The Super Power of Positivity and Confidence

Early in my career I worked with the most pessimistic person that I have ever met in my life by far.  Larry was comically negative.  He ran the machine shop and whenever an engineer showed up with drawings Larry would pull out a pencil and examine them.  If there was one mistake, he would circle it and hand the drawings back to you without explanation so that you could go back and figure out what mistake you made.  If there was more than one mistake, Larry would throw the drawing package on the floor and walk away.  There was a weird sort of admiration for Larry at this company like how doctors remember residency or soldiers look back on deployment with each other.  “Remember when we were really in the sh*t, but somehow made it through?”  This was the fondness that existed among the R&D organization around Larry when each remembered his/her initiation as a young engineer.

The Lesson I Learned From Larry

For some reason, Larry liked me and I would talk to him every time I dropped off drawings to be made.  “How’s it going Larry?” I would ask.  “Same sh*t different day,” he would answer.  I would sometimes make a game out of trying to get Larry to admit something was actually good in the world.  “Hey Larry Christmas break is coming up are you excited to get a break?”  “All these orders are going to pile up and just be waiting here for me when I get back,” he answered.  Larry could identify concerns with a design in seconds that much higher paid engineers missed, yet he never made it out of the machine shop.  Who would want him on a design team?  Senior engineers routinely had the junior engineers drop off designs for Larry so that they didn’t have to deal with him.  Incidentally, after consulting, I was offered a full time job with this company which I promptly turned down.     

Pessimism Is Corrosive, Optimism Begets More

What pessimists do not realize is that they are not simply commenting on their lives, they are creating them. Pessimism can be corrosive to organizations and to people. At the same time, optimism is more than a sunny disposition, it is a world view. It is a strategy for life and has made a huge difference in my trajectory.

The Research on Positivity

In part one of this article, I expressed some concern over the pseudoscience and motivational speaker types that seem to dominate the discussion around positivity and motivation. Now let’s look at the science. There have been thousands of research papers published on positivity and confidence. Researchers think of positivity in terms of “attributional style,” and “dispositional optimism.” Someone who is optimistic tends to think of bad outcomes as one off events, that don’t define them as a person and are due to something temporary and often out of their control (an optimistic attributional style). Optimists also tend to believe that positive outcomes are more stable and they expect positive outcomes across the important areas of their lives (dispositional optimism).

As neuroscientist Tali Sharot describes in this interesting Ted Talk, “Optimists are people who expect more kisses in their future, more strolls in the park.  That anticipation enhances their wellbeing.  In this way, optimism changes one’s subjective reality.  However, it also changes one’s objective reality.  It acts as a self fulfilling prophecy.”  “Controlled experiments have shown that optimism is not only related to success, it leads to success…in academia, sports, politics…”  

Moreover, research links optimism to career success, better performance, better health, increased longevity, reduced stress, and increased resilience to trauma and adverse events(1,2).

In preparing for this article, I ended up reading through about 100 data backed studies on optimism / positivity.  I did this to see what I could incorporate into my own life and also share the most powerful findings with you.  This article is long and research is much drier than motivational speech.  However, I have distilled some life changing research here with scientific basis and proven effectiveness.  It is worth the read.  We will look at what the research has shown us about the benefits of optimism, some tools to evaluate how optimistic you are, and science based tools that can make you a more optimistic person.  One of the most pronounced benefits of positivity may be with respect to health.

Positivity and Health

There is a compelling body of evidence to show that optimism improves health and increases lifespan. Many of these health benefits of optimism seem to be linked to reducing stress. This meta study covering 300 studies over 30 years found that while stress in the very short term can boost the immune system, long term stress suppresses the immune system.

An interesting study tracked cell-mediated immunity in students over a year while also surveying the students’ outlook over time. The researchers found that when optimism went up, so did the cell-mediated immune response. When optimism dropped, the immune system weakened.

Optimism and Your Heart

The research seems to indicate that optimism reduces stress, which in addition to better immune system function is also good for your heart. Interestingly, research has shown that those who had a higher number of positive thoughts had faster cardiovascular recovery from negative emotional arousal, compared to those that recorded less positive thoughts. This raises the question of how this might affect your heart over the long term?

In one study, people with a family history of heart disease who also had a positive outlook were one-third less likely to have a heart attack or other cardiovascular event within five to 25 years than those with a more negative outlook. This kind of blows me away.

Optimism Is Not a Cure All

While health benefits due to optimism have been demonstrated through research, it should be noted that the link between optimism and health is complicated. The link between stress and immunity depends on the health concern in question. Furthermore, optimism has shown to improve outcomes with some types of cancers (breast cancer for example) but may be detrimental to patients with other cancer types (for example advanced lung cancer) 3,4,5,6. In short, optimism may make you healthier but is not a miracle cure for everything (sorry Tom Cruise).

Optimism Actually Makes You Live Longer

My grandfather was an optimist.  He always had a positive outlook and was hopeful about recovery from every ailment no matter his age.  In his mid 80s, he searched everywhere for a doctor who would give him a new hip.  “I’ve got a lot of good years left,” he pleaded.  I still remember the giant smile on his face at his 100th birthday.  He danced to the polka music from his bed that was set up in the middle of the room.  “I love you all,” he shouted out in jubilation.  

Perhaps the most well substantiated benefit of optimism that I found in perusing the research is that it is associated with living longer. One study of over 97,000 women found that optimists were less likely than pessimists to develop or die from coronary heart disease, had lower cancer related mortality, and had lower total mortality due to all causes, across the 8 years of study. This is a striking finding over a huge data set but it is not even the only one!

Research from a totally different data set of over 70,000 women found that those who were optimistic had a significantly reduced risk of dying from every major cause of death analyzed including cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, and infection — over an eight-year period, compared with women who were less optimistic.

A subsequent study has gone so far as to quantify the longevity benefit of optimism indicating that more optimistic women and men lived 11-15% longer on average.  Many additional studies all show similar results (7,8). In addition to health benefits, positivity has been linked to better performance.

Positivity and Performance

Intuitively, feeling more positive seems to lead to success.  As expected, positive visualization has shown to help athletic performance and several additional studies have indicated that more optimistic athletes perform better in competition and also handle negative results better. This performance boost seems to apply to career as well.

Positivity and Career Success

Anyone who has ever worked in sales understands that making a sale usually leads to making another sale and then suddenly you are positive, confident, and on a roll.  However, if you go cold, then you turn into Jack Lemon in Glengarry Glen Ross.  This is actually backed by research into sales performance, but it goes much further than this.  

A meta study of over 275,000 people asked the question of whether optimism and happiness lead to success or whether success simply makes people happy and optimistic.  The study found that the happiest people actually do owe their success, in part, to their optimism and positive outlook.  To quote the researcher from this study, “When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic and energetic and others find them likable and sociable. Happy people are thus able to benefit from these perceptions.” 

A Personal Perspective on Optimism and Success

There is a simple reason that I believe that positive and confident people are more successful in what they look to achieve in life.  People do not remember what you do but rather how you make them feel.  Anyone who has dated knows that when you are feeling most positive and confident, magically you seem to get the girl or guy. 

When it comes to business, would you rather work with someone who thinks that you are awesome and that everything you do is just a step on that shared path to inevitable success?  Or on the other hand, would you rather work for someone who points out your mistakes and has doubts about your chances at every turn? 

Having spent a career in new product development, everything that I have ever done had never been done before….until we did it.  Many times I have kicked off projects in front of an apathetic group of cube dwellers only to celebrate as a team of believers months later when presenting our success.  As a lowly project manager, all I had to offer was confidence and optimism every day.  People need to believe that the ride is worth taking with you.  Still to this day when someone comes to me and asks if we can do X my response is always that of course we can.  It is simply a matter of applying resources and framing success properly.  So often, people see you smiling and wonder what your secret is when the smile itself actually is the secret.  This may sound too simplistic and fluffy to intelligent people such as you and I but the power of confidence and positivity can’t be overstated. In fact, it is linked to reduced stress and more resilience as well.

Positivity Reduces Stress

Research has shown that replacing negative thoughts with positive ones reduces anxiety in those with diagnosed depression. There is much research linking optimism with reductions of common mental health issues such as stress and one might argue that traditional psychotherapy itself and especially cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on being more optimistic, detecting your automatic thoughts, and replacing these with more adaptive thinking (9).

Positivity Improves Resilience

Intuitively, it makes sense that an optimistic attitude that expects good things and explains bad things as abnormal, temporary, and caused by external factors would make one more resilient to setbacks.  Moreover, “mindsets that promote resilience” is the research basis for the very popular growth mindset movement  that I have previously written about.

In fact the military is currently training over a million soldiers to be more resilient in a somewhat controversial $125M program based largely on research about learned optimism and resilience. But what does the research say?

Interestingly, multiple studies have shown optimism to improve resilience among students that are in an academic setting (10,11).

Evaluate Your Own Optimism

So, do you want to be healthier, live longer, be more successful, less stressed, more resilient, and be a top performer?  With all of these benefits of positivity / optimism of course you do!  However, where do you sit today?  Are you already 80th percentile for optimism?  The following links are optimism evaluations created by Martin Seligman who is known as the father of “positive psychology” and is the 31st most cited psychologist of the 20th century:

• This Stanford link shares the optimism evaluation from Seligman’s book, “Learned Optimisim.” It provides some comparitive feedback about optimism as a net score and also breaks this down along three continuums of permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization . More information on interpreting these results can be found here and also here.
• This University of Pennsylvania evaluation requires you to create a free account and gives you results on how you rank in optimism versus the general population tested. I personally preferred the Stanford one above but am providing both.

Regardless of your evaluation results, the encouraging thing is that Dr Seligman claims that optimism can be learned.  Moreover, much of the research that I reviewed seems to suggest that optimism levels change over time.  So how can you positively become more positive?

Resources To Practice and Build Optimism

Many resources on becoming optimistic center around creating awareness of your thought processes and modifying them.

The ABCDE Method

Dr Seligman mentioned above, quantifies optimism based on the way people interpret events that happen to them (attributional style). He suggests that one can practice adding steps to the way they interpret adverse events in order to increase optimism. This is done by turning ABC into ABCDE as shown in this example (drawn heavily from here).

• A= Adversity: Someone cuts you off in traffic.
• B= Belief: You think, “I can’t believe that idiot was so rude and selfish!”
• C= Consequence: You are overcome with anger, yelling profanity at the other driver.

This can be augmented by adding a step D of disputing or developing counter evidence to the belief, and E energizing which is adding an energizing interpretation based on the counter evidence which then offsets the initial pessimistic conclusion.  To go back to the driving example:

• D=Dispute: I am over reacting.  I don’t know the circumstances.  Perhaps the other driver has a health or family emergency.  I have cut people off before as well.  Perhaps I should give him a break.
• E=Energize: I feel more relaxed.  Perhaps, I helped someone in a critical situation by not honking and getting angry.  I am glad that I am not in that situation myself.

This method is something to practice over time. Here is a worksheet that can be used to work on it yourself.

Valuable Optimism Building Tools

Similar to Seligman’s ABCDE method, much research as well as psychotherapy practice focuses on awareness and  re-framing one’s thinking.  By challenging negative self-talk and replacing pessimistic thoughts with more positive ones, people can learn how to become more optimistic. This article from the Mayo Clinic provides some guidance on self talk and optimism.

Gratitude Visit and Three Good Things

In this article, psychologists Medina and Seligman share the following “gratitude visit”, and “3 good things” exercises.

Gratitude Visit

“Identify someone who means a lot to you. Write that person a 300-word letter that concretely explains how that person has influenced your life. Visit the person and read the letter out loud. Seligman’s research found an immediate boost in the writer’s happiness that lasted a week after the visit and lingered for another month.”

Three Good Things

At the end of each day, recall 3 positive things that happened that day.  Write them down and beside each write why they happened.  This helps your brain rewire attributional style.  According to Dr Medina’s research the positive effects are observed within a week to a month.  

 Results using the gratitude visit and three good things exercises have been replicated at the Massachusetts School for Professional Psychology as well showing not only reduced depression but also providing “lifelong tools to combat negative thoughts and cultivate well-being.” (12)

Imagine Your Best Self

If the exercises above seem challenging or time consuming what about spending just 5 minutes per day?  According to this study, spending just 5 minutes per day imagining your best possible self can actually enhance optimism independent of the mood effect.  Subjects were simply asked to picture their best self along the following domains: personal, relational, and professional.  After 5 minutes per day over 2 weeks a measurable difference was seen as compared to a control group.

If all else Fails, Smile! 

If even 5 minutes per day sounds tough to maintain, what about simply forcing yourself to smile more?  We smile because we do not feel threatened according to psychologists.  Research suggests that the mere act of smiling has many of the benefits of optimism even if it is a forced smile (13,14,15). In fact, even using devices to create a smile, or tricking people into smiling has shown some benefit as well (16). Now if that doesn’t make you smile and feel optimistic, I don’t know what will.

The Power of Positivity is Undeniable

Times are tough and sometimes it can feel like there is not a lot to be positive about. However being a pessimistic Larry will not help you. As any optimist knows, the state of the world is in the eye of the beholder.  While optimism and motivation are rife with pseudoscience, the actual science is clear.  Optimists perform better, are healthier, live longer, are more successful, and are more resilient.  While motivational speeches may make one feel empowered in the moment, we looked at science backed ways to evaluate and even increase optimism long term in your life. Use this as a reference on your journey, wield this superpower happily,…..oh yeah and smile 🙂  

Consider sharing this article and let’s make a more optimistic world. If you have a question, comment, or a personal perspective to share about optimism and motivation please chime in on the comments below. We would love to hear from you.

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