How to Cultivate More Optimism

“Always look on the bright side of life.”
~ Eric Idle

Did you start singing as you were reading that quote? Maybe you recognize the lyric from the movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Cutting edge at the time it was released in 1979, the satirical comedy has remained wildly popular.

I’ll confess, I’m not a Monty Python fan, but I appreciate the song, which Eric Idle said he purposely wrote in a Disney-esque style, as an anthem to optimism.

“Always look on the bright side of life” sounds like good advice, especially these days, but the viewpoint comes more naturally to some of us than others.

Are you a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full kind of person?

Each of us has a genetic predisposition toward a certain degree of happiness and optimism, which psychologist Sonya Lyubomirsky calls our happiness set point in her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. According to her studies, our innate tendencies account for 50 percent of our dispositions, which means that a large percentage of our attitudes towards life and luck are under our control.

In addition to the genetic component, some of our views about the future—how hopeful and confident we are—are formed based on our early life experiences, and the number of hard knocks we’ve encountered. Professor Lyubomirsky says these life circumstances account for another 10 percent.

The remaining 40 percent initially comes from our parents’ beliefs about the extent to which good things will happen to them. Even when parents don’t address the topic of hope directly, their assessments and attributions about their fortunes greatly affect our own worldview.

Think about your parents, or the people who raised you, and the way they viewed life. How would you describe them?

Were they more likely to see things in a positive light? Better, even, than they actually were?

Or did they see life as more likely to disappoint than not?

My mom was an extreme optimist. She was fearless, always expecting things to work out. When she decided to do something, there was no looking back.

My dad was more likely to worry about things not turning out. I think his level of sensitivity gave him an awareness about the possibilities for failure in any endeavor.

He often described my mom and her family as “wearing rose-colored glasses,” a phrase I was reminded of as I searched for new eyeglass frames this week. (Curious about how the idiom came about, I looked it up. It seems that there are no certain answers, but here are some interesting possibilities.)

I’m like my dad in temperament—keenly aware of the pitfalls of life, and as a result, a bit on the cautious side. Because he threw water on a lot of her ideas, at least at first, my mom sometimes accused him of being a pessimist, but he considered himself a realist.

It was a curious dynamic to grow up with, but my folks’ polar opposite traits often balanced each other. Mom took us on many off-the-beaten-path outings and encouraged us to try anything we “got a mind to.” Dad made sure the cars were filled with gas, and was never without a map. (In part, she was able to be so spontaneous because he was always there for backup in case things didn’t turn out.)

As kids we learned the benefits of both viewpoints. Rather than looking only looking on the bright side of life, my siblings and I learned the advantages of being both optimistic and prepared.

What did your family teach you about disappointments and how to handle them?

Some parents unintentionally influence their children toward being more pessimistic as a shield against disappointments in life. If you expect the worst, it can act as an emotional cushion for the times when things don’t work out. But it can also create a kind of learned helplessness. Why try if you believe the likelihood of success is small?

A better tactic is to teach our children, even our adult ones, to expect that their plans will work out, but to underpin that hope with action designed to make sure they do.

If you plan, and then work hard, you can make things more likely to go your way. As the saying goes, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

Perhaps more importantly, we need to learn what to do when we fail, or when life throws us curveballs. Instead of approaching life from a fearful stance, we can work on expanding our capacity to handle disappointment when it happens. Rather than being overly tied to a certain outcome, we can remain flexible and open to possibilities we had not considered.

Ever since I learned about the 40 percent of my attitude that is under my control, I’ve been laser focused on increasing my level of hopefulness and optimism. I have a stack of positive psychology books with titles like Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, and Flourish, (all by Martin E. P. Seligman, the “Father of Positive Psychology”), which outline the steps we can take to cultivate these traits. Despite my cautious nature, I’ve been taking more risks, confident that I’ll be able to handle it if my plans or projects don’t work out.

What about you? Where do you fall on the optimism scale?

Why not take your 40 percent out for a spin to see what it can do for you?

Affectionately,

Elaine