If you want to achieve a major goal, conventional wisdom says to think
positive. Picture yourself delivering the perfect presentation, and
absorb the energy of the audience. Envision the ideal job interview, and
imagine yourself on cloud nine when you get the offer. Although these
strategies sound compelling, it turns out that they often backfire. Many
of us are more successful when we focus on the reasons that we're
likely to fail.
This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.
In a series of
clever studies, the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor compared strategic optimists
and defensive pessimists. If you're a strategic optimist, you envision
the best possible outcome and then eagerly plan to make it happen. If
you're a defensive pessimist, even if you've been successful in the
past, you know this time could be different. You start picturing all the
things that could go wrong. What if I spill coffee on the interviewer?
What if I accidentally deliver the presentation in a foreign language?
What if I forget my own name?
Most people assume that strategic
optimists outperform defensive pessimists, because they benefit from
confidence and high expectations. Norem and Cantor
found
that defensive pessimists were more anxious and set lower expectations
for themselves in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks. Yet they
didn't perform any worse.
"At first, I asked how these people were able to do so well
despite their pessimism," Norem writes in
The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. "Before long, I began to realize that they were doing so well
because of
their pessimism... negative thinking transformed anxiety into action."
By imagining the worst-case scenario, defensive pessimists motivate
themselves to prepare more and try harder.
Strategic optimists
and defensive pessimists succeed under different circumstances. If
you're a defensive pessimist, or you're attempting to motivate one, the
strategies that prove effective are often the reverse of what you
expect.
Don't Whistle While You Work
Although
evidence shows that happiness often makes us more successful by
fostering energy and creativity, it can backfire for defensive pessimists. When strategic optimists and defensive pessimists
threw darts,
they did equally well overall, but were most effective under opposite
conditions. Before throwing darts, some people listened to relaxing
tapes ("hear the gentle rolling of waves on a sun-sparkled ocean").
Others imagined themselves throwing darts and missing their targets.
When they actually threw their darts, the strategic optimists were about
30% more accurate when they relaxed rather than imagining negative
outcomes.
But the opposite was true for the defensive
pessimists: they were about 30% more accurate when they thought about
negative outcomes, instead of relaxing or picturing perfect performance.
Norem's research
suggests that "positive
mood
impairs the
performance of defensive pessimists." When they're in a good mood, they
become complacent; they no longer have the anxiety that typically
mobilizes their effort. If you want to sabotage defensive pessimists,
just make them happy.
Encouragement Discourages
We think it's a good idea to encourage people, but not so fast. In
one experiment,
people completed a drawing task requiring focus and accuracy. Right
before the task, for half of the participants, the researcher looked at
their grades in college and said, "Hmm, given how well you've done in
the past, I would think that you'd be very confident about your
performance. You will probably do very well on the upcoming tasks."
These words of encouragement slightly boosted the performance of
strategic optimists, who did 14% better.
In contrast, the
defensive pessimists did significantly worse when they were encouraged,
scoring 29% lower. The encouragement boosted their confidence, quelling
their anxiety and interfering with their efforts to set low
expectations. As Oliver Burkeman writes in
The Antidote, "Reassurance is a double-edged sword."
Don't Worry
When people are anxious, we sometimes tell them to distract themselves.
Once again, this doesn't pay off for defensive pessimists. In
another experiment,
people completed a questionnaire about their styles, and then took a
mental math test that involved adding and subtracting numbers in their
heads (like 15 + 47 - 73). The strategic optimists didn't benefit from
reflecting on possible outcomes, but the defensive pessimists did. When
the defensive pessimists
distracted
themselves with another task right before the math test, their scores
were about 25% lower than when they listed the most extreme outcomes
that could happen in the test, and how they might feel. Taking time to
worry helped them generate the anxiety necessary to motivate themselves.
Save Fantasies for the Silver Screen
Studies show that
positive fantasies discourage achievement-when people imagine losing weight or pursing a relationship with a crush, they're less likely to follow through. Also,
people perform worse when they say "I will" than when they ask themselves, "Will I?"
"Affirmation feels good," writes Dan Pink in
To Sell Is Human. "But it doesn't prompt you to summon the resources and strategies to actually accomplish the task."
We Need the Glass to Be Half-Full and Half-Empty
In the U.S.,
we favor optimists over pessimists. When
economists surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. CEOs, they found that more than 80% scored as "very optimistic."
Optimists tend to thrive in jobs that require resilience and perseverance. For example, in
insurance sales jobs with high rejection rates, optimists sold 37% more than pessimists over a 2-year period and were half as likely to quit in their first year. In
Learned Optimism,
psychologist Martin Seligman reveals that when things go wrong,
pessimists view negative events as personal (I'm a terrible public
speaker), permanent (I'm never going to get better), and pervasive (I'm
going to lose the respect of my colleagues and my spouse). Optimists, by
contrast, recognize that when a presentation misses the mark, it's
possible that the audience wasn't ready for their message, they can
practice and improve, and they can still excel at other tasks and have
an enjoyable evening at home.
At the same time, we need pessimists to
anticipate the worst and prepare us all for it. On average,
research indicates
that people who never worry have lower job performance than those who
worry from time to time. Studies also show that when entrepreneurs are
highly optimistic, their
new ventures bring in less revenue and grow more slowly, and when CEOs are highly optimistic, they
take on more risky debt and
swing for the fences more often, putting their companies in jeopardy. (This may be why there are
fewer optimistic CFOs than CEOs.)
Ultimately,
both styles are deadly at their extremes.
Pessimism becomes fatalistic, and optimism becomes toxic. The key is to
find the sweet spot, the more moderate ranges that combine the benefits
of both approaches. In the words of Richard Pine, "The best chief
executives-and that includes presidents-know that too much optimism is a
dangerous thing, that wise and productive leadership means striking a
balance between optimists' blue sky view of the world and pessimists'
more clear-eyed assessment of any given situation. Take one part
salesman, one part inventor, one part lawyer, one part safety engineer,
stir gently and you've got a great chief executive."
If you're
the kind of person who's always telling other people to look on the
bright side, you might want to reconsider. Whether people succeed is not
a matter of thinking positively or negatively, but rather whether they
choose the strategies that match their thinking styles. As psychologists
Heidi Grant Halvorson and Tory Higgins write in
Focus, "It's the fit that counts."
And if you're a defensive pessimist, when preparing for a performance
that really matters, you might want to list your weaknesses instead of
your strengths, and drink a glass of anxiety rather than a shot of
confidence.
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