How to Change
Your Mind and Your Life
Much of Martin Seligman's professional life has been spent thinking about the difference between optimists and pessimists. Bad events happen to everyone, but optimists bounce back faster and usually achieve better results. Why?
What Seligman found is that pessimists look at things in three unhelpful ways. They see bad events as permanent (it's always going to be like this), pervasive (this affects everything I do), and personal (it's my fault).
Optimists, on the other hand, see adverse events as temporary, specific, and external. They view adversities as one-time events, which affect only the present, and are caused by something outside themselves.
Their point of view also explains why optimists have higher self-esteem than pessimists. When bad events happen, everyone feels down, but optimists recover fast because their point of view energizes them.
In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin Seligman demonstrates a method for dealing with adversity in positive ways.
The steps are:
1. Objectively record what happened,
2. Note how you interpret what happened,
3. Write down as many feelings and actions as you can remember,
4. Dispute your interpretation of events, and
5. Observe how challenging negative reactions energizes you and and makes you ready to tackle life.
Martin Seligman got into this research by accident. He was trying to find out why an experimenter's dogs wouldn't cooperate in an experiment. What he found out was that by their prior treatment, these dogs had learned to be helpless. They had lost hope that they could influence events, in the same way many children learn to lose hope.
While a few of Seligman's examples (like his explanation of the 1988 presidential election) are questionable, the premise of the book is based on solid research.
People who grew up with poor self-esteem, dating to the way they were treated in childhood, may find this book especially helpful.
From Learned Optimism:
--"The commonness of being knocked flat by troubles, however, does not mean it is acceptable or that life has to be this way. If you use a different explanatory style, you'll be better equipped to cope with troubled times and keep them from propelling you toward depression."
--"Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better."
--"The good news is that pessimists can learn the skills of optimism and permanently improve the quality of their lives…"
