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030 - Change your Mind, and Your Life by Martin Seligman

Hello there! Kevin here with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast. Bringing you English lessons based on life in business, books, to help you become a superstar in life and business while naturally improving your English.

Imagine this, you have an experiment and you have two dogs. So one of the dogs you put in an area, let’s say it’s a cage and you give it a shock, which causes a little pain but the dog has the ability to escape the cage, he can get out of the area and if he gets out of the area he gets out of the cage; he won’t be shocked. So he does and he relieves himself of getting shocked.

Then you have another dog and you put this dog in a different area, a different cage, however, this dog can’t escape. You shock the dog but unfortunately the dog can’t get out.

Now you change the situation: you take both dogs and you put them in a new area, separated, and you shock them, however, the difference is now … Both areas, both cages can be opened.

The first dog, who was able to escape from the first situation gets shocked and then escapes because he knows he can get out. The second dog, however, because in the first situation he wasn’t able to escape the cage, he doesn’t even try to get out of the next one, and he could if he wanted to but he doesn’t even try. This is called learned helplessness.

In today’s episode, I’m going to talk about a book called “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman, he is one of the founders of the positive psychology revolution helping people become better through psychology as opposed to just fixing problems. This book is going to talk about the difference between optimistic people and pessimistic people, and also, give you some ways to help you become more optimistic, if that’s something you need to improve on.

“Learned Optimism”, a great book. Before we get into the lesson, let me just remind you, if you want transcripts to these episodes, if you’re learning English and you would like transcripts to help you improve even faster, go to my website- www.feelgoodenglish.com and learn how to become how to be a member.

But before that, let’s get into another life-changing lesson.

So as I talked about in this dog experiment, what happened was they taught one dog that he could get out of the situation that was painful by putting in some effort to escape the cage, and the other dog they taught him that even if he tried to escape he couldn’t, so he had to deal with the pain and then when they put them in a new situation where they both could escape if they wanted to, the dog that was thought that he can’t get out; didn’t even try.

The reason this experiment is important is because this also happens to us as humans especially when we’re children. When we’re children, we learn how to deal with difficult or negative experiences, most of this learning comes from our teachers or our parents.

In a big point in this book, “Learned Optimism”, is about something called Explanatory Styles, and this is how we explain negative or difficult situations to ourselves, the way that we do this causes us to become either optimistic people or pessimistic people, and there’s a lot of consequences that come with both; either positive consequences or negative consequences.

As you can imagine, pessimistic people have to deal with a lot more negative consequences in life. So imagine this situation, you are at a company, you’ve been there for a few years, and your supervisor quits or he gets fired but he leaves his position, and so your boss, the guy above your supervisor is looking for somebody to be a new supervisor, and you’re hoping that he chooses you, however, unfortunately he doesn’t choose you, he instead chooses another co-worker who’s been there less time than you but she happens to be an attractive female so you get really disappointed. Now I’m gonna use this example of you not getting the supervisor position to explain this Explanatory Style theory.

Explanatory Style comes down to three things: the first is if you think the situation is permanent, the second is if you think is pervasive, and the third is if you think it’s personal.

So, permanent. You don’t get to become supervisor, your boss chooses the attractive female instead, you either think this is something permanent, that you never will get this supervisor position, that this always happens to you… You always use the words “this always happens to me” or you just use it like a specific example, like this time “I didn’t get the job but there’s more chances in the future” , things can change for you in the future and you will do things to help you see better results in the future.

Now in the second thing, if you think this situation is pervasive, you’d be a pessimistic person and think “I’m just not a good worker”, I obviously don’t have the skills to become supervisor.

First, an optimistic (person) knowing that this is not pervasive and just thinking of it as a specific example, this time, “I didn’t get the job, however, there will be plenty of opportunities” And the last aspect, the last thing here, is if you take things personally, and in the situation of the supervisor position, you would take it personally as “I suck, the boss doesn’t like me. He likes this woman better”. Vesus external, maybe there are some skills that she has that I don’t have or maybe there are some underlying politics around the company that I don’t know about that were involved in this decision.

As you can see in general, when bad things happen, you either look at it as a very permanent and personal situation, it’s always going to be like this, it’s my fault; I am not this, I don’t have these skills versus an optimist who would look at it specifically for that situation and say:

“This time it didn’t work out for me. There could be different factors, different reasons for why it didn’t work out for me, however, things can change in the future.”

We choose how we want to look at things, we choose how we want to explain things to ourselves when bad things happen, and they found through studies that, optimists become more successful in general and this might sound obvious, but looking at a specific examples.

Let’s say you’re in sales, now if you get rejected a lot, which happens to a lot of sales people, they try to sell something, they got on the phone, may be they make cold calls and they get rejected.

If you’re pessimistic about this, you’re going to take it personally and think you’re never going to make the sale that you need and that’s something wrong with your skills and you’re bothering people, these people that you’re calling don’t wanna hear from you. They’re trying to avoid you, probably talking bad things about you somewhere else, versus an optimistic person who’ll just think “Oh, well I have something of value to give these people. I am an honest person, I’m a good salesman, and you know, if I make 10 calls… I might sell one. If I make a hundred calls, I might sell 10.”, and you just keep pushing and pushing and not taking things personally and not giving up based on the way that you explain being rejected to yourself.

So they found that people that were optimistic, were best suited for occupations that involved a lot of rejection. So you can think of a big company too or big positions and maybe you’ve noticed that people put into big positions are able to take rejection more, are not afraid to share ideas even if they are negated, and they’re not worried about what people think about them, themselves so much, they’re worried more about results and seeing results and getting their ideas shared, and working as teams, to get bigger and better results.

Through the studies from the book, the author actually followed students in a university, and he followed ones that were pessimistic, versus ones that were optimistic and obviously, the optimistic ones performed better in school than the pessimistic ones, and this was more important than their actual aptitude tests; meaning the skills that they had: getting good grades and stuff like that.

And you know you might be thinking, well, great… This is easier said than done.

It’s not easy to be always optimistic about everything, maybe you’ve tried to be optimistic but things just don’t go your way or maybe you just naturally find that you complain about things and things are difficult and you don’t even notice yourself doing this?

I, for one, personally, find myself complaining about a situation or being negative about something and then I have to stop and say: “Wait a minute, it’s my responsibility to take control of this situation. It’s my responsibility to change the situation. It’s my choice to be here. Nobody’s forcing me to do this.” If you are being forced, nobody’s forcing you to think negatively about the situation.

You always have a choice to be pessimistic or optimistic. To be grateful or to complain- gratitude.

Gratitude is a lovely word.

And in the book, there is a technique you can implement. If you find yourself being somebody who’s a little too negative, little too pessimistic… There’s a technique called the ABC technique.

That’s easy to remember… ABC.

A stands for Adversity, B for Belief, C stands for Consequence… So, let’s look back at the supervisor position situation, think about how you are explaining the situation to yourself, so A… Adversity.

What happened? Well you weren’t chosen for the supervisor position.

B… Belief. You have two options: You can say “I suck. I’m a bad employee. I smell bad. The boss doesn’t like me. I’m boring. I’ll get fired soon probably” or you could think, “This specific time I wasn’t chosen, there’s probably a good reason why not. I bet my boss likes me, I have performed well here. There’s proof of that, my results have been good.”

And then C, stands for consequence. So if you thought in the first belief, that it’s your fault, that you’re a bad employee, that you’re not skilled. Consequence would be you probably get scared that you would get fired, that you might not do good at work because you don’t even think that it’s necessary anymore because you’re not gonna be there long anyway.

You might get angry with the employee that was selected as supervisor, you might get angry with your boss. In general, you might start slacking off a little bit, or if you had the optimistic beliefs, saying it’s the specific to this time, in the future, I’ll have more opportunities.

The consequence of that will be what?

Well, you will work harder, you will maybe talk to your boss about it just to let him know how you’re feeling, you’ll keep putting in good work. You’ll treat the new supervisor nicely, and then she’ll ask you out on a date and you’ll start dating her then the long story short, you’ll become supervisor with her, and then you’ll buy the company and … Oh, no sorry. That was a fantasy there…

but, as you can see being optimistic can help you continue to be your best and to continue to success, and not to invent these stories in your brain which can stop you unnecessarily from moving ahead.

So in order to this ABC technique, sometimes we don’t even catch our thoughts, sometimes we have to pay attention and you can look at past experiences to see how you reacted in certain situations, might be easier to look at the past and say: “I did this. I did that.

Maybe I should have acted differently.’

And also just pay attention when you’re feeling negative, when you’re feeling down, when you’re feeling in a bad mood. Stop yourself and go through the ABC technique of what’s the problem here, and I can take two beliefs in this situation, I can explain this is a very long term, permanent, personal thing or I can look at it as a very specific, temporary. Something that can change, and that I can change which will have positive consequences.

So how about a little English example: maybe you are thinking of an English experience that you had, you’re in an English class that you didn’t find yourself doing very well, and you thought, English is not for me.

Maybe you’ve done, may be you’ve been to several different schools and thought: “I never do well. I can’t speak English well still, I’ve been studying for years, and I’m still not great.” Well, okay so… Adversity. You’re trying to speak English well but you can’t, and you can either believe that it’s your problem, and you aren’t good in English. (That) you’re not good at learning languages or you could put the blame on somebody else, my teacher sucks, my school sucks and the consequence of that is that you’ll never speak English well, or you could be optimistic and your belief could be maybe I’m not learning the correct way, maybe there’s a better method out there. Maybe I need to find things that inspire me that are better for my English learning instead of just sitting in this boring classroom, and the consequence of that is that you’ll look for these situations, get inspired and you will keep practicing and training and listening to English, eventually you will speak well. So a very clear example of how this could work in action.

Okay, so be optimistic. Smile, catch your thoughts, don’t let your mind control your life. Don’t let your negative thoughts control you.

A big point in this book is you can learn how to explain any situation in an optimistic way.

Maybe you were raised as a child to be pessimistic, let’s stop thinking that this is forever and start becoming more optimistic, alright?

So great book, hope this connected with you. Some main points here;

• optimism can be learned. You don’t have to be a pessimist forever.

• Practice the ABC technique to help you become a more optimistic person. You might be thinking, well… What if I think everything is just fine and I’ll just become overly optimistic and we’ll never see the reality of things.

Well, balance is important just like anything. You need to be balanced in life so make sure you’re not getting unrealistic here, we need to look at the reality of things and make sure that we’re not always just thinking everything’s great! and running around the streets with flowers and doing circles even when the building next to you is on fire.

So maintain some balance in your life.

Any questions for me go to feelgoodenglish.com or send me a direct message, kevin@feelgoodenglish.com or you can send me a voice message on my website as well.

I’m really happy you’re here listening to this and I truly hope it helps you become more confident in life, more optimistic in life, and more optimistic with your English.

Until next time, keep smiling, keep learning and keep improving and your super-duper, funny, smart joke of the day: What do you call a motorcycle that laughs a lot? You call it a Yamahahaha.

(laughs)

Sorry, that was a pretty bad one. Anyway, talk to you soon.

Bye bye.