Tweak Your Week: Embrace Optimism
Tips, tricks and tweaks to help founders each week. You’ll be surprised what a difference these tiny experiments can make.
Good morning Upsiders!
This week’s tweak is all about optimism and how having an optimistic outlook can drive ingenuity, opportunity, and progress - in other words, how grounded optimism can drive founder optimisation.
Let me just expand on the word grounded here.
Psychologists have understood for some time now that it’s not wild, unchained optimism that is the key to making the most of yourself, your team, and your business, but grounded optimism, which harnesses your positive outlook to active engagement in positive behaviour.
As neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains in her book The Optimism Bias, “hope . . . enables people to embrace their goals and stay committed to moving toward them,” an idea that Jill Neimark also nailed when she wrote that “grounded optimism gives the brain a built-in action potential: it replaces emotion with motion” in a Psychology Today article back in 2007.
Finally, it’s important to understand that optimism is a choice. In his TEDx talk on the power of optimism, Bert Jacobs, co-founder and CEO of Life Is Good opens with this powerful message:
Pessimism is destructive. Realism lacks imagination. Optimism opens all the doors.
Pessimism, realism, and optimism aren’t just academic philosophies; they’re actually strategies for life [and] the strategy you choose will be a greater determinant of your success, your happiness, and the impact you have on the communities to which you belong than anything else.
So, with this in mind, we’d love you to think about embracing grounded optimism this week. Start taking an optimistic attitude from thought through to action and observe how it energises not only you, but the people around you.
Here’s how to do it:
Choose to adopt optimism as your strategy for life this week (and the next, and the next…).
Approach optimism as a practice: slowly learn to recognise and consciously pull away from pessimistic thoughts or conversations when they surface.
Be patient with yourself. Every practice takes time to perfect.
Don’t deny negativity. Real life is not all roses. Grounded optimism doesn’t mean pretending everything is perfect all the time. It means not allowing negativity to swallow you whole and paralyse you.
Limit your pessimists. We all have them, but we can limit their influence on us by listening to them, acknowledging them, and then steering the conversation in a more productive direction.
Do one small thing that lifts your spirits in the morning, and again at night. It could be listening to music, going for a run, laughing at a dad joke - anything that hits that happy button.
Try this plan out for a week, starting now!
Notice a difference?
Tell us how you go. Share your experiences - ‘mazing or meh - with the Upside community.
We’re all a work in progress.
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Upside Founder Programs are proudly supported by KPMG High Growth Ventures and Microsoft Australia.