The other day, someone asked me if I’d changed my mind about anything. At first, I started to think about the question in terms of opinions or beliefs, but then I recognized a deeper level to explore. “Yes,” I answered. “I changed my mind from pessimistic to optimistic.”
Since I was a small child, I had a story I told myself that I titled, “Nothing Ever Works Out.” It was based on an idea I had: I thought I couldn’t get what I wanted, no matter how hard I tried. Of course, what I wanted was to be worthy of love. Or, failing that, to at least make people laugh.
Here’s how bad it got. The first time I saw the bumper sticker that read “Sh*t Happens,” I thought I knew exactly what it meant. It meant that nothing ever happened for me, no matter how hard I tried. It took a sympathetic friend to explain to me that it just meant that, in life, stuff just happens to us. Deal with it. And I suppose, in that context, I could’ve just said, “Yeah, pessimism happens. Live with it.” But, in fact, it never occurred to me that I was a pessimist.
Learned optimism
In 1990, Martin Seligman, Ph.D., published Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, in which he showed that we have a choice about how our minds work. We can learn to be optimistic, make positive choices, gain control over negative thinking, and change the ways we grew up thinking to achieve healthier and more productive psychological frameworks.
Seligman’s work focused on the dramatically different outcomes between the pessimistic mindset and the optimistic mindset. “The defining characteristics of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do and are their own fault,” he wrote in Learned Optimism. “The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to just this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault.”
Citing hundreds of studies, Seligman showed that pessimists have worse outcomes in every aspect of life, from relationships to careers to health. For optimists, it’s just the opposite. They’re far more likely to succeed in anything they try. His work is a fulfillment of the old saying: Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds; pessimists know it is!
In tests with incoming students at the University of Pennsylvania, Seligman and his team scored incoming students on their pessimistic mindsets. Those with the most pessimistic responses were placed into a control group or invited to attend a learned optimism workshop when they arrived. Although the workshop lasted only 16 hours, the results were profound.
Over the next year, 44 percent of the control group, which hadn’t taken the workshop, experienced periods of moderate to severe depression. Those who attended the workshop? Only 22 percent had incidents of depression; incidents were cut in half. Years later, in a similar test of cancer patients, those who received cognitive therapy designed to help them recognize pessimistic or negative thoughts had dramatic spikes in their natural immune system responses, while the control group had none.
In other words, a small change—just a couple of days in a workshop—can produce profound, life-changing effects.
We have two minds
So how did I change my mind? How did I move from thinking nothing ever works out to knowing that almost everything I try will succeed? Well, I wish I could say I took a 16-hour workshop that changed my world. But remember that pessimists aren’t necessarily unsuccessful, they just tend to be less successful than if they were optimists. And, pessimist or not, I built a good life and a good career as a writer and executive coach. And it was through my work as a coach that I made an interesting discovery.
We have two minds. One is a deeply original and authentic mind we were born with that I call the Essential Self. The other is a mind that we constructed ourselves and let others construct for us throughout our life. I call it the Synthetic Self because, although it feels completely real to us, it’s nothing more than a collection of stories we tell ourselves. In that mind, we have no idea of who we really are. We have no idea that we have this other mind, the Essential Self. And we have no idea that we have a choice. We can choose to change minds.
We have no idea that we have a choice. We can choose to change minds.
In their book, Changing Minds: A Journey to Awakening, psychologists Dr. Frank Allen and Dr. Kathleen Allen-Weber write about the idea of recognizing where your mind lies, or as they might put it, which “operating system” you’re letting run your life. And when you notice which mind you’re in, you can exercise choice in how you’re seeing the world.
Are you in the mind of your Essential Self or your Synthetic Self? Are you being optimistic or pessimistic? Just asking starts to shift the balance. It’s like any kind of exercise. You start off seeing if you can just run a mile, and before long, you’re running a marathon.
But there’s one more thing you should know: The value of changing your mind from pessimistic to optimistic is more than just a little less depression and a little better metabolism. Done right, the effects can be life-changing.
Changing your mind changes who you’re being. As you learn to identify which mind you’re operating from at any moment, you begin a transformation. Just noticing who you’re being—optimistic or pessimistic—changes who you’re being. And changing who you’re being changes the people around you, whether they know it or not. They experience you in a new way and that new experience of you alters how they experience themselves. It creates a virtuous circle around you. And in that circle, new people and new opportunities begin to emerge.
Putting optimism into practice
A few years ago, I had the idea to start creating a circle of executive coaches, so that when I had a client who needed something different from what I did, I could point them to someone else. The only problem was that I didn’t actually know any other coaches.
Then something unexpected started to happen. In a chance encounter at a conference, I took an empty seat at a table and fell into a conversation with another consultant who liked my idea of an advisory circle.
A few months later, she was at a conference when a third consultant, the former CEO of a global publishing house, took another empty seat. He’d become a CEO coach in his retirement, and when she shared our idea, he wanted in.
At another conference, I was seated next to a leadership expert from Harvard who then became part of our circle. A contract to help a graduate management professor from New York speak about a new book led to a relationship with another member of the circle.
A call to a young MBA friend to help manage a small project led to a new generation of thought leadership, and she became the head of strategy and innovation in the new company we’d formed, called Reservoir, around the idea of providing deep resources for leaders.
On and on, in coincidental meeting after coincidental meeting, in empty seat after empty seat, something electric was happening and it was happening because I made the choice to change my mind.
Yes, “stuff happens.” But what that stuff is isn’t always random. It’s related who you’re being. So be optimistic. It’s not just a better attitude, it’s a better life.
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