There is an old story about identical twins who were alike in every way except one. One was an incurable optimist; the other saw trouble in almost everything. Their parents, worried by both extremes, sought advice and were told to try an unusual experiment on the boys’ next birthday. Give the pessimist the finest bicycle they could afford and give the optimist a box filled with manure.
The pessimist looked at his magnificent new bicycle and immediately worried that he would fall off and break his leg. The optimist opened his box, stared at the manure for a moment and then began looking around excitedly. “With this much manure, there has to be a pony somewhere.”
It is an exaggerated story, of course, but there is something recognisable about both reactions. We often think of optimism as expecting good things to happen. In organisations, this can easily turn into the familiar language of positive thinking: believe in yourself, look on the bright side, everything will work out. That is not particularly useful to a leader.
There are situations where things really are going badly. A strategy may have failed, the numbers may be poor or a valued colleague may have left. Pretending otherwise is not optimism. It is denial. The more useful question is not whether you see the glass as half full. It is what you tell yourself when things go wrong.
What Story Do You Tell Yourself?
Martin Seligman’s work on optimism offers an interesting way of looking at this. When something goes wrong, pessimistic thinking has a tendency to make the problem permanent, pervasive and personal.
A bad quarter becomes “the business is in trouble”. A failed presentation becomes “I’m not good at this”. A difficult relationship with one colleague becomes “I can’t work with these people”. In each case, something quite subtle has happened. A specific event has quietly become a much larger conclusion.
Optimistic thinking does not require us to deny the problem. It requires us to examine the conclusion we have drawn from it. This quarter was poor, but does it mean the business is fundamentally broken? The presentation did not go well, but does that make me a poor presenter? This relationship is difficult, but does it say something about every relationship around me?
This matters because the explanation we give ourselves influences what we do next. If I believe a setback is permanent, there is little reason to try again. If I believe the problem affects everything, other possibilities become harder to see. And if I turn every failure into a judgement about myself, useful reflection can quickly become self-doubt.
Optimism Needs Evidence
There is another side to this argument. Unrestrained optimism can be just as misleading as pervasive pessimism. Leaders who habitually look for the pony may eventually step over information they should have noticed. Sometimes the manure really is manure.
Useful optimism therefore needs to coexist with realism. A leader needs enough optimism to keep looking for possibilities, but enough honesty to recognise when something is not working. The two are not opposites. In fact, optimism becomes more useful when it is willing to confront inconvenient evidence.
In my coaching conversations, I sometimes ask leaders to write down the negative thoughts that keep returning. Seeing them on paper creates a little distance from them. Some begin to look exaggerated almost immediately. Others survive the scrutiny, and those are usually the ones worth doing something about.
The purpose is not to replace every negative thought with a positive one. It is to separate what has actually happened from the larger story we have started telling ourselves about it. If the concern does not survive examination, perhaps we can let it go. If it does, optimism is no substitute for action.
Perhaps that is where useful optimism begins. Not with the certainty that there is always a pony somewhere, but with the willingness to look carefully at what has happened before deciding what it means.
Optimism does not change the reality in front of us. It changes what we believe may still be possible.
