The benefits of optimism are real. It has the power to increase longevity, reduce stress, and improve the relationship, business, and health aspects of your life. AKA, it can have a positive impact on pretty much everything.
The best part about optimism is that while incorporating it has unlimited benefits; it doesn’t cost a penny to become more optimistic. This is not to say that optimism is free. The cost of optimism is the work that it takes to become more optimistic.
After years of being a pessimistic and cynical person, I needed to understand what it took to become more optimistic. Then I actually had to implement those changes! Learning to change my attitude is not just a one-time thing but something I have to practice daily. I’ve found that learning about these four concepts below and incorporating practices that align with these concepts has finally allowed me to live a more optimistic life!
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1. Locus of Control
Locus of Control is one of the four core dimensions of self-evaluation. It’s a concept developed by psychologist Julian Rotter to describe the degree to which people believe what we do produces the outcomes in our lives versus the belief that events outside of our control produce these outcomes.
Your locus of control can lean more towards an Internal Locus of Control (people who attribute their success or failures to themselves) or an External Locus of Control (People who attribute their success or failures to things like luck, fate, injustice, bias, etc.)
If interested in finding out where you fall, you can take the locus of control questionnaire developed by Julian Rotter.
What’s important to note is that your locus of control is not fixed, meaning you have the power to develop the locus of control you want! On top of that, neither is necessarily good or bad, but there is a significant positive correlation between optimism and an internal locus of control; thus, it can help shift to lean towards an internal locus if you are looking to become more optimistic.
Steps to Take: Practice reminding yourself in any situation (good or bad) that you always have power over at least one aspect. That aspect is your attitude. Whereas I used to get angry over last-minute work deadlines or rush hour traffic, I’ve started to use these moments as practice for a mindset shift. I can choose how to feel about the “dilemma.” The best choice for me happens to be becoming more content about the situation.
2. Representative Heuristic:
People often take mental shortcuts in life. One of these shortcuts (or heuristics) is the representative heuristic. This is our tendency to make decisions or predictions about an event/person based on what we think is most relevant. We overestimate certain information’s importance, like assuming someone who wears glasses is more likely to be a mathematician than a musician.
This bias can also apply to our assumptions about situations. We assume that our feelings will align with the outcome (i.e a negative feeling means a negative outcome). By thinking this way, we worry and create a negative environment for ourselves long before anything negative actually occurs.
Steps to Take: This is a hard tendency to avoid altogether, but awareness is the first step. Take a step back from any upcoming situation you are worrying about and practice questioning your assumptions about it. Do you think it will be negative just because it’s similar to something that happened before? After taking this approach, I became more aware of how often my pessimistic mindset was an inaccurate prediction for how the situation would turn out. Not only was I often wrong, but even when I wasn’t wrong, the added pessimism didn’t do anything to help the situation.
3. Availability Bias:
We are also impacted by what’s readily available to us. We tend to think that those things that come readily to our minds are more representative than they are. So if we are continually reading destructive news, or surrounding ourselves with complainers, we will think negative events and issues are extremely common. This quote says it well:
Steps to Take: To help increase optimism, take a good look at the content you consume, the people around you, and whether you can practice limiting any of negativity. Changing your environment is one of the hardest but also most beneficial decisions that anyone can make. For me, this meant turning off my news and social media notifications and eventually building the courage to leave a toxic work environment. While neither of these processes was easy, I found solace in knowing that the difficult times (breaking through the habit of checking news and leaving a job I felt comfortable in) would eventually lead to a more positive life.
4. Attributional Style:
The last concept is quite similar to your locus of control. Attributional Style indicates the reason people believe they experience a particular event. The major difference here is that there are three attributional styles and they vary based on whether people lean towards believing that situations are internal, permanent, and global.
Those that lean towards an optimistic attributional style tend to see positive events as being internal (caused by factors within oneself), stable (the situation is more permanent), and global (the situation is consistent, regardless of context). They also see negative events as external (caused by factors outside of oneself), unstable (the situation is fleeting), and specific (the situation only occurs in a given context).
Steps to Take: The obvious step here is to attempt to build an optimistic attributional style. The previous suggestions listed here will help you build that optimistic attributional style but it’s important to remember that this isn’t a one-time situation. A major mistake I made when trying to become more optimistic was assuming that there would come the point when I no longer would need to practice it. I was wrong. I will always need to work on it, and that’s okay. Remembering an optimistic attributional style’s key components makes it easier to realize when I am slipping into a pessimistic mindset. I often remind myself that many negative events are outside of my control ( external), that these events will pass (fleeting), and that these events do not mean the world is perpetually negative(specific).
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These four concepts have helped me tremendously on my journey towards optimism. I’m hopeful that they will do the same for some of you!
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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Photo credit: Pixabay
