The Top 10 Things You Should Know About Optimism

Originally Submitted on 9/3/2001.

1. Optimism is learned.

If it's learned, it can be changed! If you don't feel you're optimistic and would like to be, put yourself around someone who is and observe and listen, or work with a coach.

2. People who are optimistic have learned to modulate their inner states.

According to Dr. Susan Vaughan, people who are optimistic can tolerate extremes of both pleasure and sadness without getting stuck. They know they'll bounce back, so they do. They're resilient.

3. Optimists are looking at life through a special filter!

Remember the song about the cock-eyed optimist? The rose-colored glasses? The way we experience the external world is a direct reflection of our feelings. Our emotions, and the thoughts that accmpany them, influence how we see and interpret the people, places and events of the present, past and future. What you see is what you get!

4. Pessimists are more often right, but optimists accomplish more.

This is kind of like "would you rather be right, or in relationship?" Being "right" has its downside.

5. Optimism and pessimism rule.

In mood congruence studies, if researchers induced sadness in a person and then tried to teach them happy and sad words, the subject learned the sad words more effectively. Hostile people will pick out the angry pictures from a spread. Anxious people will remember anxious events from childhood. Depressed people will zero in on distressing headlines in the newspaper. Whether you're optimistic or pessimistic, it will be a force field that influences your whole life.

6. Optimists view bad events as transitory and random.

Optimists view bad events as passing things that just happened as a fluke, that had nothing to do with them, and probably will never happen again. Pessimists, on the other hand, see bad events as permanent, pervasive, specific to them, and bound to recur. And the converse is true about good events.

7. Being optimistic alone isn't enough but it's like the leavening in the bread.

You need the flour, water, shortening and salt, but look what the yeast does! Dr. Reuven Bar-On considers it the facilitator of all the other emotional intelligence competencies. Like a catalyst, it provokes or speeds significant change or action.

8. Life is better for optimists.

According to Dr. Martin Seligman's extensive research on optimism, optimists are resistant to depression, likely to achieve their potential, persistent in the face of adversity, enjoy better health than pessimists, and get the maximum pleasure out of their successes because they think they caused them and that they'll have more of them. Which should make them all the more optimistic, right?

9. The essence of optimism isn't the happy side.

The essence of optimism is avoiding the downward spiral into negative thoughts and feelings. Optimists do something pleasurable after a distressing event to distract themselves from it. They start dating again immediately after a breakup or divorce. They go out and celebrate the end of the school term after they flunk a final. They don't let one bad apple spoil the bunch. They don't punish themselves. They don't dwell.

10. Optimism is somewhat sustained by a kind of benign illusion about things.

A case in point would be Mozart's incredible optimism and exuberant self-confidence. By the end of his life, which was short, when he suffered the deaths of four children, serious illnesses and repeated professional and financial disasters, a psychological analysis of his correspondence done by Professor Steptoe of St. George's Hospital Medical School showed that his optimism actually rose.

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