Optimism Can Give You the Success You Want

If you're like most of us, I think at times you probably struggle with staying optimistic in life. But what I want to say in this video is actually that you are, whether you know it or not, you are naturally an optimist. And um yeah, you are naturally an optimist. Now this means that your natural state of being is that you naturally anticipate good things happening in your life which may feel like it's a distant memory maybe if you remember it at all. But how can I say something like that? How can I say that you are a natural optimist? Well, what I point to is let me ask you this. How many children, how many toddlers do you know that you would classify as being naturally pessimistic? I would I would suggest that not many. I think most toddlers and really most of us when we when we're born when we're small, the natural factory setting is to be optimistic. So all children are born optimistic. Now the problem is now and that's very important. I'll talk about how essential it is to be optimistic and why that's the natural default for us. But of course what happens is with our natural optimism we run into all sorts of pain all sorts of trauma, complex trauma, unmet needs, lack of autonomy, lack of freedom, um neglect, all sorts of things. And it looks as if from that point of view that our optimism isn't working. And the assumption then becomes that this optimism of ours has left us in a sort of a defenseless vulnerable state. So what really happens then is we start to see this optimism that we have which is our natural state of being as the problem. Now the truth is the the optimism that we have was never the problem. In fact, if the child in that situation had been completely pessimistic as a default setting, the truth is it wouldn't have changed a thing. It the because the the truth of it is in childhood we are captive, right? So the had we been pessimistic, it wouldn't have changed the fact that our needs weren't been met or that we went through all these traumatic experiences or unmet needs. And it's an interesting thing because it's actually a form of blaming oneself when we become skeptical toward skeptical towards our own optimism. It's a sort of a sense of it's kind of my fault, right? Had I not been so naive and optimistic, I wouldn't have had exper I wouldn't have I wouldn't have had experienced so much suffering, which is not true. It's actually sort of a superstitious belief. Now, it's a very common belief that we pick up. we become skeptical towards our own sense, our natural state of optimism. But really another way of thinking about it is it's sort of a way of um not looking at the real cause of the suffering that we experience which is the neglect or the um if it doesn't come from the family of origin, it comes certainly soon after from the culture we're around. But it's nothing to do with our own innate sense of optimism. our innate sense of optimism is is so vitally important. Now, if you in your personal life are noticing that you're struggling with remaining optim um retaining a sense of optimism, it's so important to start addressing that because if you're going to take on any challenges in life, it is necessary to hold optimism. Think of it as what a child needs, right? So, a child can't walk. They have to learn how to walk. They have to learn how to eat. They have to learn how to use the bathroom. Immense challenges. Could you imagine having to go through all that without a sense of optimism? It will be impossible to do it. But it's the same for us as adults. If we're going to try and go after things or live life and uh thrive in life certainly, we need to retain a sense of optimism, which is our natural sense. So what we have to do is stop attacking that part of ourselves and seeing that as the problem because really that is an internalized voice of potentially strong language here maybe but internalized voice of our abuser or our tormentors when we were smaller. It's basically saying the problem wasn't with that person or with the parenting style that happened. the problem was with innately within myself and it wasn't. So once we can put in boundaries, once we can start to change our environment, start to do some work in ourselves, it's vitally important that we start to reconnect with that part of ourselves which is optimistic again. Now how we do this? How do we start to get in touch with that optimism? Well, the way I do it, and I talk about this in my book, it's on procrastination is to the easiest way I know to do it is to work with our story, right? So let's say whatever your situation is in life, you want to achieve a goal or you want to take something on, we'll have a story about I am struggling with this. This isn't going well. It's not going to go anywhere. There's no point. It'll never work for me. That is probably going to be our current story given that we are disconnected from our natural sense of optimism. So what we do is we start to first of all notice that the story that we're carrying is vitally important and we start to look at it more directly. We write it down on paper and we start to look at our relationship with our own story. Now initially it's going to be a pretty dark relationship, right? We won't like the story. We won't want to look at it for too long. But the work here is in looking at the story and working with it. working with it to transform it. And we start to gradually no, we we start off with a recognition that it is currently not optimistic and very very gradually start to change the story. Work with the story. We almost like you'd write it out as a paragraph. You keep revisiting it every day and try to see how much you can change it towards something that is more optimistic rather than pessimistic. Now, it doesn't have to go overnight from super pessimistic to optimistic, but gradually you look for you look for slight changes. So, if you're like a zero out of 10 in optimism, what your goal is to get it is to a two out of 10 and gradually three out of 10 to the point where eventually you're looking at this story, you're focusing on what it is that you really want and you're seeing reasons why it can happen for you in your life. You write it. I I I I tell people write it in the first person. Don't write it in the future tense. Write it in the first person tense or the present tense and start to be around it all the time like a daily exercise. I describe it more in the book, but basically it's one of the most fundamental things we can do to start changing our mindset. So take away from this short video is you hear people talking about pessimism and optimism. you are an optimist. You just maybe don't know it fully. And I would suggest to you that it is vitally important that you start to work on developing redeveloping that natural sense of optimism within yourself because I would I would say this. I would go as far as to say this. Whatever goal you have in your life, right, we tend to think of success as well, did it did I win? Did I lose? Did I get my way? Did it did it work? Did it not work? really how you should define how I certainly define success isn't in terms of what happened in terms of the outcome. It's in terms of how optimistic was I in the process of going after the goal. Cuz if you think about it, if you look at your life lifespan, you had sequences of wins or positive outcomes, but at no point in your life you experience a sense of optimism. I would say that those outcomes are pretty irrelevant. The the whole point is how often am I in a state of optimism and then the outcomes kind of take care of themselves. I I firmly believe that with a sense of optimism expecting positive things to happen in our life, we're far more likely to have positive outcomes, but the outcomes are secondary in terms of importance to the underlying sense of optimism that we're carrying on a day-to-day basis. because that determines how we feel internally. So if you want to check it out more um you can check out my book procrastination decoded. The big part of it the main kind of tool that I describe is doing this kind of story work or narrative work on ourselves. You can get that the link is in the description below. Hope that's a useful video. If you have any comments or feedback leave it below I always read the comments and I will see you guys again very soon. Thanks for watching. Take care. Bye-bye. [Music] [Applause]