How Does Optimism Affect Happiness?
Do you have the Optimistic Explanatory Style?
Optimism refers to hopefulness and confidence about the future, or about a successful outcome of a certain thing.
Optimism is in itself a positive feeling, or characterized by positive feelings (hopefulness and confidence). In addition, it points to a positive outcome or future (positive potentials). It is thus associated with happiness through these positive feelings and positive potentials.
More fundamentally, optimism can become a mental tendency, not just being hopeful and confident toward something in particular based on specific conditions.
Optimistic people, that is, people with optimism as a mental tendency, have a way of explaining things differently from others, and in opposite to pessimistic people.
This style of explaining things is called Optimistic Explanatory Style. It can be summarized as:
When something goes well, optimistic people tend to explain it as: It’s due to internal reasons or the self; it can apply to other things; and it can always be like this. (Internal reasons/self, everything, always). In other words, it is a rule not a coincidence.
When something goes bad, they tend to explain it as: It’s due to external reasons; it will not happen to other things; and it will not always happen like this. (External reasons, just this thing, just this time). In other words, it’s coincidental.
These explanations might not always be the most objective or accurate in reality. However, having this style of explanation leads people to stay hopeful, and motivates their actions in a successful direction, enabling higher success rates for positive outcomes.
In bad situations, this explanatory style facilitates resilience.
Being hopeful, resilient, and successful are all conducive to happiness.
Research has born these out.
This beneficial explanatory style can be learned by anyone with proper training. You can develop this style into your natural responding tendency, with research-proven techniques, best under professional guidance.
The training and guidance are now provided through our coaching service. So, if you haven’t, click “subscribe now” to get access to the services and other benefits. See you there for building your optimism, resilience, and happiness!!!
Optimism IS my mental tendency, my baseline. I am so glad I found myself again after suffering from MH issues. We can all train ourselves to be this way, as you say.