| Explanatory
style consists of three dimensions. Whether you are a optimist of a pessimist as a
whole depends on how you respond along these three dimensions. The degree to which
we embrace things like hope, love, and responsibility, has a lot to do with our
explanatory styles. Permanence. This is about how long in time you
give up after a failure. If you think about bad things in always's and never's
and abiding traits, you have permanent, pessimistic style. On the contrary, if you
think in sometime's and lately's, if you use qualifiers and blame bad
events on transient conditions, you have an optimistic style.
Pervasiveness. This is about how pervasively you apply your
explanations of failures to other aspects in your life. People who make universal
explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one
area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one
part of their lives, yet march on in the others. People of the latter style
tend to be more optimistic than those of the universal style.
Personalization. When bad things happen, we can blame
ourselves (internalize), or we can blame other people or circumstances
(externalize). People who blame themselves when they fail have low self-esteem and
tend to think themselves as worthless, talentless, etc. People who blame external
events do not lose self-esteem when bad events strike and, as a consequence, they like
themselves better than people of the other kind do.
In his book Learned Optimism, Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman
provides a set of easy-to-answer questions that help us understand our explanatory styles.
He also presents a set of techniques, The ABCs-- Adversity, Belief,
Consequences, that helps to diagnose how you behave in bad situations. With
these self-understandings, changing your mind and moving toward a optimistic view of world
is possible for everyone. |
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