It always goes back to the classic cliché: Is the glass half-empty or half-full? This answer to this simple (and admittedly over-used) question is actually quite revealing about how you live your life. Are people always out to get you? Do you have a lot of "bad days"? Do you find that things are never your fault, they just happen to you? These could be signs that you're a "half-empty" kind of person.

Dr. Jane Bluestein is a motivational speaker and educator who focuses her research on relationships, motivation and empowerment. Below is a short, but important list of ways you can live a more optimistic life taken from Bluestein's book on effective parenting.

15 Ways to Live Optimistically

By Jane Bluestein

1.    Expect the best for yourself and others.

2.    Set goals for yourself and work toward them. Help your children set goals and identify ways to reach them.

3.    Keep a clear, detailed picture of your goal in your mind.

4.    Focus on what you want, rather than on avoiding what you don't want.

5.    Respect people's dreams, even if they seem impossible.

6.    Practice persistence.

7.    Watch how often you express negative or pessimistic thoughts, or have negative expectations. (For example, do you say something like, "It figures!" when something bad happens?)

8.    Look for the good that can come out of bad experiences. Remember that disappointments often precede something even better than you originally expected.

9.    Develop a picture of the world (and your life) as a place of infinite, positive possibilities, even better than you can imagine.

10.    Fight fear with faith.

11.    Develop "an attitude of gratitude."

12.    Keep your thoughts positive. Notice and acknowledge when you slip into fear, doubt and negativity. Make a deliberate effort to switch to more positive feelings and thoughts.

13.    Minimize the amount of time you spend with negative or pessimistic people or, if possible, avoid them altogether.

14.    Make a deliberate effort to eliminate doubt and cynicism. They really don't protect you from much of anything. (Try, "Well, why not?" instead.) Minimize your exposure to negative or pessimistic information, news and literature. Seek out positive, uplifting resources and read or listen to them regularly.

15.    Understand that pessimism, negativity and "scarcity thinking" are all learned traits. They can be unlearned and replaced with more constructive alternatives.

 (c) 1999, Jane Bluestein, Ph.D., Instructional Support Services, Inc.

Based on similar material in The Parent's Little Book of Lists: Do's & Don'ts of Effective Parenting, by Jane Bluestein, Ph.D. (Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, FL).

Optimistic Quotes

Sometimes, all it takes are a few words of encouragement to completely turn your attitude around. The quotes below are from some the most influential people in politics and entertainment who endured great hardships to achieve enormous accomplishments. Let their optimism inspire you.

"If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation."

--Helen Keller

"We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible."

--Vince Lombardi

"I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter."

--Walt Disney

"Life is too short to spend your precious time trying to convince a person who wants to live in gloom and doom otherwise. Give lifting that person your best shot, but don't hang around long enough for his or her bad attitude to pull you down. Instead, surround yourself with optimistic people."

--Zig Ziglar

"A positive attitude is important, but it is only part of the story. Understanding how to surmount pain, doubt, and failure is a vital component in winning the game of life."

--Chin-Ning Chu

"Whether you think you can or think you can't -- you are right."

--Henry Ford

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door--or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present."

--Joan Rivers

"If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic."

--Hazel Henderson

"In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when they are wrong they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eye-open optimism pays."

--David Landes (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor)

"The incontestable truth is that America has been built up by optimists, not by pessimists, but by men possessing courage, confidence in the nation's destiny, by men willing to adventure, to shoulder risks terrifying to the timid."

--B. C. Forbes

"One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn' t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself."

--Lucille Ball

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson