Have you found yourself recently driving along in traffic and someone cuts right in front of you? Well, when that happens, how do you respond? Again? What are you thinking? What are you feeling? What might you be saying?

What? What do you do? Well, that's a problem. Someone's off right in the middle of traffic, and you need to figure out how to deal with that. Well, I want to share with you a technology on how to do that the right way through what's called learned optimism. Now learn optimism was popularized by a number of years ago by Dr. Seligman.

And he wrote an outstanding book called learned optimism, and among other things, he looked at those who were involved In the Holocaust and why so many of them died and their lives were destroyed for all sorts of reasons. And why some made it through the Holocaust and actually came out on the other end with a positive type of attitude. And what he learned was the key to all of this was learned optimism, these people learned how to be optimistic. Now you can learn optimism, and you can learn pessimism, or helplessness. And what I want to do is share with you technologies about how to develop learned optimism in your life. I liked what Harry Truman said.

He said, a pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities. And an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties. You see, it's just a matter of how you've learned or trained yourself to think about the problem, the person who cuts you off in traffic, the financial collapse, the relational breakdown, the physical problem, the death or harm to someone in your family. It really is the result of what's going on up here. What you've learned to do what you've practiced to do. You know, we all know the metaphor of the glass being half empty, or half full.

And we use that to define a pessimists and an optimist. So when you look at a glass by enlarge of water, like we have in this illustration, do you see it half empty? Or do you see it half full? Well, a learned optimist, realizes that it's entirely full. You see, it's full of water, and it's full of air, so it's filled to the top, just with two different substances. So when we have these difficulties, these challenges these problems come into our lives.

Crowd into our lives. Really the mindset is, our life is full, the situation is full, I might not be able to see it like I can't see the air. But there's something good in here for me to learn and grow from as I practice, learned optimism or learn how to embrace the problem, as we're talking about, of course, throughout this entire module. I like some of the thinking that goes on and in when people think about learned optimism versus learned helplessness, or weakness. One of them is this particular illustration that I'm going to put up and walk you through. learned helplessness is a pattern of giving up.

In the face of difficulties. Learned optimism is a pattern of persisting in the face of difficulty. A learned helplessness has this mindset when things are tough. That's That person blames himself when things are going wrong. They see failure as evidence of worthlessness. They be value attributes, their own attributes and accomplishments.

They focus on weaknesses, not mistakes, they lose motivation in the face of obstacles. They this all increases stress and avoidance and it feels to the person to be overwhelming and tends to shut the person down. The learn optimist in the same circumstances, sees the bad events as unlucky or unfortunate. They see failure as a part of life. They see that a gives they give themselves credit for their positive attributes and accomplishments. They focus on their strengths.

They maintain a motivation to overcome obstacles. They use a stress to push towards a goal, they work harder to find a solution. They're energized by the problem, or the difficulty they see is the challenge again a mountain to climb, a possibility versus having a sense of helpless ness. Well, that's the different kind of responses people have, and the patterns that they can have when they're more a learned optimist versus a learned a pessimist or a person who feels helpless. Also, by the way, when, when this whole concept of learned optimism came to the fore, Seligman makes a distinction between how an optimist responds versus a pessimist responds to both bad situations and good situations. And you'll see that in this particular graphic that I want to walk you through.

Notice the optimists is the left quadrants the top two from top to bottom. pessimists is the response on the right quadrants from top to bottom. And then the top two quadrants are, how they respond in a bad situation. And the bottom two are how they respond in a good situation. Notice also that we're identifying each one of these the three things Seligman and his associates deal with and that is time. That is the scope and that's the source.

So here's how this works. When there's a bad situation, the optimist sees things as temporary, related to time, they see it as specific related to scope, and they see it as external related to overall source. The pessimists actually sees instead of it as temporary, they see it as permanent and prevalent. This is always the way it is. They see it as perversely pervasive. This is just who I am.

And this is my way of life and they personalize it or internalize it. That's in a bad situation. Notice it in a good situation, the mindset totally flips. So the optimist sees the good situation as permanent and prevalent. They see it as pervasive, and they see it as personal internal, and the pessimist sees just the opposite. Well, by the way, you're going to be able to understand these a lot better by some of the tools we're making available in the resource center that drill down on these areas.

But I'm just giving you an introduction now and I want you to go deeper in a moment. And then you'll notice as an example, of this concept of permanent, pervasive and personal, here's how pessimists and optimists would respond to say, having a date that doesn't go very well. So the pessimist, again, sees a permanence by saying, I'll never be able to attract a girl. It's pervasive and they say I'm just not an issue. interesting person, and it's personal. They say I'm ugly.

That's my problem. The optimist says, Hey, they're going to be plenty of girls who like me. And it was just one of those isolated situations. It's not pervasive. And hey, she might have been in a bad mood. So they don't personalize it and say, Hey, I'm ugly, they say she may have been in a bad mood.

Now, this isn't success, motivational hype. It's simply a mindset that you need to develop yourself and grow in in the days to come. Now, the technology that we want to give you the process we want to give you to do this is called the ABC d e method. And here's what those things stand for. A stands for adversity. So here's an adversity or an activating event.

So let's go back to the car and someone pulls right in front of you in traffic. You say the adversity is that act, someone's pulled right in front of you, and you've That's activated something inside of you a way to deal with stress. The B is for belief. And that means whenever that happens, there's something that's going on in your mind, you might be saying, well, that jerk that stupid person, how rude they are, I can't believe they invaded my space. This is offensive. And it may lead you to say, I'm going to get back at them or I'm going to go after them.

Or I'm going to call the cops on them or, or something else, if you're responding inappropriately. The consequences of that would be, boy, this makes me feel yucky about myself. You know, sometimes I cut people off and maybe it wasn't intentional, it was unintentional. And maybe I, you know, maybe I need to learn better about this. The consequences of, of you're responding wrongly might cause you to step on the gas and try to ram a person or, or give them some kind of international hand signal or start, you know, cussing at them. You know, yelling at them so they can hear you We do the most juvenile things, don't we?

The consequences could be, hey, I could actually hurt someone in that car, I could hurt someone with me, it could be unhealthy. And I don't want to see that happen. consequences could be, hey, this is going to put me in a bad mood all day. And I'm going to be, you know, unkind to the people around me at work or in my circle. And that's not a healthy thing. So that's where you think through your consequences.

And then the disputation. That's the de you dispute this, you dispute your faulty thinking, and you go, you know, maybe this person just had a bad day. Maybe they're, you know, there's something that they were totally unaware of what they did. Maybe they're in a rush for an emergency and needed to get somewhere you get my point. You start to dispute the way you think and see it becomes habit and instinctual the way we think, and we're trying to change that here. And then the E is for energization, or execution.

That's when you energize yourself. You execute Positive kind of mindset that leads to the positive kind of response. You say, Hey, I'm going to cut this person slack. I'm going to be gracious toward them. Because you know, people cut me slack when I do things wrong. So I'm going to have a kind response.

I'm going to be patient. I'm going to, frankly, just turn the wheel and stay out of the way and hopefully, make everyone around me safe. Do you get the idea of what we're doing? Now look at. We could go into great depth on that here. But that's not my intent.

I'm introducing you to these principles and also a process of practicing learned optimism. So what I'd like for you to do following the video is I want you to work through the ABCD process. You'll see in the Resource Center, we have an explanation of this that's more full, fully developed. It explains how to respond or how you could respond in a negative situation. How you could respond in a positive situation using the ABCDE method. And at the end of that, you'll see we have a worksheet that you can fill in.

And and I want you to apply that to the biggest challenge you're dealing with right now. Or the biggest problem. I want you to think through. Here's the adversity spelled out, you have room to write. Here's my normal belief pattern. And think about this, dwell on this meditate upon this.

And then here are the consequences when I behave or my act in light of my poor pattern of behaving, perhaps learn helplessness or learn pessimism. And here's some of the consequences. And here's how I think I need to think differently. That's a disputation that's explained again, both in the documents but also in some videos, I'm going to mention in a moment, and then energization that's where you start changing your behavior. Now remember, you need to practice these things over and over again. 21 days to To start a habit 42 days to really instill it.

But you can turn this into a learned habit, and to learn optimism, and that's what we want to see happen with you. And finally, then I want to give you a couple of other exercises going forward. Because this is such an important area, we have an outstanding document, a PDF here by BYU University, their management school that they've developed on this, it's simple. It explains these issues a little bit more clearly. It's easy to understand, but I want you to study that and think through this, because I want you to, to really get this into your brain. I want you to switch on your brain.

And then secondly, we have a couple of videos here that deal with learned optimism that are very helpful. One is a learned optimism, book summary video, which means it's, it's, by the way, more graphic and it's very simple, and it's very helpful in understanding what we've been talking about in this particular session, but a greater length and the other one also Also delves deeper into this whole topic of learned happiness, learned optimism and how it's related to happiness overall, and how you can fill up your joy bucket by practicing this skill. So if you want to have the right perspective toward problems, you've got to learn to embrace them. We've talked about why that's important. And we've talked about how to do it now I want to see a put it to work. By all means, begin chatting up your questions and your insights in our private Facebook group.

And let's bring our group wisdom together to even sharpen one another and even expose one another to better and greater resources when it comes to how we deal with problems. You got it. Okay, look forward to joining you in our next module.