Turn Pessimism Into Optimism

Welcome to LegalBiz Cafe! Digitally remastered with AI, in this podcast series, Attorney Shaune B. Arnold gives to frustrated professionals like YOU the tools and resources you need to make the LEAP to entrepreneurship so you can start, build or fix a business you will absolutely LOVE. 

 In this insightful episode, Shaune explores how our self-talk shapes success. Drawing from Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism, she reveals how childhood messages influence our inner voice—and how to rewrite that narrative. You’ll learn to challenge limiting beliefs and transform pessimism into powerful, purposeful optimism. 

Transcript

Hello, everyone. And welcome, …once again, …to this week's episode of legal Biz cafe. I am your host attorney Shaune B Arnold, and I'm just excited to be here with you today. We’re going to talk about optimism and how to turn pessimism into optimism. But before we go gettin’ all bold and believing, I want to deal quickly with some housekeeping matters.

Let me tell you what we’re doing here on legal biz café. We look at various issues that are of value to entrepreneurs to get you into business. We also consider what to do if you find yourself feeling frustrated because being an entrepreneur wasn't quite what you thought it was going to be. You find yourself feeling like a hamster on a wheel just sort of chasing around and not really functioning well and getting the things that you want out of being in business.

You know that I have another show called Your Business, Accelerated! On that show, we deal with the hardcore business and legal issues that can tank your business overnight. When you listen to LegalBiz Café AND Your Business, Accelerated! you put arrows in your quiver and make yourself an entrepreneur warrior, not a worrier. To that end, I am really, really happy to talk about turning pessimism into optimism.

Martin Seligman, PhD, wrote a book called Learnd Optimism. He’s a psychologist who did a number of experiments back in the 1970s on depression. Learnd Optimism chronicles his journey through all of that research. For that reason, it's a bit of a difficult read. You're really wanting just to read about turning pessimism into optimism, and instead you're getting all of this back story on psychology experiments. Bear with it, though, because this is really an excellent book.

Seligman starts out by telling us that each of us is born with a word in our heart, and that word, ladies and gentlemen, is either yes or no. When things happen, your response to whatever happens, to whatever opportunity is provided to you, your response is either a yes or a no. I have a friend who I don't care what I say to him, the first word out of his mouth is either “no,” “stop” or don't.

I call him Mr. No, Stop, Don't. That is definitely an individual who has the word no in his heart. That “no” leads in every conversation he has, and it leads every decision he makes. He is often stuck in a place he doesn't want to be in.

So, examine your heart. What is the first thing you say to opportunity? Do you say yes? Do you leap and grow your wings on the way down? Or do you sit there with a “no,” a “stop” and a “don't” on your heart?

This whole subject matter of optimism really came up in a sort of round-about way for Seligman. He was conducting experiments on rats. He had two boxes of rats. In one box, he had a set of rats that could press a lever and stop an uncomfortable electric charge that was running under their feet.

In another nearby box, there was another set of rats that also had an electric charge under their feet. This particular set of rats were also in a box with a lever. However, nothing they did would turn off that electrical charge. They pressed the lever. They ran around in circles. They jumped up and down. Eventually, they just laid down on the floor of the box and just sat in the pain.

Fast forward to another set of experiments with the same two sets of rats. The first set of rats was put in a box that had an electrical charge. All they had to do was jump over a really low barrier into another box where there was no current. 

Every last one of the rats that were in the first box, where they could press the lever and stop the electrical charge, jumped the low barrier and made it away from the electrical charge. However, the rats that had been in the second box, where nothing they did would stop the electrical charge, had a very different reaction. All they had to do was jump over the low barrier to a second box that had no charge. None of the rats in the second group jumped over the barrier. They went around in circles and just sat down in the pain.

My goodness, that second set of rats was not able to do anything for themselves. They literally curled in on themselves and laid down on top of the electrical charge and didn't jump over the barrier. They had learnd they were helpless.

Now, here's the thing that was so odd about this response – this learnd helplessness in the second set of rats. The behavior the second set of rats exhibited looked a lot like the symptoms of depression. Mr. Seligman thought to map across and see if learnd helplessness had anything to do with depression in humans.

In looking at depression in humans, Seligman discovered that our habit of talking to ourselves has everything to do with whether we are optimistic or pessimistic. Specifically, he says that your explanatory style is more than just the words that you say when you fail. It's a habit of thought that you actually learned during childhood.

Seligman says our mothers are our main caretaker when we are very young. So, it's really our mother that teaches us how to talk to ourselves when things go wrong. Seligman says this learned explanatory style is taken directly from our view of our world.

Now, listen closely. This is what I want you to get. Your explanatory style stems from thinking either you're valuable and deserving or that you are worthless and hopeless. And this is the hallmark of whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

So how do you talk to yourself when things go wrong? Do you say, better luck next time, or do you call yourself a loser, or an idiot. Are you your best friend when things go wrong, or are you your own worst enemy?

Seligman found there's a difference in boys’ and girls’ self-explanatory style. This is because the way we tell a girl why she failed when she failed tends to have very permanent reasons, whereas we tend to tell boys temporary reasons.

Boys are usually very high energy, and they wiggle around a lot in class. They whisper and throw spit balls and papers. They do a lot of things that are physically disruptive to the classroom, and so the teacher will often tell the boy when he gets a bad test result, oh, it's because you move around too much, you wiggle too much and you don't pay attention. And these are all temporary causes of his failure.

Females, on the other hand, tend to be a lot more compliant when they're in class. They don't wiggle around as much. They don't tend to talk as much. They don't tend to throw as many spit balls and paper. The teacher tends to tell the girl when she fails that she didn't study hard enough or she just doesn’t understand the work.

These are much more permanent reasons for why the girl failed. When she then talks to herself about her failure, she tends to internalize that failure a lot more than the boy does. He tends to think, “Oh, well, you know, I can pay attention next week and I can get it. I can get that information the teacher wanted me to get.” He thinks it's a matter of choice.

The way that we talk to ourselves stems from the way our caregivers talked to us back in the day. But it doesn't have to be permanent. If you find you had the kind of childhood nurturing or lack thereof that created an explanatory style for you where the word in your heart is “no,” or with your explanatory style, you tell yourself you failed for permanent reasons, like you're not good enough, you can actually change that. You can actually turn that around.

Your level of optimism is measured by how you habitually talk to yourself when things go wrong. Understand, you can actually learn to talk to yourself differently when things go wrong.

You can dispute the conclusions in your head. If you say to yourself, “Oh, I'm such a loser!” or "I'm so stupid!" Promptly ask yourself for some proof of that statement. I think that you will find the proof is not there. 

Distract yourself from that train of thought. A good way to do it is to just think of something else more empowering. Ask yourself, what else might be the reason that you failed besides the awful statement that you’re a loser or you're stupid.

I invite you to say something different to yourself when you drop something, or you don’t get something you went after. You are not clumsy and you didn't fail because God hates you. 

Give yourself different reasons that will empower you and leave you feeling positive about why things went wrong. If you're thinking something permanent, make another choice. You can study and take the test again. Right...? 

It's just that simple. Affirmatively make another choice about why things didn't go as planned, and turn pessimism into optimism.

Ladies and gentlemen, I really want to thank you for trusting me and for joining me on this week's episode of legal biz cafe. I'm attorney Shaune B Arnold. I encourage you to follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter X. In all of those places you’ll find me as Shaune dot Arnold. In the meantime, and in between time, I’m reminding you, as always, to MAXIMIZE your COMPETENCE to get the CONFIDENCE YOU NEED to succeed.

I’ll see you right back here next week, on LegalBiz Café. Bye-bye, friends!