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"Today could be great, or awful, depending on your point of view."

These are our 'Calm snippets' from iceandlemon ltd. (www.iceandlemon.com) Please pass them on to your colleagues, friends, family and anyone else you feel might benefit. If you use any of the material in this publication, please point to iceandlemon as your source, and include our contact email - info@iceandlemon.com. And remember, there's no charge for this - only an investment of the few minutes of your time it takes to read it!

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Optimism is not something you're just born with - it's a frame of mind, a way of thinking, feeling and experiencing the world. And it's a way that anyone can learn with a bit of practice too.

"A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." [Harry Truman, 33rd President of the USA]

As usual I've been prompted by a couple of recent experiences to write what I'm about to write about simply because personally I feel we can't be reminded enough about it. So, I thought that for this Calm Snippet we'd revisit something that I talk about in one section of the 'Calm' stress-management sessions - Optimism and Pessimism.

We tend to think of extremes when presented with these two concepts, i.e. that optimists are all about everything being wonderful and great, care-free without worry and somewhat naive about reality, and that pessimists are consumed with projections of impending disaster, feelings of failure and worthlessness, and a generally doom-and-gloom-focused outlook. However, optimism and pessimism in their every-day form are more subtle but nonetheless powerful in their effects.

These effects, from what I've discovered in various scientific papers and articles, touch nearly all of our lives. Optimists are less affected by stress or depression, more successful in their careers and relationships, live longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives, recover from illness and other setbacks more rapidly, are luckier, and report being happier and more content generally. Pessimists on the other hand are more prone to long-term stress and depression, less successful in careers and relationships, die younger, take longer to recover from illness or other setbacks, feel more unlucky and are more dissatisfied and less content and happy with their lives.

The real kick in the research though is that, on average, optimists and pessimists are found in all strata of society - in reality the contexts in which they live their lives aren't that different. What makes the difference in both the emotional and physical senses is the individual's view of their lives - it's in their attitude and approach.

Helpfully, it turns out that there's a structure to optimism and pessimism, that is there's a 'recipe' for each of them and, not surprisingly, the ingredients for both come from the same psychological concepts. (And, like many models, it's three P's again!)

First of all there's the idea of PERMANENCE, i.e. whether we view events as permanent or temporary in time. Pessimists in general feel success to be temporary and failure as a more permanent and continuous feature of life, whereas optimists tend to view failure as temporary and success as a more permanent aspect of their lives.

Next comes PERVASIVENESS, i.e. whether we view an event or outcome as a universal characteristic of most or all things in our lives, or just specific to that one particular context. As you might already have guessed, pessimists tend to specify success and universalise failure, i.e. believe that 'failure is normal, success is the exception', whilst optimists take failure as specific and success and universal, and espouse that 'success is normal, failure is the exception'.

Finally there's PERSONALISATION, i.e. whether we see things as being caused by us and our choices, or by external circumstances or other people. However, this is a little more tricky when it comes to pessimism and optimism in that while optimists do personalise success, i.e. see themselves and their choices as the cause, they also personalise failure to a degree in that they accept responsibility for their part, knowing that they can learn from their mistakes and do something about it. Pessimists tend not to personalise success, i.e. they see it as being caused by someone or something else. Pessimists also personalise failure but with a different mode of thinking to optimists; they tend to accept their role in the failure, but not their responsibility for it - they are much more likely to have a 'victim' mentality.*

As you were reading through those perhaps you noticed how subtle the differences between optimism and pessimism can be at times - no huge extremes at all really. But it's this subtlety that can make all the difference when applied consistently, a bit like putting your pocket change into a jar at the end of every day and then, come the end of the year, finding you have £50 in there.

Now think honestly, really honestly, about some of the successes and failures you've had personally and, using the principles of Permanence, Pervasiveness and Personalisation as a guide, work out where you sit on the pessimism-optimism scale.

And next time we'll talk about how you transform a tendency towards pessimism into a more optimistic approach to life. Isn't that great! (or were you thinking, "I have to wait another month!?")

Soon,

 

If you'd like to know more about optimism & pessimism, or about iceandlemon and our approach then take a good look around our website at www.iceandlemon.com then call us on 0845 111 0360 or email us at info@iceandlemon.com now.

* If you're familiar with NLP, you'll already be making the link between these three and the overall broader concept of CAUSE vs. EFFECT. This, in essence, says that everyone of us has a choice to exist at the CAUSE of our lives and the events we're involved in, or at the EFFECT of those events and life in general. At EFFECT we push responsibility away from us to other people or to circumstance to explain why our lives are the way they are now, and in so doing we rob ourselves of power. At CAUSE we accept responsibility for own actions and choices and for their consequences - at CAUSE we have the power.

There's also a valid point about optimists holding a broader definition of 'success' than pessimists. This means that when it comes to the middle-ground between an out-and-out success and a definite failure, optimists tend to focus on what went well, and label an event as a 'moderate success' whilst pessimists are more likely to focus on what didn't go as planned and label it as a 'moderate failure'.

© iceandlemon ltd. 2005

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