Become the Author of Your Own Story with Learned Optimism
We often talk about the power of positive thinking: simply envision yourself acing the job interview and the position is yours, or imagine driving the car of your dreams and soon enough, it will materialize before you. But as you have probably experienced firsthand, life isn’t quite that simple.
In Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, cognitive psychologist Timothy Wilson notes how positive self-affirmations alone can actually make people feel worse about themselves and their abilities to achieve their goals. Similarly, studies have found that couples who claimed optimism about their future were more likely to experience marital strife. Dieters who focused on visualizing their fit future selves shed fewer pounds. University graduates who fantasized about their success transferring into the real world earned less, received fewer job offers, and sent fewer job applications out in the first place.
Why might this be?
To illustrate, take for example, this tale of two college freshmen.
Self Sabotage & Story Editing
Based on their high school success and 4.0 GPAs, two freshmen enter college optimistic and assured of their abilities. Yet, after their first semester, both are lagging academically and emotionally they’re each a mess.
The first student thinks he’s the problem. He must be depressed. Stupid. Not trying hard enough. Maybe it has to do with when he was five-years-old and his parents divorced and he was left to fend for himself but never really adapted to that new situation well. Plus, his father never told him he was smart. Ah, The Story!
The second student is given information. She’s shown statistics of how successful high school students typically suffer their first year or two in college. It’s not just her. She gets testimonials from older students that college life can get better. She’s given strategies for studying differently. She’s shown how to change her environment so she can flourish.
The first student has a grand story but no plan to change his circumstances. The second student got Story Editing. A new frame. A little less sexy, story editing is one of the brilliant breakthroughs of social psychologist Timothy Wilson. Since the 1970s, Timothy Wilson’s research consistently shows how we make decisions on unconscious irrational impulses – our often unfounded anxieties and fears – although we consciously rationalize with elaborate explanations for our behavior.
How does our brain make this leap? Well, let’s take a closer look.
Behind the Scenes: Storytelling and the Brain
Our brains are very good at envisioning imagined scenarios. So good, in fact, that our brains have trouble distinguishing between something that really happened, and something that we just imagined. This is because imagining an object, situation, or action in vivid detail lights up the same neural pathways that the same object, situation, or action would trigger in real life.
Our ability to simulate reality so effectively means that we can actually learn from imagined events and alter our behavior accordingly. On the other hand, it means that our daydreams can deliver us the same results and sense of reward as fulfilling our goals in real life. If we feel like we’ve already won, we lose the motivation, the sharpness, and grit it takes to pursue our goals. What’s more, if we feel buoyed up by our ego-boosting daydreams, the inevitable obstacles we face on the way to our goals will be that much more disheartening.
In this demoralized state, it’s easy to lapse into negative self-talk. We tell ourselves, “I failed because I’m a bad person,” or “I’m not good enough.” Our brains internalize this narrative and that becomes our story. If, on the other hand, we can recognize that our failures are a result of our actions (not our inherent worth) we can learn from those actions and become the authors of our own stories.
So how do we strike a balance and rewrite the script? How do we walk the fine line between hope and despair, even in the face of crisis and change? Martin Seligman, leading authority in the field of positive psychology, would suggest that we practice learned optimism.
Positive Psychology is Not Just Happy Faces
There is an important distinction between wishful thinking and what Martin Seligman termed “learned optimism.” While the former can easily lapse into escapist fantasies, the latter is the conscious practice of viewing the world from a positive perspective. It means understanding “failures” or misfortunes – and the negative emotions associated with them – as temporary setbacks and opportunities for growth.
The trap of optimism is that, more often than not, we ignore the nuances and consume only what we want to hear: “I’ll take the happy meal without the side of anxiety, please.” But learned optimism is much more than a “glass half full” outlook on life. Rather, it is about acknowledging our struggles and reframing them in a way that empowers us to reclaim our agency and direct the course of our life.
To help us navigate this positive reframing process, Seligman designed the ABCDE model, which focuses on identifying the stories underlying our behaviors and challenging the limiting beliefs that perpetuate our negative storytelling. So, as you prepare for another year of rampant uncertainty, I invite you to try and practice learned optimism with this 5 step approach.
- Adversity: The situation that calls for a response.
Think about a recent challenge that you faced. Say, for example, that you were struck with a bold idea for a creative project and you’re eager to forge ahead, but you’re not making any progress.
- Belief: How we interpret the event.
What thoughts run through your head as you reflect back on this challenge? Maybe you’re thinking: I’ll never make my dream come true, or It was a stupid idea anyway.
- Consequence: The way that we behave, respond, or feel.
What was the result of the beliefs you described in step 2? Did your beliefs help you make progress on your creative endeavor? Or did they inhibit you further? Most likely, you’ll realize that the negative self-talk actually made it harder to work toward your goal.
- Disputation: The effort we expend to argue or dispute the belief.
Look back to the limiting beliefs you described in step 2 and find evidence to disprove them. Think about past goals that you set, then attained or past ideas that bore fruit after some fine-tuning.
- Energization: The outcome that emerges from trying to challenge our beliefs.
Do you feel more energized or motivated now that you’ve proven your negative self-talk to be unfounded? Hopefully, you will feel less hopeless than you did before, and more motivated to tackle the next challenge you face with more self-compassion.My hope is that through these practices, you can flip the script when you find yourself telling those self-sabotaging stories. More importantly, I hope that learned optimism can help you find deeper purpose in your work and lead a more excellent life. As Seligman said, “Optimism is invaluable for a meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.”
