Whoops.
I promised that I would report back on Memorial Day Weekend re: the Optimist Challenge, and here it is Father's Day.
Public accountability is a beautiful thing — except when it's not.
Here's what I committed to do for one month:
- Wake up and write down what I am worrying about — just the facts.
- Write down the story I am telling myself about the facts.
- Work to write the most conceivably optimistic story I can tell myself based on the same incontrovertible facts.
Here's what I can report:
- I completed the actual exercise 2-3x a week, less than I aspired to do, more than I would have otherwise done.
- I was overly optimistic about my ability to be optimistic.
- What I think I'm pessimistic about can be symptomatic: I often need to peel the onion some before discovering why I'm really pessimistic.
- Even when I didn't write things down, I observed myself a lot, my patterns of thinking — revealing.
- On the days when I wrote an optimist's version, I felt immediately more sunny, and physically more energetic — staggeringly so.
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Because this is something new to me, baby steps seem to be required. So, I'm going to provide another update on July 3, compress the timeframe.
In the meantime, here is some of what I've been reading/thinking on the topic:
Seth Godin's Linchpin: I especially love page 127 — Signs that your lizard brain is at work. Here's a YouTube video preview of his book.
For something totally different and more personal, read Laurel Christensen's blog post: Optimist Experiment
Or, organizational psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson's Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool.
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For those of you that took this Challenge, what have you learned? Or in the words of Tom DeLong, have you, as have I, had the opportunity to do poorly along your way to doing well?
I love this, “I was overly optimistic about my ability to be optimistic.” It made me laugh, but also rings so true that optimism is an ability. I am not optimistic, generally, so something that helps me is to set the intent in specific situations (that I’m worrying about) that no matter what happens, the highest good for myself and others will be served. Sometimes things turn out as I envisioned, sometimes not. But, almost always, the intent is fulfilled.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and insights about the Optimist’s Challenge. I, too, often find optimism difficult, and I’ve only recently come to see how very good I am at taking factual information and spinning it into elaborate, terrifying stories to tell myself.
Another book I’d recommend, if you haven’t already read it, is a fun but powerful book called Taming Your Gremlin. I read it years ago and still draw on its wisdom when I’m feeling especially anxious or pessimistic.
I think optimism is also a spiritual gift. So we can be born with it, or ask/develope it later.
Thanks for this post Whitney. I think I have not been overly optimistic lately. Some more minute but obvious manifestations of this is that I have not been commenting on the blog as much because I have not been “dreaming” much recently and I’ve been more pulled back from interactions in general. I tend to think of myself as more pessimistic than optimistic. But when I pull back the layers, I see my refusal to give up attitude smiling back at me. A little worse for wear, but still ready to fight like a tiger. Sometimes it just takes posts like this to find it again. Thanks.