Optimism: Your Special Sauce

Think you’re in danger – you feel anxiety.

Think you’re being treated unfairly — you feel anger, sadness or despair.

Choose to be optimistic & change your life.

Optimism comes from how you process what’s happening to you or how you think about it. 

Optimism on Over-Drive

Before exploring the dangers of over-drive, I want to point out that any strength when over or under used can become a liability. The great news is that when you become more self-aware, you’ll become familiar with what will trigger either reaction. You’ll also be more attuned to when you’re in the sweet spot of the strength. Additionally, if you’re a pessimist by nature and you don’t want to adopt an optimistic mindset, you, too, can do the work to ensure you’re not over using that “strength”. Moreover, I do think a pessimistic mindset can be a strength when applied in proportion to the circumstances. Living as a pessimist though is more difficult on your health and well-being. That will become clear when I speak to the benefits of optimism below.

TWO DANGERS of OVER-DRIVE

While there are more than two, I decided to focus on these just to give you a taste of how a little too much of a good thing can spoil the intended impact. Frankly, this is commonly true. Living a self-aware and purposeful life helps you remain vigilant and more capable of adjusting to any situation.

The Silencing of a CAN-DO Attitude

“The good thing about optimists is that they’re positive and hopeful, and you tend to need heavy doses of that in senior leadership because sometimes it can be difficult to even get out of bed in the morning and say, ‘I believe we can make this work’. But what happens with optimists is they’re often so focused on what’s possible, and so convinced that the team is going to be able to make something work, that they don’t see the messy process of getting there.” –  Liz Wiseman Multipliers: How The Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter

The danger in this can-do optimism appears in a few different forms. Perhaps you or members of your team or your stakeholders hit a wall with a particular part of the plan. Feeling like you’ve failed others, you choose to hide the problem, therefore jeopardizing the entire project. What if the message received by a can-do approach is that, to be accepted, you need to position an extreme problem in softer ways, so you communicate it, but minimize it’s potential impact. Finally, and possibly most damaging over all, the impact when you lose the ability to be constructively self-critical and, consequently, are unable to anticipate or respond to serious challenges.

Diminishing the Effort Required

Sometimes an optimistic attitude produces an unwillingness to acknowledge the effort required to create the best outcomes. There are times when by simply being clear about what it will take to accomplish something will help you buckle down and do the work to accomplish it.

“Life is difficult. …once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer so difficult.” M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

When I first read M. Scott Peck’s very positive book in the 80’s, to help me navigate a very male dominated and often inhospitable work environment, this opening sentence stood out to me. I’ve quoted it, sometimes paraphrased it, often when delivering key-notes or workshops. The thing is, when you can accept that things are difficult and not always try to paste a sunny perspective on it, it does become less daunting. Later in the first chapter of the section of the book Peck entitles “discipline”, he suggests that it’s in the meeting and solving of life’s problems that we find meaning. Meaning is not found in glossing over the problems, but in our willingness to roll up our sleeves and solve them. Facing and acknowledging the effort required can be hard and it fits into the fierce optimism I’m advancing.

Two Ways to Mitigate the Impact of Over-Drive

In the podcast episode I offer three and you’ll notice I acknowledge the link between the third and first so I’ve combined them here. Peck, as noted above, challenged me in the early part of my career not to get too comfortable. His book not only helped me be optimistic, it helped me view problems in a constructive way. How you think about them matters! Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct”. This can be taken too far. It was reading Dr. Schüssler Fiorenza (a Harvard Theologian) in the 90’s that informed my concern that Franklin’s point didn’t fit every situation and failed to balance the importance of self-compassion in a world of inequity. Regardless, these two ideas may help you build your own mitigation strategy. Being disciplined, and perhaps fierce, in your optimism is useful.

1. Build a Process

Building and honing a specific thinking process to ensure your optimism is not clouding your judgment is wise. Some of my clients create one similar to an environmental scan. Some of them use apps or other tools to self evaluate and welcome input from others. Other clients have enjoyed adapting tools like Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats to meet their needs. Essentially de Bono’s model, often referred to as lateral thinking, can be used as a way to get unstuck or to unlock limiting thinking patterns. Regardless of the process you choose to use, ensure it’s one that pushes you past your comfort zone, shaking up your thinking patterns and apply it systematically over time.

2. Practice Reflection

To mitigate the impact of optimism on over-drive you essentially need to stretch your thinking. While a process as described above is invaluable, you may be more inclined to use more of a mindfulness approach. In this mitigation approach you will develop a noticing or observation frame. You may incorporate meditation or journaling or thinking groups. This is also a great practice in which to incorporate a coach to hold space for you or perhaps a Master Mind of sorts. The idea here is to push the boundaries of your thinking. We all become complacent in time and our thinking patterns are often the first victims of this tendency.

Fierce Optimism

Fierce optimism is the ability to use optimism as your secret sauce or weapon to make your way through the most difficult or important challenges of your life. In my BYI system, optimism is a key component in a variety of the concepts. In fact, building skills that relate to optimism is critical to realizing one of the three significant benefits of the system: resilience.

This week’s newsletter expands on a story of how my family physician taught me this lesson when I was in my 20’s. It may have taken me a few more experiences with it for the lesson to take hold but the lesson was powerful. Just the same, being able to press forward and advocate powerfully for your needs, ideas and perspective is a key element of cultivating optimism.

The Benefits of Optimism

Optimism may be a soft skill. It carries a lot of benefits for increasing performance and improving your health, both physically and mentally even when it hasn’t reached the fierce type of optimism. Below I outline three benefits and each of these could be expanded to reveal so many more.

1. Persistence – generate more self reliance and, as a result, resilience will expand.
2. Improved performance – whether measured by better grades or the improved ability to apply learning over time, there’s plenty of research demonstrating how optimism supports improved outcomes.
3. Longer, healthier lives – one way to describe this is that when catecholamines are low, as in depression, endorphins go up. The immune system detects this and turns itself down. (Selgman, Learned Optimism) Optimism will improve your sleep and the functioning of your physical body and your mental state.

Three Ways to Build Up Fierce Optimism

Of course, there are more than three methods or tools to enhance your ability to access optimism. I’m choosing to highlight three that I’ve talked about before: disputations, explanatory styles and befriending your inner critic.  In my BYI system though I incorporate a few neuro-leadership models I’ve learned over the years and a couple of my own including my SOB exercise. The trick to making these work for you is to pick one and work on it until it becomes part of your thinking or processing habits. Of course in time you can learn many and then pick and choose what is best for the situation.

Disputations

You may have heard my podcast or read my posts on disputations. It is one of the “Ds” in the ABCD model that I teach my clients both in coaching work and in my BYI System workshops. Given you can access the posts through the blog linked earlier, I will focus here specifically on 4 things you can do to break the negative cycle. These all relate to learning and applying disputations. Learn to:

1. notice your automatic thoughts.
2. dispute (using the specific guidance outlined in my posts on disputations) the automatic or negative thought patterns by marshaling contrary evidence.
3. explain what’s happening to you differently; expand your perspective.
4. distract yourself from unhelpful thinking patterns.

Explanatory Styles

The explanatory style is easy to explain and even easier to start noticing if you are willing to put in the energy. It’s not so easy to change. So start with learning it here and then start noticing – #1 in the list above. You may recall the Max Planck quote that is my motto: “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” While I welcome you reaching out when you are ready to do the hard work of shifting your explanatory style, by simply starting to notice your style, according to Planck, you will realize some change.

There are three elements that help you assess whether you have an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style. It may be helpful to note that “optimism is not simply the absence of pessimism”. (Peterson, 2006) The three are outlined below along with a question to prompt your thinking and an example of each.

1. Permanence – When bad things happen to you, how permanent is your explanation of it? “THIS is just the way things are in my life. I guess it’s my destiny.”
2. Pervasiveness – How all encompassing is the explanation you give when bad things happen to you? “THIS ALWAYS happens no matter where I go or what I do.”
3. Personal – How much do you see what happens to you as personal to you? “Of course, I’m the one who experiences this.”

Do the same rules apply to the good things?

Befriend Your IC

Disputations help you talk back to your inner critic

I’ve just completed a experiential exercise you can use to explore your Inner Critic (IC). Open the link as a PDF for the best view. Befriending your IC may be one of the best ways to maintain a constructive and optimistic mindset. Your Inner Critic has been and will be with you for your entire life. Why not make it a friend. Learn to hear its judgments and conclusions differently as a result. BE CAREFUL not to start accepting what it says as truth though. Until you tame it and make it a friendly beast, it can tear you down and hold you small.

When you have befriended it you may still find you need to monitor your explanatory style and use disputations to support the relationship. I invite you to use this exercise I’ve created and I welcome your feedback. Welcoming more feedback is the gift of being optimistic. Once you’ve learned to befriend your IC, you will be very skilled at managing all judgments and feedback will be more useful.

Learned Helplessness

Learning about and being able to recognize when I might fall into Learned helplessness has been very useful. The learned helplessness model (Overmier & Seligman, 1967) definitely pre-dated and possibly prompted the beginning of what we now call positive psychology. Understanding how it shows up in your life may be essential to sustaining your resilience or at least your persistence. I will not attempt to do it full justice in this post but plan to return to it in a future post. Today I’ll share a personal story that helped me understand how I avoided getting stuck in its clutches as a teenager when so many, especially girls, are susceptible.

The Story

Second born of four daughters I tended to hang out a lot as a child with my father. If you are a father of daughters or a daughter you may relate to this. At about 13 years old, I became interested in boys. It always seemed awkward to talk to my dad about that, at least in the early years and I felt us being pulled apart as I went further into adolescence.

One Saturday I was going biking with a few kids, including boys. The chain on my bike was acting up and I noticed my dad was doing work on his car in the garage so I sheepishly approached him and asked him to fix my chain. I still remember him rolling out from under the car and saying, “Zandy (that’s what he called me) you know full well how to fix your chain. You don’t need me to baby you.” My feelings were hurt, but he was right. Yes I just wanted to connect BUT when you learn to connect by playing helpless it can become a pattern. I never played helpless again and years later I thanked my dad for that moment. Did you learn to play helpless and did it eventually impact how you see and think about yourself?

How We Can Walk together…

Is finding purpose and meaning in your life and in your career important to you?

Are you ready to unpack the tough stuff so you can find your north star?

Is your career all that you want it to be and more? If you answered yes to this last one, I’m so happy for you. Don’t you want that for everyone you know? THEN, pass on my message to everyone in your network in case it resonates for them.

Want to learn to #unpack4impact? Willing to do the work to search for meaning?

Once you have the skills to unpack the emotions and barriers and triggers and mindset challenges with the skills in my system, you’ll begin to see the impact in your career and you’ll find what matters most to you. Join me…

My goal is to make my system accessible and affordable. There are many ways you can engage with me….here are THREE to get started, without spending a dime.

• REGISTER for an ASK ROX RoundTable… TWO 50 minute engagements on ZOOM per month limited to 12 participants in each. 
• BOOK  a complimentary exploratory conversation 15-20 minutes.
• SUBSCRIBE to my mailing list from  my home page, receive an interactive exercise helping you cope with stress, and a weekly reflection.

Of course I’d love to work with you, your team or organization so…

• Book me to speak at your conference or to a group in your organization. My workshops on building resilience, improving relationships, and increasing performance are popular.