The Stoic philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”. Learned Optimism is something intriguing and I want to write something about it today.
Ask yourself a question. Do you think yourself as an optimistic person? Do you just have this feeling things will turn out all okay? Or do you think yourself as a pessimistic person? Do you feel like something is always missing? Would you think that something somewhere will somehow go wrong?
Ponder upon that and see if something feeling true rises to the surface.
It turns out, it’s a choice. Scientific community has showed that you can choose which way of thinking you can follow. Even those who have always seen themselves as pessimists aren’t really doomed to a life of pessimism.
History of Learned Optimism
Martin Seligman defined the term Learned Optimism and published in his 1990 book, Learned Optimism. He found that optimists generally blame bad events on temporary external causes, whereas pessimists always blame themselves. Seligman invites pessimists to learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way. The resulting optimism—one that grew from pessimism—is a learned optimism. The optimist’s outlook on failure can thus be summarized as “What happened was an unlucky situation (not personal), and really just a setback (not permanent) for this one, of many, goals (not pervasive)”.
Seligman came to the concept of Learned Optimism when he was studying Learned Helplessness, the idea that a certain reoccurring negative event is out of the person’s control. During the study he tried conditioning people to become self helpless but some participants resisted helplessness. He shifted his focus to study what made them more resistant then others and he found out those people were more optimistic than the other participants. Using his knowledge about conditioning people to be helpless in the lab, he shifted his focus to conditioning people to be optimists. The result of these experiments led to defining the processes of learning optimism.
Research
Studies done by three scientists showed that optimistic people are 32% less likely to become depressed, 54% less likely to have anxiety issues and are generally more healthy than their adversaries. ¹. Optimistic sales people make 35% more sales². It was also shown that when the caretakers are more optimistic people the pediatric rehabilitation returns better results.³
Personal thoughts on the distinction of Personalization- and Root Cause Analysis of Problems
I believe it is important to master the aforementioned subject deeply and not mistake it with having a high external locus of control. What is that? Let me explain it in a simple way.
In psychology, the term locus of control is used to describe how much control a person feels they have in regards to various life decisions and resultant outcomes.
People with a high internal locus of control believe they have quite a bit of control over their decisions and the outcome of those decisions. Such a person who is late for work for instance may say: “I went to bed too late and overslept this morning.”
On the other hand, people with high external locus of control believe that pretty everything is outside their control and they have very little influence on what happens in their life. Such a person who was late for work would say: “Traffic was really bad this morning” (even if it is the same traffic every morning).
So if someone struggles with various problems in their lives due to his or her lifestyle and they have a high external locus of control, he or she will always find someone or something to blame for these problems.
Feeling the responsibility vs Personalization of Learned Optimism
I cannot distinguish the difference between having a high locus of control and Seligman’s Personalization. Because it feels like Seligman’s Personalization Parameter is deflecting responsibility from bad events. I might elaborate on this topic in the future. On the time of writing this post I believe it is important to be self aware. Be conscious about the actions of the self and their consequences. One should be aware of the causality of things and know which external and internal actors are affecting the outcome. Meanwhile it’s not helpful to feel dreadful on past mistakes.
As an optimal middle ground an individual should feel the responsibility but not make it permanently personal. You should not feel like you made this mistake because you have inherent bad traits. A mistake happened and now you are going to learn from it, analyze it for its root causes. The person should analyze the root cause of that mistake if they want to avoid it in the future.
External Links
- Discovery Health 1997
- Peter Schulman (1999) Applying Learned Optimism to Increase Sales Productivity, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 19:1, 31-37, DOI: 10.1080/08853134.1999.10754157
- Mark Ylvisaker & Timothy Feeney (2002) Executive functions, self-regulation, and learned optimism in paediatric rehabilitation: a review and implications for intervention, Pediatric Rehabilitation, 5:2, 51-70, DOI: 10.1080/1363849021000041891
- Thumbnail Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash
- In-Post Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash
Internal Links
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