“Sustaining Momentum Through Continued Optimism”

You need to ask yourself the question, or listen to the people with whom you are responsible, just listen to them. And the question is, how do they think or, first person, how do I think when bad news happens? Okay, that’s the question.  Any of you ever faced any bad news? Often?  Okay, how do we think when bad things happen? Now you have bad things, you need to be your own translator on that.

If you’re a pessimist, what you do is you globalize the bad. You let it contaminate, say it happened to work, you let it contaminate your social life, your family life, and so it’s called globalizing, but it’s contaminating everything, every part of your life. An optimist when bad things happen, they isolate it . So you want to get into the pattern of isolating the bad situations and not let it contaminate the whole. So you be the judge of yourself. You listen to your own people, listen to how your organization thinks. Is it awful? Everything’s going to be screwed up? Ah, and I you know, whatever. Okay. The other thing when a bad thing happens, a pessimist eternalizes it, by “eternal-izes” that. Screwed up forever.

What do you think the optimists does? They do what they call temporalizes it they see what’s going to be pretty tough and not too happy for a little while, we’ll get ourselves through it. They put a time frame on it. How about you? What’s it like in your company? How are you listening and managing and coaching the people around you?  So you can hear how they talk. And now you know how powerful self-talk is. But you also now know it can put you into a real downward spiral. And it can cause a lot of unhappy and unsatisfactory results.

The other thing that happens when bad things occur to a pessimist, is they take full accountability. Now sounds funny about accountability. But I think they caused it all. It’s all my fault. Now, it may have been partially their fault, but they take all the accountability. Now, what the optimist does is they look at it and take their share of the accountability, they can look at where it isn’t, they had no control over it. They don’t then put a full list on themselves. But we don’t want to be one to give up accountability by any means. So you got to make that distinction.

But now there’s another point to it. Watch people that you’re working with. How do they think when good things happen? Oh, this is just as important. A pessimist when something good happens? They say but it was only in this one little area. Can you imagine they just the opposite. They isolate the good. You know, it’d be like that.

So you’re going to be a great coach and a great mentor and a much better leader. Because you’re listening differently now that you know how people think, going to be able to expand them and broaden them. It’s going to be very important. Ah, so what do you think the optimist thinks like when something good happens? Ah, my luck is it’s all over. Everything’s going well, they let it they let it contaminate everything they do just the opposite. They globalized the good. Ah, and the pessimist when something good happens says, but it won’t last you got it.

They temporalize it. And though you think the optimist does they do just the opposite. They say Oh, my luck has changed forever, things are going to be great. You know, things are on a roll and more will follow. So listen, it’s better to be an optimist than a pessimist if you got a heart attack, or if you got a disease, your success in the world is greatly reduced.

Your life goes better by far healthy business, etc. If you’re an optimist instead of a pessimist. It doesn’t mean to be Pollyanna and build a scotoma to the bad at all. That’s not what we’re talking about. How do you think when bad things strike you?