I’m going to cut straight to the chase: how optimistic are you feeling right now? Like how are you coping with:
Covid life readjustments?
Working from home?
The kid/work juggle?
The worry?
The social distancing?
The mask wearing?
Our collective murky future?
If you’re anything like me, you won’t be finding it easy, that’s for sure.
I have some good news though; despite all of this (and a whole lot more), you can still turn that heavy, negative head into an optimistic one. And it isn’t as hard as it sounds.
Because while you might think that optimism and pessimism are personality traits; researchers now believe that we have the power to dial up or down our optimism genes, a bit like a volume control.
As British science writer and professor, Tim Spector puts it, ‘We are regaining control, if you like, of our genes.’ Which is excellent news.
Often, we feel most negatively about our lives and ourselves when something bad happens, like a mistake at work, or a personal mess up. This is how it goes: you make a mistake, you berate yourself, you blow the whole thing out of proportion and then everything feels overwhelming and unmanageable. You feel like crap. Anyone?
There’s a trick though, and it’s happens by intersecting the part where you tell yourself what actually happened to cause the mistake. Obviously no one can avoid life or work mess ups, but you can manage how you respond to them by thinking about how you mentally process what’s just happened.
And I can show you how in the membership club this month.