Member Article

The Optimism Advantage

In 2010 a client of mine was changing jobs, he had been incredibly successful leading 50 people and now the organisation was giving him an entire division with 500 people to run.

This guy was famous for really getting the best out of people and creating amazing cultures; he has the personal touch. He was however, now going into a business that had many urgent problems.

In this kind of high-pressure situation, the approach of many leaders would be to hassle their people with problems and demands, ramping up everyone’s anxiety level, triggering the part of their brain that deals with threats, creating a fight or flight response and preventing use of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for effective problem solving).

So I asked him, how he could produce the same results with 500 people as he did with 50 people and he said ‘The list of problems is massive, but I’ll focus my senior team on what is working, what is good and on our goals and get them to do the same with their people down the line, that way we will get more of what is good and the list of problems will shrink to a manageable size’.

The result should not be a surprise, performance increased and the team went from around the lowest to the highest engagement scores in the company in 18 months. People perform at their best when they are focused optimistically on constructive goals, not fears and failures.

Optimism drives Performance

In 2009 Gallop polled 150,000 adults in virtually every country in the world and asked them this question. ‘Do you expect the next 5 years of your life to be: a) Worse b) As good c) Better… than your current life?’ 89% of people answered B or C. Most people are essentially optimistic, scientists believe it’s a survival skill programmed in to our reptilian brain from our cave man past, we needed to be able to deal with problems in a constructive way otherwise we would die out. I think we could comfortably say that’s also true for our businesses and yet only 20% of people say they are mostly optimistic at work.

Pragmatic Optimism means we do not give up, we remain energised, invent solutions and take action.

In 1985 Dr. Martin Seligman found that sales people at the Met Life company who scored above average for Optimism sold 37% more insurance than those who scored below.

He tested 500 first year students at the University of Pennsylvania and found that their optimism test scores were a better predictor of actual future grades, than looking at any of their past exam results.

Optimism is a massive driver of performance. When in a positive state our brains are flooded with dopamine, a chemical which lights up the learning centers of our brain, we have wide access to our subconscious mind which we need to have ideas and invent solutions and we sparkle; connecting with and influencing other people. When primed to be in an optimistic state doctors diagnose patients 20% faster, 4 year old children put blocks together 50% faster and my favorite, optimists live 20% longer than pessimists.

What drives Optimism?

Pragmatic Optimism is driven by three very simple practical skills:

1. Focusing on what we want - Our ability to keep our attention on outcomes and solutions over blame and negativity. Driven by the practical lanugage tool ‘What do I/we want?’.

2. Not taking setbacks personally - Our ability to accept that bad things will happen and not get frustrated or beat ourselves up. Driven by the practical lanugage tool ‘It is what it is’.

3. The belief our actions will affect our future - Our ability to believe that we can do something and not to focus on all the things we can’t do. Driven by the practical lanuage tool ‘What can we do?’.

Dr. Seligman calls this our “explanatory style” the way in which we explain events to ourselves in our head.

When something good happens an optimist will say ‘thats great, it will last a long time’, ‘I made this happen’, ’ I can make more of this happen’. When something bad happens, an optimist will say ‘so thats the problem and what do I want?’, ‘things happen, it’s not going to last forever’, ‘what can i do to fix it’. Pessimists are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad events occur.

Developing Optimism in yourself

The practical skills that drive optimism I simply call ‘constructive thinking’, our ability to focus on what we want, on goals and objectives rather than problems, blame or negativity, to accept the problem for what it is and to put our attention on what we can do rather than what we can’t do. Easy to say, but hard to do in the moment. Watch your own thoughts and notice how often your thinking is “that’s a nightmare”, “I can’t do anything about it” or ’“I always screw this up”. Constructive thinking is a mindset; keeping your ‘focus on what you want’ , what you ‘can do’ to move forward and accepting the problem ‘is what it is.’

The most practical of the tools that drives constructive thinking is the first one, ‘re-framing’ and here is how to do it. Make a list of your problems, then ask yourself, ‘What do I want?’. Re write them as goals, then throw away the list of problems. This is a practical skill which will help you to practice the shift needed. The aim is to do this in your head every time a challenge or problem comes up, not to dwell on it, but to ask ‘what to I want?’ and focus constructively.

If you want to develop more optimism the single thing that is most important is awareness. Start to notice how you are thinking and talking moment by moment, become highly aware of your thought and speech patterns and observe when they are helpful and when they are harmful. This will lead you naturally on to ask the question, ‘what do I want?’ and enable you to make a choice in that moment about how you want to feel and what you can do.

Re-framing yourself repeatedly over time creates new neural pathways, new ways of thinking, a new habit of optimism. Enabling you to be resilient and positive in the face of problems and confident, energised and happy every day.

Developing Optimism in your team

Most leaders do not believe they are responsible for or can influence the optimism in their people, but optimism is a skill which can be learned, developed and taught (as well as recruited for).

As a leader or as someone who cares about the people around them you can create a habit of optimism in other people by helping them to focus constructively when they’re stuck in a problem. Re-frame negativity with 1 simple question in 3 easy steps.

’What do you want?’

1. Become highly aware of when people around you are talking about what they can’t do, what’s too hard, or maybe they seem to be stuck in the problem.

2. Intervene! This is one of the hardest things to do, as we are used to just letting it go. A little gentle, brief complaining can be cathartic, but any more is just wasting energy and time. Many of my clients have chosen to take a ‘zero tolerance approach to whinging’.

3. Show empathy ‘I can understand where you are coming from’ and then Re-frame the person ‘what do you want?’, allowing the space for a bit of bluster and then then to focus on something more constructive.

If this is a wide spread effort across a management team, it will quickly affect the culture and optimism will become part of the DNA of the organisation.

An optimistic team is a ‘can do’ team, fun to be around, resilient and positive in the face of problems and always inventing ways to make things better.

Learn more about Optimism and the other 6 powers that drive engagement at work here www.thepositivecompany.com/powers

The Positive Company helps organisations to generate ‘Power through the People’, developing Engagement through Performance, Empowerment and Happiness… your in Positive company.

© The Positive Company 2013

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Stuart Baldwin .