“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.” – Gil Stern
In a Bay of Plenty warehouse a storeman is extracting a pallet of raw material from the rack. “Oh, no!” says Damien to himself, as he notices that this stock, too, is out-of-date. “I’m such a loser, I can never get anything organized properly!”. Damien double-checks the dates, then using the standard procedure he contacts Angela in the lab to see if she can work out what to do with the material now.
Angela arrives on the scene and notes “We’ve had a few of these out-of-dates since the system change over. We are going to have to downgrade this lot. Never mind, things will get better once the IT team get all the location data entered in the new database.”
“I hope so!”, says Damien, “It’s really stressful managing this stuff.”
Damien is a pessimist and when something goes wrong for him he thinks it’s his fault, that it will adversely affect his entire life and that the impact will last a long time. In other words it’s personal, pervasive and permanent.
Angela on the other hand is expecting things to improve according to the plan at work, just as she looks for and works towards positive outcomes in the rest of her life. When things don’t go according to plan in the lives of the world’s optimists, they will attribute the “failure” to external circumstances and interpret the event as temporary and isolated. Last weekend, for example, when Angela’s team lost their netball game, she pointed out the circumstances that had them lose “Our goal shoot’s off on honeymoon for two weeks and we were up against the team that won our league last season – don’t worry, we are not due to play next week and after that Jeanine’s back!”. To an optimist, external circumstances are something they can change or may even change of their own accord. Optimists typically interpret adverse events as temporary, external, isolated – and importantly, are able to be impacted by them.
Optimism and pessimism are nothing more than habitual ways of interpreting events. Unfortunately for the pessimists amongst us, putting a negative spin on events adversely affects enjoyment and performance in every area of our lives, including our home life, business life, sports and so on. A pessimistic response to circumstances often becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy so when Damien the storeman says “I can never get anything organized properly!”, even though he only said it to himself, he’s setting himself up to never get anything organized properly by reinforcing his negative beliefs. Just as Virgil said “They can because they think they can”. If we think we can’t, that’s also true!
The three P’s of pessimism: personal, pervasive and permanent were identified by Martin E. P. Seligman PhD, a leading researcher in the field of positive psychology. In his book “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”, Seligman details the pervasiveness and costs to individuals of having a pessimistic mind-set and spells out steps that can be taken to learn a new set of cognitive skills that have people become more optimistic.
Pessimism isn’t all bad, it’s useful to have someone on the team who will identify pitfalls and shortcomings in the company’s plans. However, it is costly on a personal and professional level. If you notice the three P’s of pessimism in your conversation – even the private conversation in your head – why not stop and challenge the thought – it might not be as bad as you think!