7 Solid Tips For Optimizing Your Optimism

Tom Terez has an excellent article at BetterWorkplaceNow with the catchy title of 7 Ways to Optimize Your Optimism. It's a tight piece listing seven tips you can apply to work and life to put a more optimistic perspective on things. We so often focus on the negative - why not seek out ways to strengthen the positive - root out the (possibly hidden) optimist in you? You might find the end results are more positive experiences, more enriching interactions and overall you are less stressful - who wouldn't want that?

Here are the tips from the article:

Appreciate and activate your strengths. You have real skills, rich life experiences, and areservoir of good intention. Put all of it to work every day.

Opt for a partial solution when perfection isn't possible. It's always better to make some progress than to endure life as a chronically frustrated perfectionist.

Imagine success before it unfolds. Follow the lead of successful athletes. Before you take on a challenging situation, picture yourself dealing with it in a winning way.

Act yourself into a new way of thinking. It sounds a bit backward, but it works. Pretend to be positive, carry yourself with confidence, communicate an upbeat message -- and those behaviors will start shaping your attitude.

Talk about what's going right. Even in the most dysfunctional environments, good things happen. Start spotting those success stories, and make them the focus of your conversations.

Put problems in perspective. Too much thinking can drag us down, especially when we generalize ("I'm no good with numbers"), catastrophize ("If I don't make this next sale, I'm going to lose my job"), or personalize ("It was all my fault"). Learn to recognize these distorted interpretations, and replace them with a view of the situation that's scaled down to fit reality.

Do what you can instead of dwelling on what you can't. There's so much to be concerned about these days. Try to accept what you can't change, but work like heck in those many situations where you can make a difference

Link: http://www.betterworkplacenow.com/optimism/index.html

My favorite tip was "Opt for a partial solution when perfection isn't possible." We in the business world need to remember this more and fight less. As a PM (read: control freak), I think I might like this slogan as a new tattoo. Somewhere prominent - where both myself *and* all stakeholders could read it. What do you think? Too extreme? Fuddy duddy's! I was going to go the t-shirt route, but Elizabeth already beat me too it..

image courtesy: Savage Chickens!