How to make optimism stick

Optimism, I hear, is a good thing.

In challenging times, the belief that things will be better in the future than they are now can make the difference you’re determinedly, desperately seeking.

I’m not a naturally optimistic person (sigh), but I’d like for it to come more naturally. Optimism correlates strongly with both resilience and openness, traits that we’ll never not find useful.

Besides, it sounds a lot more fun than the alternative.

But no matter how strong your can-do attitude, in the face of the tougher, more stickier life challenges, your optimism can falter.

Like with any belief I’m (often, reluctantly) working on to internalize because I know it will make me better, I tend to make more progress if I aim for depth more than speed.

A recent insight has shaken me from my usual pattern of how I tend to approach a sticky problem. I found it so eye-opening that I think it’s perhaps more useful than I initially thought.

Depending on the problem you might be facing, your mind might go to from Problem directly to Panic!, or Problem to Possible Solution, immediately followed by the kickback that: No, that won’t work, because of reason X.

Enter despair, hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped and helpless, etc., and deeper into the hole you go. If this pattern is well-grooved into your mind, you’ll ruminate on this in circles of Olympics caliber.

The conclusion is that you still have a problem, no viable solution, and now you feel stuck. You’ve identified a barrier (or five), then stopped trying.

But what if it doesn’t have to end there?

What if you look at the possible solution again, and ask what you can do about X? What if there’s a way around X? What would it take to make X irrelevant? Or accepting that X might not work as is, but it can work if you did Y.

Now the problem is not X, it’s Y, so you now solve for Y.

Yes, I realize you still have a problem. A different problem, but a problem nonetheless. A longer chain (problem-solution-problem-solution) might be tedious, but it sure as heck beats a short chain with a dead end.

The purpose is not necessarily to find a solution.

The purpose is to not get stuck, feel it’s the end and give up; it’s to stay optimistic and keep your mind open to possibilities so you can find a solution eventually.

That solution might be sideways, counter-intuitive, or totally different than what you expected. But you won’t get there if you stopped at the dead end.

The difference is going from can’t-because to can-if*.

This is what the ideas of resilience and openness look like when it comes to life, when it comes to reality.

And dealing with reality with a sense of optimism, I hear, is a great thing.

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*Can-if, from the case study of Colin Kelly, from A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden