The Important Role of Optimism in Personal Fulfillment

We often quip that people are glass-half-empty or glass-half-full people—that some look for the silver lining in every cloud while others look for the cloud in every silver lining. This might be jokingly said, but the impact of the mindset you choose can be significant on your thoughts, feelings, actions, and outcomes. Your mindset can also affect your physical and mental health. A pessimistic mindset can make you dismiss options for problem resolution, generate feelings of helplessness and despair, and cause you to be mired in inaction.

With so much riding on your mindset choice, it’s important to consider how optimism can benefit your emotional intelligence and fulfillment. Happiness is not something we can just count on being delivered to us; it’s something we have to generate by choosing the language we use to interpret events. It can be one of positivity, or one of negativity. If happiness isn’t a natural state automatically generated by the brain, it takes effort on our part. We have to be the main player in the happiness manufacturing process.

Optimism tends to view ‘bad’ events or adversity as temporary and specific challenges to be overcome. Optimistic people perceive that there will be a return to a prevailing state of contentment before long. On the other hand, pessimists believe that life is a battle where adversity, problems, and struggle are the norm, occasionally broken up by short-term states of contentment.

When your body and mind are continually on alert, viewing threat as a constant that could come from anywhere, the drain on your emotional energy is significant and the negative physical and mental effects can add up. Pessimism and negativity are exhausting. Even the most finely tuned athlete eventually experiences injury when asked to run a marathon day after day.

Optimism, on the other hand, is like the experienced athletic coach who understands how to push us further and faster—over time and at the right times—to achieve victory. If you’ve ever observed world-class cyclists racing, you know riders in the peloton draft each other, conserving energy until the moment they make their winning move. No rider wins a Tour de France riding alone the entire race, up the mountains and against the winds. Optimism allows us to draft when times are tough so we can apply our talents when and where they matter most.

Optimism doesn’t just brighten your mood for its own sake; it actually gives you additional resources to achieve your aims and become more fulfilled. The openness to consider alternative solutions rather than the closed-mindedness of pessimism (i.e., “No, that won’t work. That won’t work either.”) gives you more ways to overcome adversity. Optimism also keeps you moving forward in the face of setbacks and failure. It reassures you that success is the natural result of additional effort and different remedies applied to the task at hand. Because failure and adversity are temporary and specific to the optimist, it’s just a matter of being flexible enough to experiment and find the right solution applied in the right way.

So, having discussed the virtue of optimism as a means of emotional control and resource for self-fulfillment, how do you capture optimism in your life?

The first step is to acknowledge that, although you cannot always control your initial feelings in every situation, you can decide the general perspective through which you’ll interpret them. You can make a conscious decision to use optimism as your filter, drawing the positive from the events in your life.

This might sound idealistic, but we’ve already established that you control your thoughts and that your feelings and actions derive from those thoughts. Likewise, the mindset that produces patterns of thought can be chosen. By holding yourself accountable for optimism, you go searching for light rather than clamoring toward the dark places in your mind. Using a prevailing attitude of optimism is a choice and applying it—particularly when you find yourself stumbling toward bleak thoughts—is also a choice.

Another resource you can use to support optimism is positive affirmation. Self-talk that reminds you of your positive qualities, past successes, adversities conquered, and future potential helps increase your optimism regarding current and future circumstances. Self-talk involving the positive aspects of ‘bad’ events or circumstances also allows you to learn from them and take heart.

At a minimum, through optimism, you gain something from every happening in your life: knowledge and experience. When you make a habit of looking for the good in yourself and your circumstances, it’s surprising how much you can find.

Remember that you have the ability to influence your environment, and in doing so, you change the conditions that might otherwise have resulted in negativity. We have all been around pessimistic people in our lives and know they can infect our own thoughts with negativity. By avoiding pessimists and resisting the urge to commiserate with them when we do have to interact, we lessen our chances of slipping into a negative mindset. We also know that, in contrast, seeking out positive and enthusiastic people increases the likelihood that optimism rubs off on us.

·????????Do you make a conscious commitment to look for positivity in each event of your life, or do you easily fall into pessimism without thinking?

·????????Do you use positive self-talk to help boost your optimism, confidence, and self-esteem, or do you get stuck in negative conversations with yourself?

·????????Do you make a habit of interacting and commiserating with pessimists, or do you seek out a more optimistic crowd?

·????????Do you light up the room when you enter, or when you leave?

*This article is an excerpt from the book "Fulfilled: Finding Joy and Prosperity In Life"

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