a quick quiz question for you. What controls your attitude?

Here are a few clues for you. It has nothing to do with your clothing selection, haircut, choice of automobiles, bank account balance, or whether your house is cleaned up and orderly. Those kind of externalities may have an occasional, temporary impact on your outlook toward life, but they certainly don’t control it.

The correct answer is that you control the way you feel.

That’s tough for some people to swallow. That’s probably because accepting the premise that you are the boss of your own disposition creates a personal responsibility for happiness. Sometimes, it’s just easier to lay everything at the feet of the rest of the world! Nonetheless, we really are in charge of how we see the world. We get to make that decision–whether we opt for joy or sorrow. It’s our call to make.

And that leads us right into a follow up quiz question (you didn’t know this article was going to be a test, did you?). How can we transform the way we feel?

Well, we already know better than to try to find that answer in retail stores or bank vaults. If we can to alter our feelings, we’ll need to start looking inward instead of outward. And when you do that, you begin to realize that part of the solution may be to start talking to yourself a little more often.

No, you don’t need to run around town editorializing on everything you see to yourself. You don’t need to invent a new imaginary friend, either. You do, however, need to make a conscious effort to control and alter your self talk in order to build a better attitude.

All of us spend our waking hours involved in an ongoing internal conversation with ourselves. When that conversation involves a great deal of self-criticism (or in more extreme cases, self-loathing) it’s hard to develop a rich, positive outlook.

However, if we can transform our self talk by intentionally cheating ourselves to deal in positivity instead of negativity, it’s possible to produce an attitude change. That’s one reason why so many people are finding a new perspective on life by properly utilizing positive affirmations. They’re taking control of their self talk with some great results.