January 8th, 2010
Self-Mastery Tip: Cultivating Realistic Learned Optimism
We’ve found that both research and our personal experience has revealed two things to be true when it comes to optimism:
- That an optimistic outlook can be extremely helpful to well-being, personal effectiveness and relationship satisfaction.
- That many believe it is more “realistic” to be pessimistic than it is to have an optimistic outlook.
This shows how critical it can be to cultivate an optimistic outlook that is also based on realism (as oppossed to “rose colored glasses”). Unrealistic optimism can be as damaging as pessimism when it comes to the ability to achieve important goals or experience satisfaction in life, so learning how to be both realistic and optimistic is critical. Read the rest of this Article »
