Mind Gym (4 page)

Try to make even the most mundane tasks more challenging: when mowing the lawn, for example, focus on how well you mow, try mowing in strips as if it were a football field, or challenge yourself to mow in the quickest time but still have the neatest lines.

An ideal state of mind fluctuates between thinking and engaged—whatever a current situation demands of you. There isn’t a formula that dictates when you should be in one state and when you should be in the other, but much like dancing, you need to find a rhythm and delicately move as the situation (or music) requires.

Claire thinks,
What should I wear? I have the big marketing meeting today, so I’d better look sophisticated
. She chooses her favorite suit and then thinks no more about it as she returns to her automatic routine for getting ready for work. During her drive to work, however, she is fully engaged in her environment, noticing that road construction is planned for next month.
I’ll need to find another route
, she thinks.

On the way up to her office, Claire bumps into Peter, her old boss, who was recently made a director. “Congratulations,” she says enthusiastically, totally engaged in the conversation. It is only when Peter starts explaining his new role that she thinks,
He could be a useful sponsor for my project. I wonder how I can persuade him
. Claire quickly develops an influencing strategy (see chapter 9), and when there is a suitable moment in the conversation, she broaches the subject: “Peter, when you say . . .”

What seems to Claire like only seconds later, though it has been several minutes, Peter suggests a meeting with his whole management team. As Claire gets herself coffee, she reflects on what she did well that helped gain Peter’s support and whether she can apply any of these lessons when it comes to the marketing meeting.

Claire glides between the different modes as the situation requires. Most of the time she is in either an engaged or a thinking state, moving to an internal focus (thinking) when she needs to assess a situation or decide what to do and then to an external focus (engaged) when she executes her decisions and plans, getting completely involved in what she is doing.

With the help of this book, you’ll learn to do much the same.

Autopilot should now be turned off. And that’s a good thing, because if you really want this book to work for you—to positively impact the way you live, work, and build relationships with people—you need to be thinking and engaged. In this chapter, you’ve learned about how to change your mind. The next challenge is much harder: putting the theory included in the pages that follow into practice.

It’s time to get busy.

GIVE YOUR MIND A WORKOUT

We are all guilty of negative, critical self-talk from time to time, but some of us have a continuous stream of critical noise within our minds. Before you can change your inner voice, you need to become intimately acquainted with it.

1. Listen to your thoughts. The first step in changing your inner critic into your inner fan is changing your awareness. Think of yourself objectively, as if you were a third party, and listen to the thoughts that regularly go through your mind.

2. Don’t critique yourself. While you listen and catalog your thoughts, don’t pass any judgment on them or on yourself. If you hear your inner critic say nasty things, don’t critique your inner critic and set yourself off on a never-ending spiral of criticism.

3. Stay neutral. Reflect neutrally on what you hear inside your head so you become more aware of the ways in which you are critical of yourself. Once you fully understand the ways in which you sabotage yourself, you’ll more easily change your state of mind.

One of the things you can do to move closer to an engaged state of mind is focus on the vital components (described earlier in this chapter) of the situations and places you find yourself in.

1. Notice more. Go to a coffee shop or somewhere busy in public. Make a list of ten things you notice, and then list ten more, then ten more. Don’t just describe your surroundings; expand your focus to people, interactions, tones of voice, and nonverbal signals. Use all your senses.

2. Practice with people. Repeat what you did in the previous step (but without writing anything down) in an interaction with a group of friends or at a work meeting. Don’t allow any critical noise to come in; just practice nonjudgmental awareness of your surroundings and the people within it.

3. Be present. See what you can learn by just externally focused, nonjudgmental observation, and notice while you’re observing how present you feel in your surroundings—no longer lost somewhere in your mind but very much present in the room.

S
ome people have all the luck. Or at least that is how it seems.

Luck is a bit like magic: You think it is incredible until you realize it’s just an illusion—a trick on the mind. Once the mystery is gone, the secret is obvious. This is great news. If you can understand what makes some people apparently luckier than others, you can also start to adopt some of their habits and become lucky yourself.
¹
A lucky you won’t happen instantly. Just like with magic tricks, it takes determination and practice to master new habits and make them appear effortless. As you become more accomplished, things will increasingly work out as you’d like—the world will seemingly turn in your favor. To everyone else, this will appear as if you are either extremely lucky or extremely talented, or maybe both.

The techniques in this book are designed to help you achieve what you want and so, in some way, to help you appear luckier. This chapter, in particular, will show you that the ways in which you perceive and interpret the world around you have an enormous effect on how fortunate or unfortunate you are. Adopting the way of thinking outlined in the pages that follow will mean that, along with numerous other benefits, you

  
•   achieve more,

  
•   live longer,

  
•   are better liked, and

  
•   have better relationships.

This way of thinking is called “attentive optimism.”

Believe it or not, the way we think and perceive the world around us greatly affects the way things work out for us. Optimists and pessimists perceive the world in very different ways. Even when they experience a similar event, they draw much different conclusions and describe the event in very different terms.

Consider this story. One night Mike and Ashley host a highly successful barbecue for a group of friends and neighbors. The following morning, Mike wakes up with a slight hangover and remembers the night before. He smiles and thinks,
We always throw such great parties
. On the other side of the bed, Ashley rouses from her slumber and slowly recalls the same event.
We were lucky
, she thinks.
Last night there was just the right group of people for a get-together
.

Mike’s analysis of events shows all the characteristics of an optimist. He applies the success of the barbecue to a wide range of other parties (he thinks,
We throw great parties
as opposed to
We throw really nice casual barbecues for six people
) spanning a long period of time (
We always host great parties
, not
Yesterday we hosted a good barbecue
).

Ashley’s reaction, by contrast, shows the traits of a pessimist. She associates her success with a very specific type of event (an intimate get-together) and associates it with one moment in time (last night only). She believes she got lucky.

Like Mike and Ashley, we all have an explanatory style—that is, a pattern of communication that reveals whether we perceive a particular event as either positive or negative. There are two dimensions that help illustrate the differences between how an optimist and a pessimist explain events: scope and time span.

This is how a person explains the depth or scope of a situation. It ranges from a highly specific, particular case (barbecues for six people) to a universal, generalized category (being good at entertaining guests). The phrase “making a mountain out of a molehill” was invented for people who expand the scope of a situation.

This is the way in which a person uses time or consistency to explain events. Descriptions range from one-off or temporary (last night) to typical (usual) and all the way to permanent (always).

When considering positive past events, an optimist explains them as universal and permanent, as Mike did. Pessimists, like Ashley, see them as specific and temporary. By contrast, when it comes to analyzing negative past events, the opposite occurs: the optimist sees them as temporary and specific; the pessimist sees them as universal and permanent. Here’s an example: After a busy summer full of barbecues and picnics, Mike and Ashley have gained a little extra weight. Mike looks at his bulging stomach and thinks,
All these summer parties haven’t been good for my stomach
. Ashley, on the other hand, avoids looking in the mirror as she passes by and tells herself,
I’m destined to be overweight
. Mike, the optimist, explains the situation by making it temporary (this summer) and specific (these parties).
²
Ashley, the pessimist, does the opposite, making it permanent and applying it to the rest of her life.

In short, an optimist explains negative events as caused by environment (external) and as transient and temporary—the negativity only corresponds to a specific instance. A pessimist explains negative events as caused by his or her own actions (internal) and as recurring or permanent. In this way, negative events are deemed likely to happen again and are seen as part of his or her whole life, not attached to one specific instance alone.

According to hundreds of well-controlled studies, optimists tend to be better off than pessimists. Time and again research has shown that optimists live longer, are healthier, achieve more, and have better, stronger relationships.
³
They are, however, more often wrong than their pessimist counterparts. But does it really matter? Let’s look at what the experts say about a few of those points.

There aren’t many concrete things you can do to greatly increase your chances of living longer. Sure, regular exercise and consuming five servings of fruits or vegetables a day (assuming you know what size a serving is) will help. Other statistics point to healthy relationships, certain financial markers, and other standards of well-being greatly impacting your longevity. However, one thing that has been scientifically shown to increase life expectancy is thinking optimistically.

Mayo Clinic researchers tested the theory for themselves.
⁴
They selected almost nine hundred people who had sought medical care. When these people were originally admitted to the clinic, they took a series of examinations and, as part of the series, were tested for their level of optimism. Thirty years later, two hundred of the original nine hundred had died, with the optimists living 19 percent longer than the pessimists. Those are impressive numbers.

For all the skeptics reading this book, you might be thinking that there could have been a lot of other variables in play—and the researchers can’t possibly know that optimism is the big divider. Diet, work pressure, sexually transmitted diseases, and lifestyle habits could play a major role. So, how can anyone claim that optimism makes a true difference? A study in which all the different variables were excluded would be impossible, wouldn’t it? It would. Unless you conducted your study in a convent.

A group of psychologists analyzed the autobiographical essays nuns had written just before completing their final vows and entering a convent in the 1930s and 1940s. The scientists discovered that 90 percent of the nuns they considered the most optimistic in their essays were still alive at age eighty-four. In contrast, only 34 percent of the least optimistic were still alive.
⁵
Same lifestyle. Same diet. Different outlook. Furthermore, 54 percent of the most positive were still alive at age ninety-four. And after the researchers studied many other factors, the nuns’ level of optimism was the only one that had a significant correlation with life span.

But it’s not just one study that proves the advantages of optimism for our health. A 2012 study with heart transplant patients showed that optimistic patients had a higher quality of life after transplantation and for an additional five years. Pessimistic patients, on the other hand, reported greater depression immediately after and for five years post-transplant, even if they showed no signs of depression beforehand.
⁶

Yes, it’s true: optimists get more things done. And it’s not just because they live longer. They tend to be more persistent and resilient and so tend to achieve results—in almost any endeavor. In a large-scale experiment conducted by the pioneering psychologist Martin Seligman, a group of optimists and pessimists were recruited to become insurance sales agents. The intention of the study was to compare the sales agents’ performance. By the second year of the experiment, the optimists were outselling the pessimists by 57 percent.
⁷
Hey, optimism is great for business.

Optimism also boosts achievements in athletics. Research has shown that runners who explain events optimistically perform better after receiving feedback that their time trial was somewhat slower than expected, whereas pessimists did even worse after this feedback.
⁸

Not everything in life goes an optimist’s way. Actually, far from it. For all their good fortune, you might be surprised how often optimists tend to get things wrong.
⁹