Learning Optimism
Your “explanatory style” – whether you view events through an optimistic or pessimistic lens – has major impacts on your health, happiness, and performance:
- Optimism helps fend off depression.
- Optimistic professionals have between 20-84% higher sales performance.
- Optimists come down with fewer colds and other opportunistic infections.
- Optimists with life-threatening illnesses manifest more robust immune responses.*
Do you know what your explanatory style is, and how to leverage its power?
“Explanatory style” is the way we explain to ourselves WHY a certain outcome occurred. It shapes the stories we tell ourselves about why we encountered specific failures or successes in life.
Optimists tend to have one type of explanatory style, while pessimists have another.
The good news is we can learn to change our explanatory style – which means we can choose to directly impact our mood, health, and performance just by being more intentional about the stories we tell ourselves.
There are three elements of explanatory style. For simplicity, I paraphrase these three elements as:
- Cause: to what extent is the outcome attributable to me personally vs. to external factors?
- Scope: to what extent is this outcome representative of success/failure in other areas of my life vs. an isolated occurrence?
- Duration: to what extent is the outcome predictive of what will occur in similar situations in the future vs. a one time fluke?
For positive outcomes, optimists tend to attribute the cause to themselves, the scope as representative of success elsewhere in their lives, and they believe that success will last.
For negative outcomes, optimists tend to attribute the cause to external factors (or to just a minor, superficial mistake on their own part), they don’t look for a connection with other “failures” elsewhere in their lives, and they treat it as a one-off that probably won’t happen again.
That relationship is inverted for pessimists.
I think this is easier to digest in visual form:
| Positive Outcome | Optimist | Pessimist |
| Cause | Personal | External |
| Scope | Pervasive | Isolated |
| Duration | Permanent | Temporary |
| Negative Outcome | Optimist | Pessimist |
| Cause | External | Personal |
| Scope | Isolated | Pervasive |
| Duration | Temporary | Permanent |
Notice the difference between the two charts. The contents of the Optimist and the Pessimist columns are reversed between the positive and the negative outcome scenarios.
A simpler way to say this is that pessimists don’t take credit for good stuff, but blame themselves for bad stuff. They think the bad stuff is connected to other bad stuff and that it will last forever. No wonder pessimism is correlated with depression and all the negative outcomes associated with stress!
Let’s make this a little more concrete with an example.
Let’s say someone went for a job interview and successfully landed an offer. Here’s how they might explain that to themselves:
| Offer (yay!) | Optimist | Pessimist |
| Cause | Personal – I worked really hard to prepare for that interview. | External – This company must be really desperate. |
| Scope | Pervasive – This is awesome. Things are trending up in my life. | Isolated – I may have faked my way into getting this job, but I’m a mess. |
| Duration | Permanent – I’m going to build on these new relationships and contribute a lot to my new team. | Temporary – I got lucky this time. I hope they don’t find out later on that I don’t really know what I’m doing. |
On the flipside, let’s say someone went for the interview but was NOT offered the job. Here’s how they might explain that to themselves:
| Rejection (boo!) | Optimist | Pessimist |
| Cause | External – The economy is volatile and the company’s needs may have shifted. | Personal – I’m incompetent. |
| Scope | Isolated – Despite this setback, a lot is going well in my life. | Pervasive – Of course I didn’t get it. This is how it always goes. Why did I even get my hopes up? |
| Duration | Temporary – My next interview at the next company will be a fresh start. | Permanent – I’ll never get hired. I may as well give up now. |
As a recovering pessimist who has deliberately learned optimism using this framework, I’d like to call my fellow skeptics’ attention to a couple important facts:
- Notice that the example statements in the Optimist column are not wild, fantastical, narcissistic delusion. They seem calm, reasonable, and plausibly accurate. (It’s actually the pessimist’s example statements that seem hyperbolic and probably unmoored from reality.)
- Notice that in each scenario, the objectively observable facts are the same. Either the person got the job, or they didn’t. But the internal interpretation of WHY that outcome occurred could not be more different. That means we have a choice which interpretation we adopt – we’re really not dealing in the realm of objective fact when it comes to explanatory style, anyway, so you may as well pick the style that is proven to lead to better outcomes.
The usual rebuttal against implementing a more optimistic explanatory style is that it will lead to self-satisfied laziness and poor-quality future performance, because optimists let their guard down and have no reason to strive for improvement.
But research shows the opposite to be true. Beating yourself up, never allowing yourself to enjoy successes, and feeling like you’re permanently having to fight to stay in the game leads to exhaustion, burnout, illness, defeatism, and intolerance of healthy risk. Fear and negativity can mobilize brief spikes of productivity, but it is just plain unsustainable over the medium to long term.
Retraining our brains to use a more optimistic explanatory style is absolutely possible, immensely effective, and actually pretty simple.
Here’s a brief exercise to start training that optimism muscle:
- Identify a couple of recent successes and disappointments.
- Jot down a few sentences capturing your original explanation to yourself (at the time) of why those outcomes transpired.
- Compare those against the personal/pervasive/permanent rubric shared above. Were your original stories more representative of an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style?
- Using those same 3 dimensions, write down a new, more optimistic explanation of those events.
- Bonus: think ahead to an upcoming outcome you’re waiting on (maybe getting a raise, or driving a difficult team decision, or finding out some health news.) Imagine both your desired outcome occurring, and the undesired outcome occurring. For both scenarios, write down a few sentences explaining the hypothetical outcome in an optimistic style.
The more you repeat this retrospective and prospective exercise, the more naturally the optimistic style will come to you. Over time, the effects on your health, happiness, and productivity will be profound.
*Research drawn from Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire
