Optimism

There is a common misperception that optimism is a personality trait.  What is true is that pessimism and optimism are both thinking styles.  Adopting an optimistic thinking style can be very beneficial.  People with more optimism experience less distress, depression, anxiety and adapt better to negative events.  They also have higher psychological and physical well-being.  This is because optimists tend to exert more continuous effort, tend to not give up, learn from negative experiences and be more productive in the workplace.  It is especially important for sales positions.

Pessimism is challenging because it produces inertia, promotes depression, feels subjectively bad and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because pessimists tend not to persist in the face of challenges.

So how do you increase optimism?  You incorporate successful thinking patterns around personalization, permanence and pervasiveness for success and failure.  When you encounter success, attribute it to your great qualities (stable, internal traits) such as character strengths, view this success as permanent and long-lasting and remind yourself that you have had lots of successes in many areas of your life.  When you encounter failure, attribute this failure to external events (circumstances), remind yourself that this is temporary (failure doesn’t last forever) and just in this one specific instance.

You don’t want to attribute your successes to luck and your failures to your personal qualities.  You don’t want to view your success as temporary and your failures as constant.  You also don’t want to have failure and then point to all of the other things not going for you in other areas of your life.  Optimism is also not an opportunity to pass the buck.  You definitely want to reflect on what you could have done better (study harder, be more organized, get more experience) but not attribute it to lack of intelligence, inability to get things done or viewing yourself as lacking in some innate quality.  Make a plan to change the circumstances.

What can you do to increase your optimistic thinking style?  Let me know in the comments!

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