Turning Others Into Optimists

NORMAN VINCENT PEALE (who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking) and W. Clement Stone (who co-authored Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude) are pioneers in positive thinking. They set the tone for what many of us know about "having a positive attitude." Even if you've never read any of their books, they have influenced every generation of positive thinking authors for sixty years. And one of their principles might be called "acting your way into feeling." In other words, if you act confident, it often makes you feel confident. If you act happy, it can sometimes help you feel happy. This is such a simple and direct method, and so easy to do under any circumstance, that many of us, including me, have used it far too much, and if you have tried it, you know it can devolve into putting on a smiling face to show others you've got a positive attitude. And that doesn't feel good at all.

Peale and Stone had a point that you can "fake it till you make it." If you do it correctly, and do it for the right reasons, your body posture, the look on your face, etc., can make you feel much better. You can read more about that here.

But when you're trying to change your attitude, the really important question is: What mood or attitude are you aiming at? For Peale and Stone, cheerfulness was the number one attitude to try for. But I disagree. My two favorites are determination and warmth (I don't have a good word for this, but it's a kind of open, affectionate feeling of kindness toward others).

But whatever your favorite attitude is, deceiving others by pretending to feel something you don't actually feel doesn't feel good, and people can somehow see through it anyway.

If you would like to crush pessimism in the world at large, you're going to start by influencing the people you know. And most of your influence will come from people wanting to know what you know because they like your attitude and admire the way you deal with situations and interact with people. They'll want your attitude. For this to happen, your attitude has to be genuine. Pretending to be positive takes effort and isn't any fun, and nobody wants to emulate it.

To interest others in crushing pessimism, it really helps if you have a genuinely positive attitude, which may be peaceful, earnest, open and affectionate, or any number of positive emotions. If you aren't feeling that great and want to feel better, do something that will make you genuinely and authentically feel better. You have lots of options. Undemoralizing yourself is the most important, but we have many good methods to use. A couple of good resources are Attitude and Mood and MoodRaiser.com. In your efforts to convert others into pessimism crushers, you don't ever have to fake cheerfulness. If you know what you're doing, you won't need to put it on from the outside. It will shine through from the inside.

Read more: A Handy Tool For Defeating Pessimism Worldwide

And still more: How To Advance The Cause