Realistic Optimism
Where Problem Solving Meets Hope
“Get your head straight,” she challenges with an uncharacteristic directness that forces me to reflect. I was complaining to my teammates about the work ahead. We had daunting hills to climb, and my mind was being pulled into the suck.
My coach was on point. “You don’t have to show up like this,” she was saying - “You have a choice.”
While it has taken years of effort to be able to choose optimism more regularly, I’m getting there.
To achieve ambitious goals, we have to embrace the challenges, while also cultivating a belief in a better future. For most of us, optimism takes practice and intentional effort, especially when things get hard. But we need it to problem-solve our way to success, to support others, and to feel okay.
As unhelpful as it may be, a pessimistic approach is understandable. As a toddler, worrying about negative events helped you avoid them. Now, as an adult, well-trodden neural pathways bias you to think negatively. Like a sled following tracks in the snow, you can turn out of the grooves, but it requires extra effort.
That is not to suggest blind optimism. Optimism only helps you if it doesn’t distort your sense of reality. Realistic optimism is the halfway point - “a reality-based belief that the future is positive, due to one’s causal analysis and self-efficacy skills,” according to 10 years of empirical research by resilience training company Adaptiv Learning.1
The Need for Realistic Optimism
Optimism is particularly hard and particularly important in the face of adversity - but we need enough belief it will get better to work to make it so. If you’ve lost hope as a leader, you need to do your work to get it back, as people are depending on your commitment to a vision. Getting it back may mean diving into your problem to find a new path - talk to your customers, your voters, or your employees. You may also just need a vacation.
Realistic optimism may mean, counter-intuitively, acknowledging that your goal can not be achieved. Some of history’s greatest victories have arisen from changing course. In 1998, Google’s co-founders tried to sell the company for $1 Million, but apparently no worse off for failing to do so. Martin Luther King Jr. set out to be a Baptist minister but became a social rights activist. The world is better for it. When we constrain our definition of success, we limit our ability to envision a better future.
Our belief in a better future is also essential to well-being. We take on massive projects to fill a gap in the universe, but also a gap in ourselves. When the project looks doomed, it can have us question our self-worth, setting off a spiral of limiting beliefs. We can become victims, believing we have no agency to create a better future. If this continues for days or weeks, we could be entering depression and may need professional help.
There is a privilege in my argument. For some, constant life challenges make it impossible to be optimistic. Generations of oppression have taught some to expect negative experiences. This intergenerational trauma requires a deeper form of healing than my privileged pep talk. It requires professional support, and more importantly - a commitment by the privileged to disassemble oppressive structures, including by taking anti-racist, and feminist approaches.
When working with others, and ourselves, we need to be compassionate as change takes place. Realistic optimism’s approach of accepting both the good and the bad helps us relate to others. If someone is weighed down by the negative, you can empathize with their reality - life and work do get hard sometimes. And there is nothing worse when you’re struggling, than someone brimming with optimism.
Still, as a friend or coach, you can help others by tracking their optimism, and challenging them when things are out of balance.
Cultivating Realistic Optimism
If we want to turn up our optimism, we need to intentionally work to change our habits, to make new neural pathways in the snow. “We’re trying to increase choice about how we might skillfully respond to difficulty rather than reacting automatically or engaging in habitual automatic patterns that may be harmful or at least not helpful to us,” said Patricia Rockman M.D. in a podcast for Mindful.org2. Rockman is the director of education and clinical services for the Centre for Mindfulness Studies in Toronto.
Mindfulness has been a significant ally as I worked to cultivate greater optimism. With mindfulness meditation, you train your mind to notice your thoughts and to respond to them non-judgmentally and with curiosity. Practicing this on the cushion each morning makes it easier to notice and to guide the quality of my thoughts throughout the day. It helps me to see the grooves my sled is in, and to purposefully turn out of them.
Research confirms meditation’s ability to promote optimism. Specific compassion meditations strengthen brain circuits that are important for a positive outlook according to research by Dr. Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and fellow researchers.3
Old habits die hard though, so give yourself an advantage by designing optimism into your life. If you journal regularly, add simple prompts like “what are your strengths?” or “what did you achieve today?” Make time to clarify your vision and your commitment to it through downtime to reflect. Teams also need to do this - through off-site retreats that give a chance to look up from the snow so you can be inspired by the mountain tops.
As we enter month 20 of a global pandemic, it seems as good a time as any to start this new habit. And to help, I’ll leave you with a question that management scholar Jim Collins asked at the beginning of this pandemic - “How can you engage those around you in the question of how to better embody the idea that we will find a way to prevail in the end? And how can you do a better job of confronting the brutal facts as they are today?”4
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https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/142027/file-17825956-pdf/docs/development_of_the_resilience_factor_inventory_
https://www.mindful.org/the-importance-of-inquiry/
https://www.mindful.org/science-reveals-well-skill/