By Ahmed al-Akber/Manama

No one I have come across has done as much research on the subject of optimism as Martin Seligman. His ground-breaking book, Learned Optimism, changed the way a lot of people think about failure and how to overcome it.
A part of what makes his work so powerful is how well researched it is. Over the course of over 20 years, Seligman studied how optimism enhances the quality of life and success in nearly every profession, including athletes, insurance salesmen and politicians.
For example, he studied presidential acceptance speeches and linked their success with how optimistic they were written. Those that dwelled on bad events, analysed them and proposed no action, were less likely to win. Seligman found that the more pessimistic candidates had a darker style in their speeches, were more passive, were less liked by voters and engendered less hope in the voters.
All these consequences taken together predicted that the more pessimistic the candidate, the less likely they were to win. On the flip side, superior results were shown to benefit with the candidates with a more optimistic style.
So if this optimism provides successful results in politics, sports and other aspects of life, it will surely work in marketing. The starting point is to realise that we all have an explanatory style, that is, we have a way of describing the good and bad things that happen to us.
Take a person giving a presentation that does not go so well. If he was optimistic, he would describe the failure as temporary, narrowly focused, and not specific to himself. A pessimist, on the other hand, would describe the failure as permanent, pervasive and personal.
The difference comes in how you view both success and failure. Seligman describes three elements of explanatory style that differentiates optimists from pessimists:
Permanence: A pessimist sees a failure as permanent – nothing he does will change the fact that he will fail, and it takes him much longer to bounce back from failure, or never recover.
The opposite is true when something good comes along – success is seen by the pessimist as temporary – a short-term cause of success that is transient and will pass. Optimists are exactly the opposite – they see success as more permanent and failure as temporary.
Pervasiveness: A pessimist sees negative events in one area of life affecting other areas of life as well. Losing a potential bid with a client is seen as impacting the whole business, or worse, “spillover” areas, such as income, lifestyle, marriage, and so on.
Optimistic people keep failure in check by simply keeping failures in siloes – it is not seen to impact other areas of life. Success, on the other hand is seen to impact other areas of life, a positive result in one area spills over into other areas.
Personalisation:Optimists blame bad events on external factors whereas pessimists tend to put the blame on themselves. Optimists therefore may be more confident as they internalise positive events better, “The positive result was due to my efforts” whereas the pessimists may think, “The positive result was due to factors outside of my control”.
According to Seligman, anyone can learn optimism. Pessimists have the power to acquire the skill of optimism by managing their self talk (how they talk to themselves) to mirror the way optimists do. Through regular practice, its becomes more natural to use, and the pessimistic ‘voice’ softens, while the optimistic voice gets louder.
Seligman’s process of learning optimism is simple, and trains a new way of responding to adversity. Namely, the person learns to talk themselves through personal defeat. It begins with the Ellis ABC model of adversity, belief, and consequence.
Adversity is the event that happens, belief is how that adversity is interpreted, and consequences are the feelings and actions that result from the beliefs. Here is an example:
lAdversity: A client you are working with says she’s not happy with the latest piece of work you have done for her.
lBelief: You think, “This is terrible. I’m going to lose this client (pervasive). This always happens (permanent) to me (personal).
lConsequence: You become depressed, struck with pessimism, and you find it hard to come up with a solution to rectify the problem.
Seligman adds to the above model that helps pessimists to change the way they view the situation. The first part is to dispute these negative thoughts, which centres on providing counter-evidence to the adversity, belief, or consequence. It also looks for the usefulness in staying with the pessimistic thinking.
Disputation might look like this: “Is it really true that the client is not happy, or is she just having a bad day and taking it out on the only person she can?”. “She may even be unhappy with our work today, but how many times has she been happy with your work?”.
“This might be a good opportunity to discuss other issues that she might be having, so that you can improve your relationship”.
Over time, responses become more positive, and help overcome pessimistic thinking. This leads to energisation, the last step in Seligman’s optimism model.
Energy is drawn from the fact that you aren’t weighed down by the negative thoughts before they were disputed. You see things more positively now, and are able to overcome the original adversity, if it still exists in your mind.
Seligman also describes when to use optimism, as it’s not always ideal. If you are in an achievement situation (such as presenting to a client, in a sales meeting, writing an article you hope gets published, or a new marketing activity), use optimism. You can also use optimism when you need to lead a team or improve your marketing mindset in general.
However, if you are going into a risky venture where the future is uncertain and could greatly affect yourself or others, you should rely on using this model to improve your outcome.
According to Seligman, the fundamental guideline for not deploying optimism is to ask what the cost of failure is in the particular situation.
If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy. The investor thinking of putting his life savings in a new business will not have a better outcome due to optimism. Sound evaluation and judgement will help decide that.

- Ahmed al-Akber is the managing director of ACK Solutions, a firm that helps companies to improve their marketing and sales results by offering more effective ways attracting customers and significantly better products and services. Ahmed has worked internationally in marketing, sales, and strategic planning at companies such as the Coca-Cola Company, Philip Morris International and Dell. Questions or comments can be sent to Ahmed on ahmed@acksolutions.com