What is Optimism And Why It's Important

If you are interested in becoming an optimist then this article is for you. Most people have heard of optimism but not everyone is clear on what it really is. Never believe that you are born an optimist or you are not. This is total nonsense. You can become an optimist at any time during your life despite your background.

 

Here you will learn the definition of optimism, the traits of an optimist and the explanatory styles of an optimist and a pessimist.

 

What is Optimism?

 

Optimism is defined as the belief that good things are likely to happen in the future and that there is good in every situation. Optimism is based on the belief that there is good in people, while pessimism is based on the belief that people are generally bad. 

 

Optimism is a state of mind. It is possible for anyone to develop an optimistic mindset at any time. When you are an optimist, you will see any setback in your life as an opportunity for you to learn and grow as a person.

 

Here are some benefits of being an optimist: 

 

·    You will be a positive thinker which can help reduce stress 

·    Optimistic people see the silver lining in every circumstance, leading them to better outcomes. 

·    They are generally more upbeat and engaging, which can improve relationships with family and friends. Optimistic people generally perceive life as more fun.

 

Optimists are confident in their abilities and plan ahead to create a bright future for themselves. They tend to be a lot happier than pessimistic people. 

 

Traits of an Optimist

 

Maybe you think that you are already an optimist? It is important that you understand the common traits of an optimist so that you can develop the same traits. Here are some of the common traits that you need to develop:

 

·      A positive feeling about the future

·      An expectation that good things will happen

·      A belief that you will succeed in life

·      The belief that any challenges are an opportunity for learning and growth

·      The past can be a useful reference and that is all

 

An optimistic does not let any issue, whether it is large or small, dent their enthusiasm for life. When an optimist sets goals, they expect to be faced with some tough challenges. These help the optimist move out of their comfort zone and grow as an individual.

 

Explanatory Styles of an Optimist and Pessimist

 

You can tell that a person is an optimist or a pessimist by two things: 

 

1.    The way they talk about events that have happened in their life

 

2.    The way they write about these events

 

An optimist is confident that all of the positive events they have experienced are down to their abilities and the actions that they took. The way that an optimist will describe a negative event is that it is just temporary and that they learned from it and moved on.

 

Conversely, a pessimist will explain a positive event in their life as fortunate because they have no belief in their ability. For negative events, this is the norm for them and proof that the world is against them.

 

Conclusion

 

Optimism is all about having a positive outlook on life. An optimist will be confident about their future because they will have set goals and worked hard to achieve what they want. Optimists are confident in their own abilities and tend to be a lot happier than pessimists.

 

Daily Rituals For Increased Optimism

The things that you do every day will define you. In time, something that you repeat each day becomes a habit. Habits can be good and bad of course. Your aim here is to develop habits that will empower you to be more optimistic.

 

It is going to take time for you to implement new and empowering habits in your life. The best way to achieve this is to do the same things each day for at least 21 days continuously. Your subconscious mind will pick up on this and realize that you are serious about forming a new habit.

 

Don’t try to implement too many new daily rituals at once. You can start with a small number and add to this as each becomes a habit that you do on autopilot. We recommend that you create a morning ritual where you do certain things every morning. Other rituals can take place whenever it suits you.

 

Your Morning Optimism Ritual

 

There are four things that we recommend for your morning optimism ritual. The first of these is to read your positive affirmations. You can read your affirmations more than once each day but it is essential that you do this at least once in the morning.

 

Optimists always set challenging goals for themselves so first thing in the morning is a very good time for you to read your goals, your emotional drivers and your WHY statement. This will light a fire under you to complete your tasks for the day and move closer to achieving your goals.

 

Spend a few minutes every morning visualizing your best self and success with your goals. Once you learn how to visualize, you will only need a few minutes of this to really inspire you. Visualization is a very powerful technique so make good use of it.

 

The final part of your morning optimism routine needs to be some gentle exercise. This will help to get your blood circulating and your heart pumping. A healthy body is a healthy mind. You can perform any exercise that you like here. It doesn’t need to be a full workout – just enough to get things moving.

 

The four things above will all help you to get the best possible start to each day.

 

Express Gratitude

 

Expressing your gratitude for what you have in your life right now is something that you must do as part of your daily optimism ritual. You can do this at the end of the day before you retire. It doesn’t really matter when you do it to be honest. Write down 3 things you are grateful for and focus on these.

 

Neutralize Negative Thoughts

 

Even the most optimistic of people can experience negative thoughts from time to time. Get into the habit of always neutralizing a negative thought with a positive one. As you progress with this, you will find that you experience fewer negative thoughts on a daily basis.

 

Identify and Complete your Daily Tasks

 

If you want to be an optimist then you need to set yourself challenging goals. When you set your goals, create plans for their achievement. You want to break your plans down into daily tasks. Plan your tasks ahead the night before and endeavor to complete all of your tasks every day.

 

Can You Really Improve Your Emotional Intelligence?

There’s been a long running debate in the world of behavioral and organizational psychologists regarding emotional intelligence. The issue? Whether emotional intelligence exists or not. 

 

A consensus of experts think that EI is a real thing. The big argument centers on what it is and where it comes from. Some people are convinced that emotional intelligence is simply just an extension of your personality. That’s the problem if you’re trying to improve emotional intelligence. 

 

If it’s just part of your personality, then it’s not much different from saying that you are just born with that emotional intelligence or you’re not. This is very depressing. Study after study has shown that emotional intelligence plays a big role in overall personal success. It works hand and hand with IQ. 

 

It doesn’t hurt to be born with high IQ. Don’t get me wrong, this will definitely open a lot of doors for you, but you cannot rely on it alone. IQ can only go so far. You may be a high IQ individual but if you’re lazy, there would be less opportunities for you. You may be able to grasp otherwise complicated concepts very quickly but if you’re unable to communicate with your emotions effectively, this inability is going to stymie your success.

 

IQ does not exist in a vacuum. It really doesn’t. It has to coordinate with other very important human skill set. Emotional intelligence is one of them. The problem with positioning emotional intelligence as essentially arising out of personality is that it becomes random. You’re left with the conclusion that either you’re born with emotional intelligence or you’re not. 

 

This flies in the face of evidence. Why? A lot of people who start out emotionally awkward or even socially incompetent become very smooth polished and effective when they find themselves in social settings. In other words, they chose to increase their emotional intelligence they chose to hone their skills. They did not wait for their built own personality-based emotional intelligence to kick in. They don’t wait around and took matters into their own hands.

 

They know that they have issues dealing with other people so they got the right information and they worked on this trait over and over again over an extended period of time until they got it right. In other words, building up emotional intelligence, if you look at it as an ability instead of some sort of built in, in born extension of your personality, is very much like working out in the gym. Do you remember the first time you hit the gym? It was probably hard on your body because you haven’t worked out before. When you hit the bench-press and you put 50, 60, 100 pounds on your system, it felt like murder. But after two weeks of continuously hitting the weights, it got easier and easier and eventually you reach the point where you can scale up the weights. Now you’re probably lifting a lot more pounds than when you started. The same applies to emotional intelligence. 

 

At first, it’s going to be downright scary. In fact, in certain cases it may seem downright pointless. But the more you keep at it and the better results that you get, the more you stick to it and the better you get at it. You create an upward spiral.

 

To do yourself a big favor, understand that emotional intelligence is something that you can improve. It’s not something that is set in stone, it is not something that some people are born with and most are not. Get those ideas out of your head. 

 

It is something that you can improve as long as you choose to. Make emotional intelligence maximize your chances of success in all areas of life.

 

Here’s Why Emotional Intelligence is as Crucial as IQ for Personal Success

For the longest time, there is the idea that people who make a big deal of emotional intelligence are simply low or mediocre IQ people. 

 

In the minds of a lot of people, those who make a big deal of their emotional skills and sociability are essentially compensating for the fact that they have low or mediocre IQ. If only things were that simple. 

 

The truth is, when you look at any organization, chances are high that the head honcho or the prime movers and shakers of that establishment are not at the top of the IQ chart for that organization. In fact, in many cases, the most progressive and successful organizations have CEOs that have IQs way below the smartest people in their organizations. The smart individuals, it turns out, are specialists. Either they work in the IT department, the planning department and other areas, but when it comes to the actual operation of raw executive control of the organization, these individuals tend to have lower IQs. 

 

What’s going on? You have to look at emotional intelligence. Success doesn’t just involve figuring out what to do. It doesn’t just turn on whether you know how to do things or not. Instead, a large part of success turns on whether you can really manage people who are often opposed to each other towards a common goal. 

 

You must be able to do this day after day, week after week, month after month. You must be able to scale this in the future and you must be able to communicate this clearly not only to your team members, but also to people outside your team.

Interestingly enough, this skill set cannot be explained by IQ. This is where emotional intelligence comes in. Not only do you have self-aware to the point that you know what you’re feelings are, but you are able to communicate you feelings to others in such a way that you’ve become more persuasive and you are able to remind them about common goals. This is how you can tell whether a leader can motivate and inspire people around them to produce better and better results.

 

People with low emotional intelligence who are thrust into leadership positions often use fear, intimidation, or grotesque and cheap rewards to get what they need. Eventually, that gets old. That organization would stagnate if it doesn’t fall apart. 

 

Emotional intelligence is crucial to any organization that is aiming for the fences. make no mistake, if you’re trying to hit that home run, you need to be led by somebody who not only knows how say the right things to the right people in the right time to produce the right results, but also who is able to do this in many different contexts. That person must also able to plan out the consequences of such emotional signals. 

 

Understand the importance of emotional intelligence because if you want to be more successful in any area of your life, you need to confront this issuer and you need to master emotional intelligence. Click here to get your own personal blueprint of emotional intelligence success. 

 

It’s not as hard as you think. It is not complicated, it is not Greek, and it is not written in computer codes. You just have to know what you’re doing and what you’re dealing with. 

 

Unfortunately, so many people think in habitual terms. They think that once they perceive certain things that they can respond emotionally a certain way. This is why they continue to struggle and don’t get the results that they otherwise have coming to them. 

 

If you want to maximize your emotional intelligence, you need the right guidance. This book will set you on the right path. Forget about blog posts that you’ve read and the webinars on YouTube that you’ve seen, start with a blank slate. Start with what you know. Start with who you are. 

 

Is Empathy Overblown and Exaggerated?

American media makes a big deal of the human trait of empathy. We are reminded at every turn to always step in the shoes of our fellow people and look at the situation from their perspective. In fact, empathy is being kicked around so often in mass media that it runs the risk of being rendered meaningless. The more people repeat it, the more clueless people are about what it really means. It really is quite sad because empathy is necessary for emotional intelligence. 

 

There are no two ways about it, this is an inescapable fact. If you want to become a more effective emotional person, and be in touch with your emotional intelligence and make it work for you, you have to know what empathy is and how to use it. Empathy means being able to look at any situation from the perspective of people in reacting with that situation. You may not necessarily like these people, they may not have anything in common with you, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are able to step out of the crushing gravitational pull of your own ego and pride to step into their shoes.

 

As you can imagine, this requires a tremendous amount of reprograming because that’s not how people wire themselves. Most of us look at the world in selfish terms. We think the world revolves around us. In fact, too many of us think that once we die, the world dies with us because we’re no longer there to witness what’s going on. You know that that’s a lie. You don’t have to be a philosophy major in college to understand the concept of absolute truth. 

 

The world existed before you, it exists now and will continue to exist long after you’re gone. That’s reality. How does this play out it terms of logic? Well, if you see a cat, it doesn’t really matter if it has stripes or spots, or has many colors or only one. Once you understand the form of a cat, you know that cats exist. 

 

The same goes with the world. If you can understand the concept of reality, then you know that reality exists whether you’re there to observe it or not. 

 

The problem is a lot of people assume that they are the center of their universe. This is why empathy merely gets lip service. It’s very hard for us to stay away from the gravitational pull of our pride and egos. You would rather imagine that everything turns around us. 

 

This is why it’s really important to master the art of empathy. Ironically enough, to become a more empathetic person, you must first become more emotionally self-aware. In other words, to be selfless, you must first become selfish and self-absorbed. 

 

Examine yourself. Are the emotions that you’re feeling what you think they are? Are you able to effectively communicate these emotions in an objectively clear way? Once you have answered these and other fundamental questions, can you make serious progress when it comes to empathy?

 

Make no mistake, if you want to become a better leader, more sexually attractive to members of the opposite sex, become a persuasive person all around and otherwise live a more fulfilling and effective life, empathy is part of the picture. 

 

The good news is you only need to click here to get the information you need to maximize your emotional intelligence.

 

Effectively Cope with Toxic Emotions with This One Simple Change

Does this happen to you? 

 

You think about a memory and all of a sudden you just feel like you’re about to cry? You can’t help it. It just happens automatically. 

 

Do you sometimes think about somebody who said a mean thing to you when you were in the past or did mention badly to you and you can’t help but fill up with rage? 

 

In fact, it can get so bad that you’re just shaking in anger. 

 

You find yourself in social situations where people look at you a certain way and you can’t help but want to smack them across the face. 

 

Welcome to the world of toxic emotions. 

 

Most people are able to deal with these toxic emotions and not take actions that they will come to regret later on. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s like falling on a grenade. Eventually, the grenade will blow up and it definitely burns deep down inside. 

 

Is that a better way to deal with toxic emotions? Well, please understand that this is not absolutely necessary. When you think about your ex-girlfriend who cheated with your best friend behind your back and told everybody about it, you don’t necessarily have to feel a sense of shame, embarrassment and the overall aching need to exact revenge. You don’t have to do that. That doesn’t necessarily have to flow from that memory. Just because you think about certain things in your life doesn’t mean they have to consume you or trigger negative emotions.

 

Did you know that toxic emotions can be controlled with one simple change? Before I get to that simple solution, let me explain to you how you develop toxic emotions in the first place. 

 

Of all the things that you can remember about your ex-girlfriend, ex-wife, whatever, you pick certain memories. You can choose to pick other things. Of those things that you remember, you choose certain interpretations. All of this is obvious, you can choose interpret or analyze those memories a certain way. It doesnt have to lead to you filling up with anger, feeling hopeless, embarrassed and humiliated. You don’t have to go through the normal range of reactions that you’ve grown accustomed to. You can choose a different path. But understand that it’s all choice and that’s where I’d like you to focus on. 

 

You can choose your memories you can also choose how to interpret them and respond to them. Know that’s very hard at first, it’s like trying to stop a roller-coaster after it has reached the peak of the tracks and starts to fall at full speed. But the more you do it, the better you get at it, let put it this way, the more you try, the less toxic your emotional states become. Eventually you reach a tipping point where you no longer have to feel bad about other people, yourself, and life, in general. 

 

Learn the intricacies of emotional intelligence and how they can help you cope with toxic emotions so you can perform better in all areas of your life.

 

Are Your Emotional Coping Skills Preventing You from Being a Happy Person?

Let’s get one thing clear. The concept of happiness is kind of exaggerated. It really is overrated. It seems that everybody in this dog is hell-bent on becoming happy. Now there’s nothing ultimately wrong with that but the problem involves definition. 

 

Let’s get on thing straight. In the United States and in the western worlds, general happiness is usually defined in externalist terms. Happiness is something that you get from the outside. It doesn’t come from within. It’s an emotional state that you feel from within, but ultimately is triggered by factors people and things outside of you. You have to wake up at the right side of the bed, people have to be kind to you, things have to work in a certain way, a lot of the things that you are expecting to happen have to happen a certain way, and then and only then would you feel happy. 

 

This really is too bad because if you define happiness along this similar line, you probably are not going to be happy all that often. Even if you reach that emotional state, it’s not going to last long. How come? These definitions don’t really position you for long lasting and truly intense happy moments. They don’t, because you’re not in control. Happiness either happens from time to time or it doesn’t. It tends to happen at a role of the dice or when things line up. That’s how way to live your life. It’s much better to look at happiness as a product of your emotional coping skills.

 

When you focus on skills, you focus on a series of actions that you can control. By being aware of what you’re doing at a specific time and place, you will put yourself in a position of becoming aware of the consequences of these actions and feelings. By doing so, you’ll be able to choose how you feel. 

 

You’ll be able to choose how you respond and what to remember what to focus on and this can lead to a more sustainable level of happiness. This leads to control. Compare this with a person who just basically waits to see if people are going to be nice to him or her. He or she waits if certain things will line up. Maybe they’re waiting for a new job or a new position to open, maybe they’re looking for a raise or a scholarship or looking to get good grades at a test. 

 

The problem is when you put yourself in a position where you waiting for somebody else to get their act together to deliver happiness in your life, you’re playing a losing game. You’re not in the driver's seat of your life and as you probably already know life is what happens when you’re making other plans. 

 

Assume more control over your life by assuming more control over you emotions coping skills across a wide variety if situations that happen in life. 

 

Get a clear understanding of how this works and to establish a blue print of increased emotional control. 

 

Emotional intelligence is crucial to life's success. It’s high time that you make your emotions work for you instead of against you.

 

Are Your Emotional Coping Skills Preventing You from Achieving Career Success?

Do you think that you’re the smartest person in the room at work? Are you able to do work that you know your coworkers cannot match in terms of volume as well as quality? Is it obvious to you that you are more qualified than anybody on your team? Is it also true that you’re not getting the kind of raises and promotions you feel you deserve? If any of this resonates with you, you might want to look at your emotional coping skills.

 

Understand that the modern American workplace doesn’t just turn on intelligence. It would be so simple if all it takes to be promoted and to get a raise is to be smarter than the next guy. 

 

If you’ve worked a day in corporate America, you know that this isn’t the case. It’s not unusual for people who are obviously less intellectually-gifted than you to get promoted not just once, twice, but all the way to the top. What’s going on? Well, a lot of success may turn on intelligence scores. In fact, in study after study, IQs have been correlated to life success. IQ tests are almost universally accepted as a good indicator of overall life success. But this begs the question, “how come people with high IQs don’t always become successful?” In fact, if we’re talking about really spectacular levels of success, I’m talking about corner office CEO type of success, when factoring an IQ, it’s a wash.

 

Now there are other factors. Maybe you’re related to the old boss, maybe you are a part of the right group or you came into the picture with all sorts of advantages. But if we were to account for all of that, there is one other factor that shines forth. It cannot be ignored. This is called emotional intelligence.

 

One key part of your emotional intelligence is your skill in coping emotionally with certain social situations. This might be holding you back. If you have tough time dealing with completion and you tend to say the wrong things it the wrong people at the wrong time, don’t be surprised if this all blows up in your face when it comes time for a promotion. 

 

If you find yourself always locked into some sort of negative emotional feedback loop with certain types of personalities in your office, don’t be surprised if this has a negative effect on your career trajectory. These situations impact your emotional coping skills. 

 

How exactly do you deal with difficult people? How do you interact with people who seem to oppose you at every turn? How do you manage people who have obviously negative attitudes and corrosive personality? These problems are not going away nor can they be explained away. You can just rely in your high IQ and magically make these difficult people disappear. It doesn’t work that way. 

 

This is where emotional intelligence comes in your emotional coping skills maybe preventing you from going up the corporate ladder as fast as you wish. This takes a lot of honesty because let’s face It nobody likes to be wrong. Most people don’t like to feel that there’s something wrong with them. But if you want to make progress, you need to look at your emotional coping skills with clear eyes. 

 

“Am I handling certain situations in the best way could? Maybe I don’t have to react. Maybe I don’t have to always pull rank. Maybe I don’t have to automatically dismiss people. Maybe there is some sort of win-win situation here. “. Unfortunately, most people are ill-equipped to handle these questions and that’s why we achieve success on a fairly random basis. Sometimes we do well, sometimes we don’t. 

 

Gain a little bit more predictability in managing your day-to-day success by honing your emotional coping skills.

 

How Much Importance Should You Place on Others' Reading of Your Emotions?

It’s very easy to think that since your emotions are your own, that everybody else should butt out. I can’t say I blame you. After all, everybody's entitled to their emotional states. Everybody has this capacity. Everybody has a right to perceive stimuli from the greater world and come up with their own judgement and analysis of those stimulus.

 

Often times, these judgements trigger strong emotions, and I’m talking about a range of emotions. Everybody’s entitled to this because this is how people process their daily waking reality. But there is a problem when people think that this is all unique. 

 

If we just look at our own perception and judgements of what’s going on around us and allow ourselves to emotionally respond to these, we’re putting ourselves in a bad position. Why? We end up expecting other people to basically just accept our emotional state and leave it at that. This is serious problem. Emotions are both subjective an objective. 

 

When you feel a strong emotion, you don’t just hold it in, let it burn and settle deep down inside because it may cause long-lasting harm. Your number one instinct is to communicate it to somebody else. 

 

That’s where the problem comes in. Again, there is no issue with you feeling how you feel. Everybody’s entitled to their own interpretation and analysis. The issue is, are you able to communicate your emotions accurately? Your feeling certain thigs but when you express it to other people, are they on the same page as you? 

 

You may be thinking that this is just a simple matter of self-awareness and honesty. Fundamentally, you’re absolutely correct. But you have to define self-awareness the right way. You have to be aware in the broader context of the people around you.

 

You have to take context into account and unfortunately, if you do not place much importance on their reading of your emotions, you’re going to remain an emotional child. You look at the world in terms of "take it or leave it" process. You play an impossible game on yourself. You tell yourself that this is how you feel and everybody should accept it otherwise they’re wrong and are bad people. You can live your life like some sort of giant tantrum. That is not a winning life strategy. Believe me you’re going to come out on the losing end each and every time. 

 

You have to place importance on how people read your emotions. You have to acknowledge that people maybe reading your emotions in a completely different way from your own internal reading. Be aware of this disconnect. This should trigger red flags to you. If you see this, then it’s time to look at how you express your emotion and how honest you are in perceiving your own emotions. 

 

A little bit of introspection can go a long way when it comes to better emotional communication. This can lead to better relationships. Make no mistake, you have to place a tremendous amount of importance on other people’s readings of your emotions. Understand that there’s a limit to this. You can’t let other people dictate what you can and cannot feel. Instead, you should just look at their perceptions as some sort of gauge as to how well you communicate your own personal emotions.