Feel Good Fridays

 For a brief explanation about Feel Good Fridays click here

This is a Part 2, to my last Friday's post:

Are you an optimist or a pessimist, what's your explanatory style?

Why are some people successful despite many setbacks and others fail?  Why do some people keep striving and others give up?  Psychologists relate this to your explanatory style, the way you explain events to yourself.

Martin Seligman, Ph.D. says there are 3 dimensions to explanatory style but today I am just going to focus on one....pervasiveness.  Pervasiveness describes the way you view some events to carry over into multitude aspects of your life.  The optimist views bad events to be specific to that situation and the good events to be universal.  For instance when an optimist receives a bad grade on a midterm, he says to himself, "I got a bad grade because I didn't study very hard, next time I will do better."  As opposed to the pessimist who says, "I failed my test!  I'm not smart, I'm just not cut out for this college thing."  In this example its pretty easy to see why optimism leads to overall success.  Also, when good events happen an optimist applies it universally; "I got an A in that class because I am intelligent and a good student."  This gives the optimist the courage/confidence to keep going.  This is the mental pathway that leads you and everybody else to success.  In the end, it is only in your best interest to think optimistically.  As the title of Selgiman's book says "Learned Optimism, how to change your mind and your life."   


I hope you all are feeling good this Friday!