Turning Pessimism into Optimism (Explanatory Styles)

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m your happiness expert. This week’s video is all about whether you’re going to be a pessimist and destined to kind of crawl on your belly through life, or if you’re more likely to be an optimist and soar with the eagles. In fact, we can see the roots of this way early in our people’s childhood, and there are ways we can manipulate both children, more easily than adults, and adults to be more optimistic. So, let’s talk about that content in this video. Before I get started, click the subscribe button, and you can get content just like this every Sunday morning.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yes, one of the things we know about children is that we can see whether they have a more pessimistic or optimistic presence in their life very early on. Pretty much from the time that they’re verbal at three and four, you can start to get traces like this.

I have to admit my two sons were quite different. My older boy was born content, and literally as a little wee baby, he was the most content little person you could imagine. Whereas my second son, quite the contrary, was born kind of grumpy and was colicky as an infant. When he became verbal, we could see signs that he had a way of dealing with life that was more pessimistic. He’d say things like “I never get dessert,” or “Why do I always have to go to bed early?” Things like that. He was quite verbal at a very young age, four years old, complete sentences.

Now, what we were seeing in this young man or this young boy was what we call an explanatory style. An explanatory style is the way that we interpret the world in a self-referential way, so we’re interpreting the world as it applies to ourselves. There are basic signs of a pessimistic explanatory style versus an optimistic explanatory style. The wonderful thing is when you see it early in little children, you can do a lot to manipulate it.

So if my son were to say, “I never get dessert,” as a four-year-old, all we’d have to do is say to him, “Do you sometimes get dessert?” He’d pause and consider, not recognizing that we’re just manipulating him, and he’d go, “Well, I sometimes do,” and we defeat that permanent belief. Same thing when he says, “My brother never plays with me,” we simply need to question him and say, “Well, does your brother sometimes play with you?” He’d pause, he’d have to consider it, and he knew the honest truth of that answer. It was defeating some of these pessimistic explanatory style reasoning that he had in his mind.

There are really clever ways that you can do that with little children and keep teaching them, up until about the time they’re sort of 10, 11, 12, and then they start getting into more abstract reasoning and it’s much harder to rationally defeat the explanatory style. It’s not impossible, but the person has to be more willing because they’re busy interpreting the world, and there’s some metacognition. They’ll have to see for themselves what their own thinking is. That’s true of adults, that’s what cognitive behavioral therapy is, it’s helping adults see their own thinking.

So what are some ways that we can actually intervene in explanatory styles? It’s really a function of catching the way that people speak out loud or in their own minds and seeing that there are some tendencies towards sort of catastrophic thinking. If people see a situation as permanent, “Oh, I’m bad at math,” then they’re just simply, that’s a viewpoint that doesn’t give them any room for growth. Whereas they could say in a more optimistic way, “I didn’t study hard enough for that math exam,” and that changes the whole explanatory style with respect to permanence very considerably.

You could also look at things where people take things very personally. They might say, “My brother doesn’t play with me. Nobody likes me.” Well, there’s a very personal way of interpreting it versus a child that says, “David’s not playing with me right now. I’ll have to go and see if mom or dad want to play,” right? Personal versus impersonal. And then thirdly, there’s this idea of pervasiveness. This is the idea that the thing that I don’t see as going well in my life is a reflection of all of my life.

I have to go back to the academic example. I might say, “Oh, I did really poorly on that exam. I’m not very smart, or I’m not very good at school.” There’s this big, not only permanent, but pervasiveness to the one thing I didn’t do well, in one exam, and now it pervades all of my life, all of academia. Whereas somebody could say, “Gee, I’m not the best at math, but I’m really quite doing quite well at Phys Ed, or English, or Social Studies, whatever it is.”

Those ways of catching our children speaking about themselves, self-referentially, is a really good way for us to then be able to correct their thinking a little bit. And if we do it early on, you can actually shift people from being pessimistic to optimistic. For the most part, optimists have a much better life. They’re more successful. The presence of positive emotions, which I’ve talked about in many videos in the past, is predictive of good life outcomes, by however you want to measure it: good relationships, good jobs, good health, that kind of stuff.

Now, it’s harder in adults, but if you can start correcting other people in your life and hearing them, whether they’re using explanatory styles that are pessimistic or optimistic, you might get pretty good at hearing your own thoughts. Therefore, you can start being able to do what’s called disputation. Disputation is when you kind of argue with what your explanatory style has concluded, and see if there’s another way of looking at it. So, rather than saying, “Gee, I’m a really poor filmmaker. Oh, that video in particular wasn’t so great, I’m gonna do a different video.” Got it?

Start seeing your own explanatory style, and disputing it when it’s negative, and maybe encouraging it when it’s positive. “Oh, I’m getting better and better at filmmaking, and I really like doing these videos.” Then, you can start saying, “Oh yeah, that’s a really true thing. I wonder if I could learn more about it, or improve my lighting, or improve the sound.” All that kind of stuff, I hope that’s making sense.

Optimism versus pessimism, it is not a set way of being for all of life. There are ways to combat it, and challenging one’s own explanatory style is the key. If you like this kind of content, please like the video, share the video, and subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching, bye for now.