How to Be an Optimist

I was raised by a brilliant optimist. My mom has this superpower where she can take the most boring, mundane, and even frustrating circumstances and make them fun or memorable. She'd turn a playground into an obstacle course or homework into a game. She can turn your worst days around in a few minutes. She regularly gives people the benefit of the doubt (even those who might not deserve it). My mom is genuinely one of the most positive people I know and is constantly working to make things better in life.

Her optimism has been one of the greatest gifts to me as a coach, manager, and, frankly, a human being. 

Optimists can be perceived as naïve. The world is a cold, dark place. We're told to pull our heads out of the sand and take off the rose-tinted glasses. What's more, there's some evidence that the pessimists are "right" more often than optimists. They'll more often accurately predict adverse events. They see recessions, break-ups, and epidemics coming before the rest of us.

The problem with pessimists is that they often add their two cents from the sideline. They're rarely in the arena, and although they may be "right" more often, they're never right where it counts.

Research shows that optimists are:

• Less likely to suffer from depression and anxiety
• More likely to earn higher grades and higher salaries
• Likelier to stay healthier throughout middle age and live longer than pessimists.
• More satisfied with their marriages, luckier, and happier
• Better salespeople in nearly every industry – real estate, car sales, banking, insurance agents, door-to-door knife set salesmen -- optimists regularly outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent
• Have more friends and fulfilling relationships

Pessimists spend their time making lists of why things won't work. And when you have 57 reasons for why things will go wrong, it doesn't exactly inspire you to get out of bed and give it a try. Because optimists are in the game, they get the payoffs. 

How to Become an Optimist

Optimism is simply the belief that you have the power to change things. The Godfather of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, studied a concept he called "Explanatory Styles," which simply means how we choose to explain events to ourselves. Seligman found that negative events don't play favorites – they equally come for us all.

Optimists and pessimists alike get the pleasure of dealing with flat tires, break-ups, and bad days at the office. The difference lies in how they explain those events to themselves, and these explanations have a critical impact on our happiness, performance, and life satisfaction.

For example, imagine you're having one of those tough weeks at work. You've got too much on your plate. You're stressed and overwhelmed and just spilled coffee all over your laptop. Friday's here, and there's no way you'll be able to get everything done. How would you explain this scenario to a friend as to why you couldn't get your work done? 

Your answer to this question can reveal a lot about your psychology. Seligman found that three factors separate how optimists explain events from pessimists. You can remember these via the "3Ps of Pessimism" -- Permanence, Pervasive, Personalized. 

Optimists tend to explain events as temporary (vs. permanent), specific (vs. pervasive), and common (vs. personal to them).

Here's how each might show up in the example above: 

Permanent: 

• Optimist: "Next week is a new day." 
• Pessimist: "This is my life now." 

Pervasive 

• Optimist: "Whew, tough week at the office. Looking forward to happy hour with Billy and Bobby, though!" 
• Pessimist: "My entire life sucks." 

Personalized: 

• Optimist: "Everybody has weeks like this. It's a part of the experience." 
• Pessimist: "My boss hates me." 

These 3Ps manifest in all of our everyday language. The journalist Hester Lacey has interviewed hundreds of incredibly creative and successful people over her career, and she asks every one of them, "What has been your greatest disappointment?" 

And every time, these remarkable people answer with something along the lines of "Well, I don't really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, 'Well  okay, that didn't go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.'"

It reminds me of Deion Sanders, AKA Coach Prime, the coach of the Colorado Buffaloes football team, who told his team "I don't have bad days". He has bad moments but not bad days.

I've seen Tony Robbins say something similar.  

What appears to just be dudes talking shit to the pessimist is optimism at work. These guys have trained themselves to explain the events of life as temporary, specific, and general, and it allows them to perform at higher levels.

My mom is a brilliant optimist, and her life is richer because of it. She's freshly retired from a successful career, is deeply loved, surrounded by great friends, is healthier than many of her peers, and has lived a full life.  

We can all take a lesson from her playbook. Optimists aren't naïve. They don't ignore reality. They're just better storytellers, and the stories they tell themselves when tough times inevitably come make for far better lives.