The Optimism Imperative: Why Seasoned Professionals Need a Positive Outlook in Uncertain Times
Amid constant change and upheaval, where can we anchor our hope? How can we find optimism and nourish it? And why should we be doing so intentionally? Read on for some keys on how optimism works.
Admittedly, there are times in history and times in our lives when optimism is not so easy to muster. When more people roll their eyes when I look, as I tend to do, for the silver lining. Oscar Wilde wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” I clearly stand among the latter. What about you? On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the gutter and 10 being the stars, where is your energy and focus going?
How can we connect with optimism more often? Where the heck is it? And why should we?
What Is Optimism?
Optimism is defined as the quality of being full of hope and emphasizing the good in a situation. It’s an inclination to anticipate the best possible outcome. Some describe it as a belief, others as the way we explain what happens to us. Some consider “dispositional optimism” to be “rational,” while others say that “positive illusions” — characterized as “systematic small distortions of reality that make things appear better than they are”—are “irrational.”
However you define it, Thomas Friedman said aptly, “Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.” And historian Howard Zinn reminded us that, “An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”
Optimism is all about how we see the future. In fact, it starts with this incredible capability to move back and forth through space and time in our mind that is so critical for survival.
Optimism Bias
The thing is, humans appear more hardwired to be optimistic than not. The majority of us tend to overestimate the likelihood of experiencing positive events and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events. It’s a cognitive biais. So while we may be pessimistic about the world around us, we believe we have some superpower protecting us, as individuals, and bestow particularly incredible powers upon our offspring.
Admit it.
Chances are you are among the optimists—according to researcher Tali Sharot, about 80% of the population display this optimism bias, and it transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality and age.
How can this be, in the face of all the proof to the contrary? Apparently, when it comes to anticipating our future, our delightfully selective brain updates our beliefs more in response to positive information than in response to negative information. We tend to ignore undesirable information.
We might actually need this to survive at all. According to Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, the awareness of our future mortality on its own and the ensuing despair would be enough to impede survival efforts if we didn’t also have a hint of irrational optimism on board, allowing us to consistently imagine a bright future.
Is this a bad thing? Without positive expectations of the future, mild depression and anxiety set in, suggesting that optimism is vital to mental health. Optimism enhances wellbeing, gives us hope, increases explorative behavior and innovation, decreases stress, possibly playing a key role in our ability to do anything at all. Optimism seems to give us a feeling of having more agency, of being at least partly responsible when life is going well.
And optimists are, statistically:
healthier
more successful
more persistent
happier
They live longer, sleep better, and have better relationships.
According to Sharot, “On balance, it seems that the benefits of unrealistic optimism may have outweighed the downfalls.”
My invitation to own that innate optimism and amplify it. As the Dalai Lama suggests, “Choose to be optimistic. It feels better.”
Pessimism and Negativity Bias
The thing is, as complex beings, we also have a negativity bias. We tend to give more importance to negative experiences from our past than to positive or neutral ones. This is about survival. Negative thoughts and feelings carve their way into long-term memory more easily than positive ones because they can provide immediate survival benefits.
So if we want to be more optimistic, we have mitigate the onslaught of negative stuff coming at us all the time.
I do this in two ways:
I have a huge protective bubble and highly developed filters, so news of the world streams in a controlled manner rather than inundating my every morning as the start of my day.
I also apply the 3-to1 positivity ratio: when I catch myself sucked up thinking or feeling something negative, I find three positive things to interrupt the formation of negative memories. Studies have shown it takes more positive to outweigh the negative.
Here’s an approach when you’ve slipped into the depths of doom, despair and pessimism:
Identify the situation that is triggering the negative thoughts and pessimism. Write it down.
Assess how you are feeling in the moment, identifying anything negative about that situation. Write it down.
Look at the evidence to either support or refute the negative thoughts and feelings.
Focus on the objective facts, and replace each automatic negative thoughts with three positive, realistic ones.
Optimism and Long-term Happiness
We’ve seen that we are unrealistically positive about the future and unrealistically negative about the past. In addition, we have an incredible capacity to bounce back and find well-being and happiness. Hedonic adaptation is when we adapt to whatever happens and reset our “happiness set point.” This means our longterm happiness is not significantly affected by impacting events. Nor by the choices we make. Making a tough decision can be difficult, but once you make up your mind, you view the choice you made as better than you did before, you conclude that the other option was not so great after all. We are constantly reevaluating what happens to us to ease the tension that arises between what we want and we we got.
This is a fabulous capacity, which means we really can just relax.
Where To Find Optimism and How To Develop It
When our optimism wavers, fortunately, it can be trained like a muscle. Apparently, only about 25% of our optimism stems from our genetics, and the rest comes from our environment and, mostly, from choice.
Creating an environment conducive to optimism makes it easier to make that choice. Simply put, this means:
Reducing stress levels, since stress focuses our attention on threats.
Turning off the news, because the latter is designed to feed into a negativity bias.
Radical self-care, because if we don’t get the basics right, our physiology will be off and it will be harder to control our emotional states. When we are sleep deprived, hypoglycemic, and stressed out ability to manage our feelings nose dives.
Optimism and Resilience
In the end, optimism is not about denying or avoiding negative events, but about cultivating a sense of empowerment to better cope with challenges. Ambrose Bierce defined optimism as “the doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including the ugly.”
There are always two sides. The more we welcome the whole experience, really feel it, fully aware, the more we can find that space of choice where we decide to perceive the best possible outcome. Mindfulness is a powerful tool to cultivate a choice of response rather than reaction.
And research has show that coloring our sunny disposition with realism, and even feeling a bit of pessimism, may make us more resilient and better able to achieve our goals.
It can help to disconnect happiness from achievement, to focus on the journey rather than the outcome.
Imagining the Future
Because optimism involves our views about the future, psychologists suggest that taking the time to think about good things that might happen in the future can increase our optimism. In particular, studies have shown that a simple exercise can increase levels of optimism:
Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Write down what you imagined.
The War for Optimism
Jamil Zaki, from the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and author of The War for Kindness, speaks about kind systems, how we as a herd species are deeply affected by others, how when we notice how other people are acting kindly, we want to do so ourselves.
What if we apply this same idea to optimism. What will happen if we incentivise, highlight and amplify optimistic behaviours?
Noam Chomsky wrote, “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.”
So, what is it that you will do now?