The Effective Optimist
Perspective Changes to Set Yourself up for Success or Disappointment
Optimism can loosely be described as choosing to see the positive despite the variance in life’s situations. In my experiences growing up with gen z, it seems as though people can be classified as one of two extremes. Either enthusiastic — optimists, or martyred pessimists. Many internal and external influences shape our society’s methods of dealing with adversity. However, that is a much broader topic with many fluctuating variables, which would be better served as a separate post.
The purpose of this article is to explain how to be effectively optimistic. To be effectively optimistic is not to look at every single situation and claim it as good, especially when it’s not. The individual can rarely disregard their feelings and selectively choose how to perceive all that happens to them. To put it quite frankly, sometimes, life sucks. Family dynamics, tragedy, accidents, academics, business, and relationships can all be the cause of demise in our lifetimes. It also seems like when one thing goes wrong, the rest follow like the first domino being knocked over and causing the rest to tumble. As the popular saying goes, “when it rains, it pours.”
Life has a spectacular way of compounding events so that it tests our inner wills, desires, faith, and mental strength. With that being said, no matter what happens to us, we can implement a process that helps us deal with life’s adversities. There are systems and thought processes that you can use to help you be your best self in the face of all that troubles you: and once you learn and implement these systems you will strengthen the backbone from which you make decisions and operate when abruptly confronted with unfavorable circumstances.
There are often situations where our first emotional reaction is so strong that our thoughts lead us down a spiraling staircase of despair. Nothing seems to work in our favor, and even the idea of happy and encouraging thoughts are as uplifting as a popped balloon. Why is that? Why do we have these intense reactions to bad luck, bad outcomes, or disappointing results? Do we have any real control of how we respond to events? Is there a way to gain control of ourselves in desperate times?
The quick answer is yes. We do have control. We CAN learn how to manage expectations and learn how to deal with less — than — stellar results. Some of the popular mainstream remedies include an abundance of optimism or other vague quick fixes with no actionable steps. Avoid any advice that fails to give a systematic approach to dealing with issues. There are no quick fixes in the long term game of paradigm shifts. Choosing Effective Optimism is committing oneself to proactiveness, acknowledgment, identification, analyzation, and determination in the face of all circumstances, not just bad.
Optimism is not a bad personal trait to have per se, but it is far from the only thing that is needed to have real success in overhauling your mindset. The avoidance of ego, arrogance, and martyrdom is also essential. The avoidance of these characteristics will prove to be beneficial to you and those around you, especially in the face of calamity.
There are 5 major steps that we should take when dealing with adversity. These 5 steps are what compose the systematic approach of what I call Effective Optimism.
Proactive Awareness
This is a critical part of adapting your mindset to handle the events of unfavorable outcomes. Direct your awareness to not letting bad situations ruin you or make you a victim of your anxieties before they ever happen. We all know very well that in one form or another, life will blindside us with adversity. Yet, even with that knowledge, we never seem to use that as leverage when faced with hardships. If we are intentional and proactive with our mindsets, we can ease ourselves into the reality of bad situations, which will allow us to never get too low, and never get too high.
Let’s think of some unfavorable examples:
- If I am going into a big test for my hardest class, despite my level of preparation, there is always a chance I won’t do well.
- If I invest, there is always a chance that I could lose money.
- If I get in a relationship, there is always the chance that it won’t work out long term.
When making a financial or emotional commitment or facing uncertainty in test results, being proactive in knowing what might happen can potentially allow for two things to transpire in each case:
- You can enter the test setting confidently when you are proactive in your preparation. Usually, dedicating the necessary time to study a week or two in advance of your tests will yield much better results than cramming.(Especially in college when you know the dates of each test after the first day of class… just saying.) I understand that different subjects require different levels of preparation, but this is the dynamic variable of proactive preparation. You must understand the level of preparation necessary and make the time for it. In the event that your test did not go as well as you had hoped, you now have the information necessary to gauge how proactive you will need to be moving forward.
- You can rationalize the level of work necessary to make a relationship functional and satisfying in the long term. You now get to dictate if these efforts are truly worth your long term commitment. If they are, GREAT. Keep it moving. If not, we can move on knowing we did the right thing and avoid a more severe form of heartbreak.
- You can be reasonable in attributing fault in the event of an investment gone bad. You will proactively do more research before investing, and rationalize the results. If your stock goes way up, WONDERFUL. Your hard work paid off. If you lose some money, you did the research and understood the risks and likelihood of this circumstance. While losing money sucks, you can forego the process of calling yourself dumb and beating yourself over things outside of your control.
There are numerous situations in which you can apply a proactive awareness to an outcome. This proactivity can function as a shield against self-doubt and pessimism, which leads to nowhere and contributes to no useful outcomes. Choose proactivity over a dominating, egocentric pessimism.
Once you take on the attitude that you are choosing to acknowledge what life’s decisions can provide us, good or bad, you will approach situations in a manner that will leave you impervious to negative outcomes. This is critical to avoiding The Spiral Staircase of Despair. Your intentions will dictate your reactions.
To combat whatever emotions you experience in adverse circumstances, you must direct your attention towards not letting these emotions get the best of you. It is up to you to decide when enough is enough, and when you are not going to let a lack of readiness for outcomes dictate your mindset for the rest of your life. Once you have decided that you are stronger than your first emotional reaction, you will begin to feel the confidence needed to take on anything your crazy life throws at you.
Acknowledgment
Don’t mistake taking on a different mindset for ignoring emotions. Suppressing ill feelings towards a situation will only cause that lingering feeling to grow within your subconscious. Negative feelings that grow in your subconscious will come out at some point. It is not a matter of if but WHEN. We must acknowledge our emotions (That goes for the men reading this too). There exists a masculine expectation within the United States that associates showing emotion with glaring weaknesses. Not only is the suppression of emotions unreasonable, but it’s also ineffective. Understanding and confronting your emotions is an essential part of mental strength. Having the awareness to acknowledge emotions prevents irrational decision making and much clearer thought processes. Anger, sadness, and anxiety all cloud the decision making landscapes of our mind. If any combination of those 3 factors is at play, the likelihood of bad, unreasonable, and regrettable decision making is exponentially more likely.
So what are you supposed to do with these newly acknowledged (and accepted) feelings? Now that our awareness of emotion is strong, we must acknowledge the fact that our feelings do not dictate our reaction. Take the necessary time you need to cool off or calm down. There are many rules of thumb for this. Some will say that if the situation won’t matter in 5 years, don’t spend more than 5 minutes being mad about it. Another rule states that you should take 72 hours before responding to something that hurts us. There are many other sayings you can find on how to deal with the pain in our lives. My rule is not to sulk for more than 24 hours. This is just an arbitrary guideline I created for myself that has worked so far for me. While the pain can linger longer, I can acknowledge that continuing to sulk past that yields diminishing returns. Or put more clearly, no additional benefit.
It is only with a clear, calm and collected mind that we can make optimal decisions. Taking the time to acknowledge our feelings and allowing ourselves time to deal with them will lead us to a clearer, more rational mind.
A good principle to live by in the happenstances of important decisions is to never make a decision final if you’re riding too high or riding too low. Exuberant happiness or crushing depression inhibits our ability to make sound decisions with the consideration of our future selves. In essence, we should make decisions with our thinking brain and not our emotional waves.
Identification of control
This subsection is a tangent off the previous section about acknowledging emotions. Sometimes, in situations of distress, we’ll replay a scenario over and over in our heads and wonder,
“ What if I had done this?”
“What if I had said that?”
“Is this all MY fault?”
Often times, outside influences have a larger effect on what happens to us than the actions we take. It is easy to blame ourselves since we usually act as the main character at the center of the entire universe. Identifying your level of control, to put it bluntly, is to realize that we are the center of no universe other than our own. The world around us has dynamic variables that influence all of us. Accidents happen, deaths happen, pandemics happen, to you, your neighbors, your friends, family…
So, what do we control in our lives? Attitude, effort, habits, and anything that deals with you and only you. You don’t control the HR department that didn’t respond to your application, you don’t control the driver that cut you off, you don’t control the traffic after work; you only control your actions and reactions. Act in such a way that when you look back on what you did, you know you did all you could to make the best out of that situation.
Objectivity
To view life objectively seems like pseudo — philosophic nonsense when you first begin. It is not easy. The reason that it is near the bottom of the list of steps is that: without any of the previous installations of this method, you cannot be successful in doing this.
Direct your focus towards perceiving all that happens through an objective lens. Once you can do this you will be able to see situations for what they truly are: a collection of random instances that have come together at a specific moment in time that results in an outcome. Through the objective lens, most circumstances can be logically deduced to a series of prior events that led to a climactic moment that formulated some kind of result. Whether these results are good or bad are up to your subjective judgment, only viewing life from a subjective lens can lead to being egocentric, narcissistic, and pessimistic evaluations throughout your life.
The ability to perceive happenstances objectively is like exercising a muscle in the brain. If you want it to get stronger, you must set your intentions often. Chances are, no person or thing is out to get you. From birth to death, life is a collection of random events that formulate into a story that we all get to live.
Analysis & Action
Now that you are working on how to cope with the random craziness of life, you might ask, “What do I do after this? All this advice on how to deal with adversity but no advice on what to do after.”
If you have been proactive, acknowledged your feelings, identified your level of control, and found the objective side of what is dragging you down and or what is putting you in a predicament, you can fall back upon your values. Now that you are in an objective mindset, you can analyze your options and act according to what you believe is for the greater good.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey suggests that the most effective people are those that can live by a set of values that they created for themselves, by themselves. The beauty in decision making should lie within our ability to decide what benefits us and those important to us. Living by your values allows you to worry less about outside opinions and other unimportant facets of life.
If you are comfortable with your life’s values and beliefs, then you will be content with the outcome each time you make decisions to support those values. Effective Optimism and value — based decision making are fundamental in being your happiest, most productive, and effective self.
