![]() ![]() ![]() At the exact same point that a pessimist will wilt, an optimist perseveres and breaks through an invisible barrier. They clearly had better ways to deal with the 9 out of 10 rejections that would make the others give up.Ĭonventional thinking is that success creates optimism, but the evidence laid out by Seligman shows the reverse to be true: on a repeat basis, optimism tends to deliver success, as the experience of the life insurance agents demonstrated. The result: agents hired on this basis, in the first year, did 20 per cent better than the regular recruits, and in the second, 57 per cent better. Instead of the usual criteria by which MetLife hired (career background, etc.), Seligman suggested that applicants be hired if they tested well for optimism and explanatory style. The company was spending millions of dollars a year training its agents, only to see most of them move on. Life insurance is considered one of the most difficult of all sales jobs, a real spirit-crusher. ![]() The author undertook groundbreaking work for life insurance company MetLife. If you have even an average level of pessimism, Seligman says, it will drag down your success in every arena of life: work, relationships, health. But Seligman says it does not have to be this way, that a different way of explaining setbacks to yourself ('explanatory style') will protect you from letting crises cast you into depression. In psychology textbooks, such reactions are considered 'normal'. Few of us are wholly pessimistic, but most of us will have given pessimism free reign in reaction to particular past events. The cause of their specific misfortune or general misery is, they believe, permanent - stupidity, lack of talent, ugliness - therefore they do not bother to change it. Pessimistic people tend to think that misfortune is their fault. Nor is this trait something that 'we either have or we don't' optimism involves a set of skills which can be learned. Rather than having an inborn trait of greatness, such people have developed a way of explaining events that does not see defeat as permanent or affecting their basic value. Seligman thought to apply the question to real life: what makes a person pick themselves up after rejection by a lover, or another keep going when their life's work comes to nothing? He found that the ability of some people to bounce back from apparent defeat is not, as we sentimentally like to say, a 'triumph of the human will'. What made these subjects different from the others? Yet the experiments contained an anomaly: as with the dog experiments, one in every three human subjects would not 'give up' they kept trying to press buttons on a panel in an attempt to shut off the noise. Another researcher tested the principle on people, using noise instead of shocks, and found that learned helplessness can be engineered in human minds just as easily. His experiments with mild electric shocks to dogs proved that dogs would give up trying to escape if they believed that, whatever they did, the shocks would keep coming. Seligman is a cognitive psychologist who spent many years clinically testing the idea of 'learned helplessness'.
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