Learned Optimism

Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it. – Charles R. Swindoll

You haven’t heard back, and it's been three days after your fourth interview when they said they were going to make a decision between you and the other top candidate soon. Do you assume they went with the other person, or that some work crisis interfered with their hiring timeline and that you’re still in contention?

Negative assumptions can happen so fast that we don’t realize we’ve made them until after the fact. The consequences can be self-fulfilling. It is critical to recognize them as soon as possible, remind ourselves that we have choice and reframe our view of the situation.

One of my very favorite books provides a step-by-step guide to learning this process. It is Learned Optimism, by Dr. Martin Seligman. Dr. Seligman is on the forefront of the Positive Psychology movement, and has put his fantastic Optimism Test (also in Learned Optimism) in the public domain on the University of Pennsylvania website.

http://www.authentichappiness.com

I strongly recommend taking it as a baseline evaluation of pessimistic self-talk. I also can't recommend his step-by-step guide to training yourself to optimistically reframe your view of situations - what happens to you - strongly enough.