Sage Solutions
Advice and insight about personal growth, personal development, and becoming your best self.
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Pragmatic Optimism
Pragmatic optimism combines positive expectations with realistic action, creating a powerful mindset that transforms how we approach challenges and improves health, relationships, and goal achievement.
• Optimism and pessimism exist on a spectrum that deals with our expectations and hope for outcomes
• The realistic-idealistic spectrum is separate and deals with our assessment of reality
• Pragmatic optimism merges optimism with realism and practical action
• Martin Seligman's research shows optimism is a learnable skill based on our "explanatory style"
• Pessimists view setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal
• Optimists see challenges as temporary, specific, and nuanced with both internal/external factors
• Studies show optimists have better cardiovascular health and live 11-15% longer
• Optimists experience less stress, stronger immune systems, and better mental health
• Benefits include greater persistence, proactive goal-setting, opportunity focus, enhanced happiness
• Cultivate pragmatic optimism by challenging assumptions, focusing on what you can control
• Practice the ABCDE method: Adversity, Beliefs, Consequences, Dispute, Energy
• Pessimism still has appropriate uses for acknowledging tragedy or identifying potential problems
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Welcome to the Sage Solutions Podcast, where we talk about all things personal growth, personal development and becoming your best self. My name is David Sage and I am a self-worth and confidence coach with Sage Coaching Solutions. With Sage Coaching Solutions, I am thrilled that you're here joining me today, because today's topic is one that I've been looking forward to doing for quite a while now. We're about to take a deep dive into a topic that really does honestly have the power to reshape your entire perspective and, from there, the way that you view your life. We're talking about a concept that I've been calling pragmatic optimism. But before we get into it, our goal with this podcast is to share free, helpful tools with you and anyone you know who is looking to improve their life. So take action, subscribe and share this podcast with them. So just be positive. Well, thank you for coming to the Sage. Just kidding, I'm not just another positivity guru here to tell you that everything is great and sunshine and rainbows, and just think happy thoughts. Okay, now, before you think, here comes another positivity guru just telling me to think happy thoughts and just be positive. If you give me a few minutes, you'll see that that is not what I'm talking about, because what we're discussing today is far more nuanced we embrace shades of gray on this podcast and not just nuanced, it's far more powerful and it's backed by some incredible research.
Speaker 1:This isn't about putting on rose-colored glasses and ignoring reality or pretending that everything is always good and happy. It's more like putting on your work boots, acknowledging the terrain ahead and being confident in your ability to navigate it. It's not ignoring challenges. It's about facing them with a resilient, solution-oriented mindset. Is the glass half full or is the glass half empty, empty? This is often what optimism and pessimism are boiled down to, and, frankly, it's way more complicated than that. Many of us, when we hear the word optimism, immediately picture someone with their head in the clouds maybe a little naive, always seeing the glass half full, maybe a little naive, always seeing the glass half full, even when it's straight up empty. And then there's pessimism, the perpetual worrier, the Eeyore in our lives, the one who always expects the worst. We often see these two as two ends of a simple spectrum, but that's not how reality works In real life. There's shades of gray, which is why that's an incomplete picture.
Speaker 1:To start with, pessimism to optimism if we boil them down to their coreism is about positive framing, hope and a belief that things will go well, at least in its purest form, at its extreme. It's also associated with a positive attitude, an internal locus of control, giving low weight to bad things and high weight to good things, making the most of every situation, taking action, planning, agency, curiosity, a growth mindset, believing in yourself and in others. They're associated with being easygoing, confident, with believing in abundance and having courage. Let's turn it to pessimism. Pessimism uses negative framing, often a feeling of hopelessness and a belief that things won't go well, of hopelessness and a belief that things won't go well. It's also associated with a negative attitude, an external locus of control, high weight to bad things and a low weight to good things, to giving up to worrying, catastrophizing. It's often linked to cynicism and skepticism. They tend not to believe in themselves or in others, are often more uptight, insecure, believe in scarcity and have a lot more fear. And not only that pessimists tend to give more scope to bad things, meaning that a bad event has a wider meaning, not just a deeper meaning, and, of course, the opposite for good. And then it's the complete reverse, for optimists giving more scope and meaning to good things and less scope and meaning to bad things, and both of them can be on this separate spectrum of unrealistic to realistic. But to keep on the optimism versus pessimism spectrum, to keep on the optimism versus pessimism spectrum, we've talked about the far ends of optimism and pessimism being a belief that things will go wrong and a belief that things will go right for pessimism and optimism respectively. But very few people are that far on the spectrum and I'm not one to often advocate for such black and white approaches. A more realistic version of the normal pessimist and the normal optimist is that a normal optimist tends to frame things more positively and believe that things are likely to go right, and they have a feeling of hope maybe not always Whereas a pessimist tends to frame things negatively, believes that things are not likely to go well and often has much less hope.
Speaker 1:I want to introduce another layer to this discussion the difference between being realistic and idealistic. I want you to imagine two spectrums. One goes from optimism to pessimism. The other goes from unrealistic to realistic. So let's take a look at the second spectrum realistic to unrealistic, or possibly even delusional or naive.
Speaker 1:Whether somebody is an optimist or whether they're a pessimist does not determine whether they are realistic or unrealistic, delusional or naive. You can be a realistic pessimist and you can be a realistic optimist. You can also be a naive or delusional pessimist and you can be a naive or delusional optimist. The positive version of being unrealistic is called idealism and the negative version of being unrealistic is called defeatism. I don't think I have to make that strong of an argument to say that it is much, much more helpful to be realistic than delusional, which means that the sweet spot is definitely not idealism or defeatism. So if we're starting from the assumption that being realistic is generally the most beneficial and remember you can only be so realistic because you don't know everything, so everyone is unrealistic sometimes simply because they just don't know everything and also, to leave a little shade of gray here, there can be value in examining defeatist thinking for understanding where somebody else is at, and there can be value in idealistic thinking for creativity and possibly changing the world or the future to become more idealistic. But both of them are very niche use cases.
Speaker 1:The idealistic optimist believes things will be great no matter what, often without a plan. The defeatist pessimist believes that, no matter what happens, there is absolutely no chance of anything ever going right. So what's the point? In fact, it leads almost directly into true nihilism. The realistic pessimist is convinced things will go wrong and can point to all of the very real data to support that belief. But the sweet spot, what I'm advocating for the place where real, sustainable progress happens is in this fourth quadrant of the realistic optimist. This is the person who believes in a positive outcome but also understands the work and the potential setbacks involved in getting there. They have hope, but they also see things clearly. In his groundbreaking book, learned Optimism, dr Martin Seligman, one of the fathers of positive psychology the fathers of positive psychology really shines a light on this. He argues, based on decades of research, that optimism isn't just a fixed genetic trait. It's a skill, one that we can cultivate and build, just like a muscle. It all comes down to what he calls our explanatory style, comes down to what he calls our explanatory style, which is just a fancy term for how we explain bad things to ourselves.
Speaker 1:Pessimists often tend to see setbacks through the lens of the three P's permanent, pervasive and personal. Permanent they believe the cause of the setback is unchangeable I'll never be good at public speaking. This company is always going to overlook me. Pervasive they let the setback bleed into every other area of their life. I failed that exam, so I'm a failure at everything. This project didn't work out, so my whole career is a mess now and personal, they blame themselves entirely it's all my fault, I'm just not smart enough. Or they take the absolute opposite and take no accountability or responsibility and say there's nothing I can do. I have no agency here, I'm just at the whims of everyone else society, whatever it may be and, to be clear, I'm not trying to minimize the fact that society and other people do have an impact on you but there's no point in taking away your own agency just to make that point. Remember shades of gray. So the realistic optimist, on the other hand, flips this script. They see setbacks as temporary. Okay, I did not prepare well enough this time. Specific. This one project was a challenge and I could have done better. But my other work is going well and nuanced. I will admit the market conditions were tough, but I can learn from that and do better in the future.
Speaker 1:It's not about making excuses. It's about using accurate attribution. It's about seeing failure not as an indictment of your character, but as an event that you can analyze, learn from and move past. To further support this, I'm going to bring in another brilliant mind, matt Ridley, and his book the Rational Optimist. Ridley takes a broader historical view. He argues that if you look at the grand sweep of human history, things have, on the whole, gotten progressively better. We've conquered diseases, increased lifespans and created technologies that would seem like magic to our ancestors. Quality of life has consistently risen over time.
Speaker 1:His optimism isn't rooted in blind faith. It's rooted in evidence, which is why he makes the argument that it is rational to be an optimist. It's an informed confidence in our collective ability to innovate and overcome problems. The rational optimist looks at a problem and doesn't just see a crisis. They see the human ingenuity that will inevitably rise up to solve it. We can apply that same logic to our own lives. We can look back at our own history of overcoming challenges as evidence that we are capable of handling what's next, evidence that we are capable of handling what's next.
Speaker 1:But let's take this one step further to get down to the core of it. Being realistic is good. In the next section I'm going to explain all of the benefits of optimism. So if optimism is good and being realistic is good, how do we take it to the next level being practical, taking action. Pragmatism is the combination of being realistic and practical. Not just being realistic, but using that information in a usable, practical, helpful way. This is where we land on pragmatic optimism, realistic, practical optimism.
Speaker 1:To help support this, I'm going to pull in a third book by Dr Sue Varma called Practical Optimism. This is where the rubber meets the road. It's about embracing a mindset that expects good things to happen, but it's actively coupled with a willingness to work hard, to adapt and to troubleshoot when things don't go according to plan. It's the entrepreneur who believes her business will succeed, while also creating the contingency plans to make sure that it does when the market downturns. It's the student who believes he'll pass the final exam and therefore creates a rigorous study schedule to make it happen. It's faith paired with action.
Speaker 1:Pragmatic optimism is a very rational approach, both based on a historical context and the fact that you are doing realistic, practical things to actually make that optimistic future happen, making it much more likely. So the key takeaway here is this the optimism-pessimism spectrum deals with our expectation of outcomes and our hope. The realistic-idealistic spectrum deals with our assessment of reality. Pragmatic optimism merges the best of both worlds and makes it practical. An expectation of positive outcomes tempered by the clear-eyed view of what needs to be done, followed by the execution to make it happen. Now you might be thinking okay, this sounds good, but what are the tangible benefits? Well, my friends, the benefits are profound, extending far beyond just a sunnier disposition. We're talking about serious, life-altering health advantages here.
Speaker 1:Winston Churchill said a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. This isn't just a clever turn of phrase. It's a blueprint for a healthier, more fulfilling life. When you see opportunities, you take action. When you only see difficulties, you stay stuck. And that state of being stuck has a massive psychological cost.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about the science. A landmark study published in the Journal of American Medical Association and frequently cited in subsequent research found a stunningly strong correlation between optimism and better cardiovascular health. Over a period of years, people who scored high on optimism tests were found to have a significantly lower risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke. The link is just too strong to ignore. Why? Well, the researchers point to a few things. First, optimists tend to engage in healthier behaviors. They're more likely to exercise, eat a balanced diet and avoid smoking. Why? Because they believe that their actions matter. They believe that doing the healthy things will lead to a positive outcome a longer, healthier life.
Speaker 1:Second, and this is crucial, is their biological response to stress. A pessimistic outlook can lead to chronic stress, which floods your body with the hormone cortisol. Over time, high cortisol levels contribute to inflammation, high blood pressure and a suppressed immune system. Optimists aren't immune to stress, but they do tend to cope with it better. They see a stressful event as a temporary challenge to be solved, not a permanent state of being. This buffers the psychological damage of that stress Beyond just the heart. Research consistently shows that optimists tend to have a stronger immune system, experience less depression and live longer. Yes, you heard that right live longer.
Speaker 1:A 2019 study from Boston University School of Medicine found that individuals with the highest levels of optimism had an 11 to 15% longer lifespan on average than most pessimistic individuals. They had substantially greater odds of living to age 85 or beyond. Think about that A shift in your mindset could literally add years to your life and, more importantly, life to your years. And because we're talking about pragmatic optimism, not idealistic optimism, we're talking also about taking control of your own health, not just being a passenger, taking all of the steps to prevent disease and decline, including early scans and the ability to catch things early, instead of just assuming that it'll all work out. It's taking the actions to make sure that it all works out, or at least optimize the best that you can for it. Pragmatic optimism has many more benefits than just for your health, though. It's a powerful mindset that actively creates positive outcomes in nearly every aspect of life. Its benefits create an upward spiral where success, happiness and well-being all build on each other. Pragmatic optimism fundamentally changes our relationship with goals and challenges.
Speaker 1:Optimists tend to have greater persistence. When faced with a setback, optimists tend to view it as a temporary and specific hurdle, something that they have agency and control over. It's something they can do something about. They focus on their locus of control, and if there is objectively nothing they can do about it, then they make the most of the situation and just let it go. They also believe that there is a good chance of their own success. They have hope, which creates confidence and a self-fulfilling prophecy. This perspective makes them far more likely to try again, adapt their strategy and ultimately persist until they succeed. A pessimist might say I failed the test. I'm just not smart, being that pessimism and fixed mindset are correlated, while the optimist would say I didn't pass this time, so I need to change how I study. I may not know the material yet, but I will soon.
Speaker 1:Proactive goal setting Because optimists genuinely believe their efforts will lead to positive outcomes, they are more motivated to set ambitious goals and take consistent action to achieve them. This can-do attitude translates into better performance in careers, academics, sports and even personal projects. Opportunity-focused mindset Optimists are skilled at finding the opportunity within a difficulty. They tend to be more interdependent and try to find win-win strategies because they believe in things like abundance and not that you have to take from somebody else like a scarcity mindset. This allows them to pivot, innovate and find solutions where others might only see a dead end, making them effective leaders and problem solvers.
Speaker 1:Optimism is one of the foundations of happiness. Happiness is often a direct result of an optimistic outlook. Optimists are naturally wired to focus on what's going well. This gives them enhanced positive emotions. They practice gratitude more easily and savor positive experiences, which directly increase their day-to-day feelings of joy and contentment. Better coping skills Life throws challenges at everyone. However, optimists are more resilient because they use active, problem-focused coping strategies. Instead of avoiding a problem or ruminating on it, they brainstorm solutions and seek help, oftentimes instead of asking if they ask how this sense of control significantly reduces feelings of helplessness and anxiety.
Speaker 1:Stronger social connections A positive and hopeful attitude is magnetic. Optimists tend to build stronger, more supportive social networks. Good relationships are one of the most reliable predictors of happiness and resilience, and optimism helps foster those very connections that sustain it. So how do we cultivate this pragmatic optimism? It's not about flipping a switch overnight. It's a practice and, like anything else, it's built like a muscle.
Speaker 1:It starts with awareness. Remember, you are the consciousness that experiences your life and your perspective of reality shapes your experience of reality and one of the main tools that we use to change our perspective of the same objective reality. Because, remember, we're being realistic, so we're looking at reality as it is, but we can frame it in a positive light. The first step to doing that is by starting with awareness. Pay attention to your inner dialogue. The language that you use is often a powerful part of how you see a situation. When a challenge arises, what's your immediate internal script? Are you worrying or catastrophizing, or are you looking for a solution? Here are a few actionable strategies that you can start using today.
Speaker 1:Challenge your assumptions this is the big one. Just because something went wrong once doesn't mean it always will. Focus on what you can control. Identify your objective locus of control and focus on what you can control and stop worrying about the things that you can't. Instead of dwelling on what's outside of your power, direct that energy towards the small, actionable steps that you can take right now. Practice gratitude Regularly. Acknowledging the good things in your life, big and small, literally rewires your brain to look for the positive. Your RAS, or reticular activating system, will deem positive things important to you and start helping you learn optimism. Surround yourself with positive influences. Energy is contagious. Spend time with people who lift you up and believe in solutions. Learn from setbacks. Don't dwell on them. Every failure is a data point. It's a lesson in disguise. Extract the lesson and leave the emotional baggage behind To dive deeper into the first of those of challenging your assumptions.
Speaker 1:Dr Seligman offers a tool that he calls the ABCDE method. A is adversity, the event that happens. Your boss criticizes your report. B is your belief. Criticizes your report. B is your belief, your immediate, often negative interpretation I'm terrible at my job. I'm going to get fired. C is for the consequence how that belief makes you feel and act. You feel defeated, anxious, and you avoid your boss for the rest of the day. Most people stop there, but the optimist continues.
Speaker 1:D is for dispute. You need to take control of your conscious perspective and hijack your inner voice to actively dispute that negative belief. Actively dispute that negative belief. Ask yourself wait a minute, is it true? Is it really true that I'm terrible at my job? No, I got a great review six months ago. My boss pointed out one section, not the whole report. Maybe she was just having a stressful day or wanted me to learn how to be more thorough. Maybe I just let myself slip a little on that. One thing I can improve. I can do better. You look for the evidence that contradicts your knee-jerk belief. E is for energy. After disputing the belief, you feel better. You feel energized, not defeated. You realize that by simply revising that one section, it has become a growth opportunity, not a catastrophe. Practicing this simple technique can fundamentally change your response to life's inevitable challenges.
Speaker 1:Pragmatic optimism isn't about ignoring the storms. It's about knowing you have the tools to build an arc and then getting on the arc. It's about understanding that waves are part of being at sea, but you are the captain of your ship, capable of navigating through them. It's not just a mindset, it's a superpower that impacts your health, your relationships and your ability to achieve your most ambitious goals. So I challenge you this week to consciously practice this. Pick one small thing that doesn't go your way it could be traffic, a spilled coffee, a difficult conversation and when that happens, catch that first negative belief and then dispute it. Ask yourself is it really true? Because remember, we're being realistic here. Frame it in a more empowering interpretation and just see what happens, see how it makes you feel. Become a pragmatic optimist.
Speaker 1:Lastly, I do want to say that there is a time and a place for pessimism. Pessimism Immediately after a tragic event happens, jumping right in with optimism, can be socially obtuse, off-putting and pretty insensitive. Pessimism can also be a very helpful perspective for playing devil's advocate, to actually identify the things that can go wrong so that you can solve them. I'm advocating for a default perspective of pragmatic optimism, but that doesn't mean that pessimism doesn't still have a place. The biggest downside of defaulting into pessimism is that pessimism embraces a lack of hope or even possibly hopelessness, and hopelessness does not inspire the actions that you need to build the positive outcomes. And remember you are enough and you deserve to fill up your inner cup with happiness, true confidence and resilience.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Sage Solutions Podcast. Your time is valuable and I'm so glad that you choose to learn and grow here with me. If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on more sage advice. One last thing the legal language. This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. No coaching client relationship is formed. It is not intended to replace the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional.