Like other essential skills and habits, optimism can be practiced and even learned, as shown in rigorous studies cited by Seligman in Learned Optimism. This is true, even in situations in which you seem to have no control.  For example, you have absolutely no control over the weather.  You do, however, have a choice regarding your response to the weather. Today’s beautiful sunny conditions and the torrential downpour of tomorrow are brief and temporary, fleeting in the scheme of things, and will change. Weather is never stable or enduring, and no weather condition lasts. This means that you might as well accept the weather, at the very least, or even be happy about it.  Weather is exactly what it is and not more. Why would you allow yourself to become unhappy or remorseful about something that you honestly cannot change?

Recognize each situation for what it is, whether a stable reality, an opportunity or simply an experience. Like most people you probably have false beliefs about specific conditions that reflect previous events and are incorrect. You have responses that you have repeatedly reinforced over time. Be prepared to better and more wisely interpret situations as they arise, whether they are new or experienced previously. Regard them more positively, and they will become more positive experiences for you.

To experience optimism in a given situation, first step aside and recognize your immediate thoughts or reaction toward the situation. This is whether the circumstance has been personally created by you, or whether you have found yourself in a situation over which you have no control. Your view of the situation, as a matter of choice, can metaphorically be viewed as the commonly stated ‘glass half-full or glass half-empty’ interpretation. As you encounter new scenarios, ask yourself: Am I seeing the best or the worst as my starting point?

 According to Martin Seligman, who has studied optimists for several decades, an optimist’s view of the world is one where defeat is just a temporary setback for the individual, and not his or her fault. A pessimist imagines the worst and is prone to depression, which is a different habit of thinking.1 In general terms, if you recognize a situation as temporary, then you are an optimist, and if you perceive it as permanent, then you are a pessimist.

Seligman conducted a thirty five year study that showed that pessimism in early adulthood results in poor health during middle and late adulthood. Similarly, Seligman’s colleague, Chris Peterson demonstrated that pessimism perpetuates helplessness, and showed that pessimistic individuals are likely to become ill more frequently, and remain unhealthy for a longer period of time. This is because their negative thinking perpetuates a helpless attitude. This also prevents individuals from taking the progressive steps necessary to fight illness.

Do you expect the best, do you count on good things to happen, and take a broad view in your response to events? If so, then you are an optimist. Optimists tend to be the ones called on when opportunities arise, thereby further supporting an optimistic approach. What do you expect will happen? Since the probability is higher that your expectations are realized, why not expect the best? Negative thinking is self-perpetuating and creates an outlook of discouragement.  Therefore, train your thoughts to be optimistic and with a positive orientation. Expect that an outcome will be favorable, and it is more likely to be favorable.

Practice optimism through hopeful and positive reactions to minimize your negative thinking. Recognize both uplifting and inspirational thought, as opposed to diminishing or de-motivating thought patterns as they occur, and you will start to choose more favorable responses to situations.

Have you considered optimism as a way of thinking? It is when you position yourself positively, resulting in the course that you take moving forward. Practicing optimism means that you believe and expect things will turn out well, and have the expectation of positive results.

Optimism is a skill that everyone can learn and practice at a high level, and yet it is often overlooked as absolutely essential to effective leadership and successful outcomes. There are a specific set of thought patterns associated with optimism. If you focus on positives, you will get more positives. If you focus on negatives, you will get more negatives. The data that supports this is now comprised of many thousands of research papers. These conclude that optimists are not only healthier and live longer, but also are more productive, successful, and more likely to achieve their goals. They are hefty promises, but worth pondering, and might lead you to making a shift towards greater optimism because the rewards are so great. Who can possibly argue against health, longevity and productivity?

To tag an objective with a thought, phrase, and statement, or even an affirmation, a picture, and a mantra, and then to tag it with a specific feeling will give you a richer, more expressive and very meaningful way to approach a goal. It undoubtedly casts the objective in a more significant light in your mind’s storage and retrieval system. How you view your goals and that of your organization, and communicate them, is also a personal choice. You can see them as dark, looming, and unreachable, or as completely within your reach and achievable within a specific time frame.

If you make a goal your own and really, truly want it, and then apply appropriate techniques to realize it, the goal will constantly be on your mind. This is similar to applying additional keywords and categories in a cataloging system. For example, a book tagged with an author, date, title, and numerous descriptive words is more likely to be retrieved than if it is catalogued only by the year of publication.

Your thoughts trigger an emotional state that gives rise to feelings. Elevation of these enable more optimal outcomes. With an orientation to outcomes you choose a more directed approach to your thinking. This thinking is also more aligned, purposeful and strategic. Simple thoughts and observations become more directive to the specific outcomes that you seek. Think it, see it, feel it, and experience it.

You might expect that an outside influence can make you feel better, and this is the basis of much of what we do discretionarily. Outside stimulants can make you feel better, but the more logical and obvious solution might be to closely examine how you feel. Once you have taken stock of and recognize exactly how you feel, then take a step to elevate that feeling. Since every feeling is somewhere on a continuum, work to move it up a notch. Take your feeling up a level, leading to progressively better thoughts, or higher thinking. You have an opportunity to optimize your feelings about past, present and future events. When you create feelings that are higher along a range of options, you build better memories, moments and expectations. You can elevate your feelings to achieve better thought, and thereby not be harnessed by negative experiences in your past, or by fears associated with the future.

When a feeling is attached to a thought or event, it has an entirely new reference point for retrieval, and you apply a label, by tagging it as important. This means you have the ability to not only change your thinking, but you can also change your feelings. If you are wondering whether you can elevate feelings as a choice, the answer is yes. On the continuum of feelings, to elevate from fear to joy might be a stretch, but if you are feeling doubt, you might take it up somewhat, to mere disappointment. If you feel anger, intentionally change it to a feeling of concern and empathy. If you feel hopeful, which is a positive emotion, this feeling can be upgraded to optimism. By continually striving to reach higher feelings you can attach stronger and more positive tags to your experiences.

How does this relate to outcomes? If you attach an emotional feel good tag to an objective, then it is more likely to occur, because as humans we usually seek pleasure and avoid pain, in a basic innate life over death choice of existence. Attach a positive feeling to your objective, and it is more likely to occur because you have emotionally tagged the outcome. You will go after it, unconsciously and consciously, towards realization.

Clearly tuning into our feelings has been more challenging for all of us recently, because of what might be referred to as the age of bombardment. This is a time of technological advancement when your attentions can easily become overwhelmed by information, and an absorption and analysis dilemma. You might be experiencing an incessant barrage of input, and a feeling of being inundated. People often experience an unstoppable stream of thought that can be like a torrent and one that does not shut down even when you sleep. This can lead to over arousal and sleeplessness, and a never ending cycle of feeling overwhelmed.

Think of yourself standing near a park bench trying to drink from a fire hose, when it is a water fountain that you need, or consider an overreaction from a colleague, when a yes or no was all you required. A one hundred page report can be redundant when the information could easily be summarized in a single page. Some things seem impossible to turn off, or even to lessen, and your resulting feelings are often less than optimal.

When we are overwhelmed or experiencing conflicting feelings, we might reach for a headache tablet or a sleeping pill. We might sip a drink, or a have a bite to eat, all just in order to feel better. Each of these simple actions to improve feelings can lead to addiction, to drug use, to alcohol abuse, or overeating. This is why it is important to learn how to switch off the constant stream that may be continually flowing in your mind. Not only are you receiving and absorbing continual input, you are also attempting to process it.  Just as it is difficult to drink from a fire hose, it is not easy to think clearly when you are being confronted by multiple stimuli. In order to develop the ability to keep your orientation on what is important, and to maintain your thoughts on what matters, a dedicated effort and continual practice is required.

Feelings have been categorized across a complex continuum, from pain to pleasure. Feelings are now also understood to be completely subjective. A rose may be prickly in one experience but admirable in another, and within each of these experiences you might also choose just the opposite perception and related feeling. If you see a lush apple tree laden with fruit, some individuals might simply pass by, perceiving that the tree is too large, the apples too ripe, or the branches too heavy. Others might stop in admiration. Your perceptions are unique to you, and are relative to your past experiences, how you interpret them, your belief systems, your knowledge base and numerous other factors.

The ‘feeling’ component of orientation to outcomes follows in the process of understanding how your thoughts influence what actually happens for you. Your ‘state of being’ ultimately comes down to how you feel, and by paying attention to your feelings, you can better understand and manage them. There is significant data to support this, including work by Richard Davidson at the University of Madison, who used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine Buddhist monks in meditation. He demonstrated that when images of emotion and feeling, such as compassion were focused on, left prefrontal brain activity, where feeling occurs, exceeded that of the right side for these practitioners. What this means is that a positive state can be trained. Moods are trainable mental states. This experiment elegantly emphasizes the power of your thoughts and your ability to manage them. You can rearrange your neural circuits through the power of your mind.

It is likely that for you, as for most individuals, visual images are so meaningful they comprise your dominant learning style. You probably are aware of how you learn best, and that people learn in different ways. The three major types of learning are based on the visual, auditory and feeling areas. Great teachers attempt to incorporate each into effective learning systems. Seeing a picture is truly worth a thousand words because it represents what you are most likely to remember and recreate in your mind.

Visual methodologies have been used for centuries by athletic coaches of competitive sport, and are used by personal and professional coaches for broader goal setting and achievement. They are also utilized by behavioral psychologists in therapy and issue resolution, and by artists to create concepts long before applying brush to palette. These are examples of how your mind interprets what it sees, and what your mind can create to pursue an idea.

This is also how a leader can best motivate and inspire, by painting a vision, and it is how you and your team can most readily accomplish your goals. It is the simplest shortcut imaginable, precisely because it involves imagination, which by its very definition is what you create in your mind’s eye.

Do you ever wonder about the power of feelings relative to analytical thinking? The importance of personal feelings explain why when you look at a picture of an apple you can also taste it, hear the crunch and feel its smoothness. You tie recollections into patterns of memory, and can experience them from the past, in the present, and you additionally project them into the future.

Over twenty five per cent of your brain is devoted to visual perception, so visualizing is often your strongest way of expressing a thought. This also explains why visuals, real or imagined, are so helpful to focus on to create outcomes. You can make them a part of the realization process. In addition to thinking about an outcome, seeing a success in advance occurs when you utilize the visual portion of your brain. You can maximize the powerful use of visual images for completing goals, making decisions, and filtering information so it is meaningful for you. 

Art appreciation is a mechanism for strengthening your visual sense. Most people can easily recall in detail a favorite painting, the color palette, the forms and shades, its’ shadows and design elements. You cannot accurately reproduce a great work of art that you love, and yet with practice you can clearly see it in your mind. The same applies to a nature scene that was more than a mere glance for you, a place so remarkable that you stopped to study all of its elements and captured it for future referral. Stop for a moment and return to that special place. See it clearly and experience it once again. It can be as real as if you were peering out from a hillside into the space you cherish.

In addition to strengthening your visual memories through re-creation and recall, you can also create future realities through visuals. You can specifically recall significant past events and meaningful moments in your life. When these are in your past, and you choose to re-experience them, you bring them into the present. Similarly you can create future events in your mind, and also transport them into the present. You can call it daydreaming, but it is real for you none the less. Whether visual images are in your past or in your future, they can be equally strong when you choose to place them in your present.

Antonio Damasio, well known in the field of conscious thinking, described images as more than just visual. He discussed what our senses lead us to experience, when he said ‘knowing all about the hunger, the thirst, the tears, the laughter, the punches, the flow of images we call thought, the feelings, the words, the stories, the beliefs, the music and the poetry, the happiness…’ Damasio looked closely at how the mind processes what it finds. He summarized how consciousness of self changes the brain’s maps from non-conscious mental patterns to conscious mental images:

 Without the guidance of images, actions would not take us far. Good actions need the company of good images. Images allow us to choose among repertoires of previously available patterns of action and optimize the delivery of the chosen action – we can, more or less deliberately, more or less automatically, review mentally the images which represent different options of action. We can pick and choose the most appropriate and reject the bad ones.

Mental images are more than just what you see. You create many different types of images in your thoughts. They are visual, auditory and tactile, and other forms, and in creating them, you strengthen the brain wiring associated with those thoughts and images.  In fact you reinforce what you focus on and what you attend to. This is once again why your thoughts matter so much, and why understanding that your thoughts are your personal choice is important to appreciate.

Hooray, another birthday! I am still thinking about the power of thoughts.

If you think about an apple, your brain patterns, as captured by functional magnetic resonance imaging, are the same as when you are actually looking at an apple, or looking at a picture of it. Your thoughts are strong reinforcers and increase the probability of actuality and realization. This is because of what you facilitate and draw to yourself through your thinking. This is also why you should train yourself to think about that which you wish to be, do, have, feel, experience or influence. By changing your thinking, so that your approach is more oriented to the successful outcomes that you desire, you are much more likely to achieve them. Far too often, people think that their lives are out of control, forgetting that they are at the wheel, steering their vehicle in the direction it is moving. Think crisp, think clear!

Jeffrey Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of California worked with individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder, teaching them to change their thinking through refocusing. When they redirected their thoughts, he found they made significant improvements. Schwartz coined the term self-directed neuroplasticity and is author of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. He suggests that mental images help to generate new mental maps so they become hardwired circuitry.  It is our mental maps and hardwired circuitry that determine how we behave when we are on autopilot. Working to create new ones, or new habits, allows us to accelerate our leadership abilities by developing better habits faster.

You can practice this skill, where you create and reinforce new mental maps geared towards your outcomes. Pick one very specific goal that you know you can accomplish in a short time. Choose a goal you can achieve in perhaps several weeks or a few months. This should be something you truly wish to accomplish, and completely focus your mind on it every day. To help you achieve this outcome or objective, you can train your brain to achieve it with your thoughts. Great stuff and great thinking…

In 1995 Pascual-Leone, a Harvard University neuroscientist, found that when volunteers practiced playing a piano piece over five days, a part of the motor cortex of their brain expanded. This is the portion responsible for movement. When Pascual instructed another group of volunteers to think about practicing the same piano piece, they showed the same expansion of their motor cortex.

Your thoughts are powerful, and thinking about an experience can be as powerful as the actual experience, in terms of how your brain changes.

This means that you must not only select that which you think about, but it also tells you to be very careful as you choose what you think about.  Your thoughts are real, as real as reality. Watch what you think about.