02 Dec Optimism: The great motivating force (DANIEL GOLEMAN)
Seligman defines optimism in terms of how people explain to
themselves their successes and failures. People who are optimistic see
a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can
succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for failure,
ascribing it to some lasting characteristic they are helpless to change.
These differing explanations have profound implications for how
people respond to life. For example, in reaction to a disappointment
such as being turned down for a job, optimists tend to respond
actively and hopefully, by formulating a plan of action, say, or
seeking out help and advice; they see the setback as something that
can be remedied. Pessimists, by contrast, react to such setbacks by
assuming there is nothing they can do to make things go better the
next time, and so do nothing about the problem; they see the setback
as due to some personal deficit that will always plague them.
As with hope, optimism predicts academic success. In a study of five
hundred members of the incoming freshman class of 1984 at the
University of Pennsylvania, the students’ scores on a test of optimism
were a better predictor of their actual grades freshman year than were
their SAT scores or their high-school grades. Said Seligman, who
studied them, “College entrance exams measure talent, while
explanatory style tells you who gives up. It is the combination of
reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat
that leads to success. What’s missing in tests of ability is motivation.
What you need to know about someone is whether they will keep
going when things get frustrating. My hunch is that for a given level
of intelligence, your actual achievement is a function not just of
talent, but also of the capacity to stand defeat.”23
One of the most telling demonstrations of the power of optimism to
motivate people is a study Seligman did of insurance salesmen with
the MetLife company. Being able to take a rejection with grace is
essential in sales of all kinds, especially with a product like insurance,
where the ratio of noes to yeses can be so discouragingly high. For
this reason, about three quarters of insurance salesmen quit in their
first three years. Seligman found that new salesmen who were by
nature optimists sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two
years on the job than did pessimists. And during the first year the
pessimists quit at twice the rate of the optimists.
What’s more, Seligman persuaded MetLife to hire a special group of
applicants who scored high on a test for optimism but failed the
normal screening tests (which compared a range of their attitudes to a
standard profile based on answers from agents who have been
successful). This special group outsold the pessimists by 21 percent in
their first year, and 57 percent in the second.
Just why optimism makes such a difference in sales success speaks
to the sense in which it is an emotionally intelligent attitude. Each no
a salesperson gets is a small defeat. The emotional reaction to that
defeat is crucial to the ability to marshal enough motivation to
continue. As the noes mount up, morale can deteriorate, making it
harder and harder to pick up the phone for the next call. Such
rejection is especially hard to take for a pessimist, who interprets it as
meaning, “I’m a failure at this; I’ll never make a sale”—an
interpretation that is sure to trigger apathy and defeatism, if not
depression. Optimists, on the other hand, tell themselves, “I’m using
the wrong approach,” or “That last person was just in a bad mood.”
By seeing not themselves but something in the situation as the reason
for their failure, they can change their approach in the next call.
While the pessimist’s mental set leads to despair, the optimist’s
spawns hope.
One source of a positive or negative outlook may well be inborn
temperament; some people by nature tend one way or the other. But
as we shall also see in Chapter 14, temperament can be tempered by
experience. Optimism and hope—like helplessness and despair—can
be learned. Underlying both is an outlook psychologists call selfefficacy, the belief that one has mastery over the events of one’s life
and can meet challenges as they come up. Developing a competency
of any kind strengthens the sense of self-efficacy, making a person
more willing to take risks and seek out more demanding challenges.
And surmounting those challenges in turn increases the sense of selfefficacy. This attitude makes people more likely to make the best use
of whatever skills they may have—or to do what it takes to develop
them.
Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist who has done much of the
research on self-efficacy, sums it up well: “People’s beliefs about their
abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed
property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who
have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach
things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about
what can go wrong.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
DANIEL GOLEMAN
