I should note that when I was thirteen, I was angry and deeply sad. My home life was challenging, I definitely didn’t have the media-driven “cool teenager” body, and I was awkward. I was really awkward. Eventually that sadness spilled out into my life through anger. I cussed, I fought and I got in too much trouble. I was so unruly that I was sent to a special school for wayward children. Perhaps this sounds like the plot of a well-orchestrated children’s novel. It’s not. People simply began to lose faith in me and as a result, I began to lose faith in myself.
On the outside, I became the neighborhood child that parents didn’t want their kids to play with. On the inside, I was a mixed bag of negative emotions. I felt lonely, angry at the world, envious of those with simpler lives, and confused as to who I was. I was desperate to turn my life around, but given the circumstances it all seemed overwhelming and hopeless.
I remember very clearly sitting in this classroom of unruly children pondering my future. To the left a teacher was literally tackling a student who’d begun a violent outburst. To the right, another student was slowly punching the front of their forehead over and over; sometimes the person we bully most is ourselves. In this terrible moment, I realized something had to change. Maybe it was some sort of divine intervention or, maybe just maybe, I was sick and tired of the person I was. I couldn’t change the circumstances around me, so I would have to be the one to change. If I didn’t, my life would be a complete waste. It was then that my story began to evolve.
Maybe that’s how you feel right now. Maybe that’s why you’re reading this book, because you too realize something in your life has to change, but you’re not sure what or how to do it. It’s a process. It would take me a few years to get my footing and to fully integrate positivity into my life. I want to start this book off with honesty. The change you want does not happen overnight, even though I would love for that to be the case. Miracles are not worked in an hour of light reading. It didn’t happen that way for me, and I am pretty confident that it doesn’t happen that way for most people. You have to put in the work to change.
By the time I got to college, my life was unrecognizable from who I previously was. I entered university on an exception—my grades had been too poor during my rebellious days to go to most schools. However, my new found positivity was a force to be reckoned with. I found an exceptions committee, prepared my case, and found my way into a good school anyway. I went from a C-minus student in high school to an A student in college. Once an awkward loner, I became a social butterfly.
I attribute the majority of my growth in those years to positivity. I was committed to the belief that things would get better, I would get better, and as a result the world would get better. That belief in a better life molded me into the lady boss I am today. I fought to recognize and appreciate many more things in my daily life. I became more present in my reality, and as result I saw and believed I was worthy of so many more opportunities. I developed a deep sense of gratitude, so when bad things happened I was able to acknowledge them as a temporary part of the cycle.
When I tell you that optimism can change your life, I tell you as a person who personally experienced it. I am who I am because I chose to live a more positive life. It may seem impossible at first, but if you invest the time, you will see a whole new world of possibilities open up to you. It will give you the ability to recognize and take advantage of all the amazing things in your life you may be overlooking, help you find the power to overcome hardship more quickly, and it will become your rock-solid foundation for a happier life.
I can see you sitting there, reading my story and making me out to be an exception to the rule. I got lucky. I was an anomaly. I can’t blame you; old me would have done the exact same thing. Maybe I come across like a modern version of that dapper man and his tiny headset. However, I want to stress to you that my growth is not unique. I’ve rounded up a bevy of research that helps to support that my story can become your story as well. You too can choose to live and receive all the benefits of living life on the sunny side. In fact, it is the scientifically expected outcome of a life lived with zeal. Studies have shown that people that incorporate positivity into their lifestyle better cope with stress, have stronger immune systems, better overall health, and are more resilient when crises do happen. Optimists are also statistically more likely to notice opportunities in their social and work lives.
Positive Thinkers Cope Better with Stress
Have you ever been at work or school and gotten a message that you needed to meet with a boss or teacher and then worried the entire day about what the meeting could be about? Maybe you failed. Maybe you’ve done some terrible awful thing you somehow managed to forget. Maybe a terrible rumor about you has spread like wildfire and you’re going to have defend yourself. So you spend the next several hours until the meeting running over every possible negative reason for the meeting. Your palms are sweaty. Your mind is cloudy. You are engulfed in your own anxiety. Then the big sit-down finally rolls around and you find out you just forgot to submit some paperwork or some other mundane thing. The stress you felt all day was unnecessary, and as a result a huge amount of your precious emotional energy was wasted. Most of our day-to-day stress—just like in this example—is self-created.
According to research, stress itself doesn’t exist in an event, but rather in our perception of an event. In simple terms, it means that no matter what happens in life, you have the ability to be in the emotional driver’s seat. Pessimists often approach commonplace life situations with the expectation that they’ve done something wrong. In the previous example, many of us frequently assume that the only reason a boss or teacher might ever speak to us is because we’ve done something wrong. This type of thinking not only creates additional stress, but closes us off from opportunities and friendships, and it can affect our ability to manage stress in the long run. Optimists, on the other hand, do not adopt a sentiment regarding a given situation until all the facts needed to fairly assess it are available. It’s not that the optimist is assuming that something amazing is going to happen at the meeting. They’re not sitting anxiously, counting down the hours until their office pow-wow so they can get some super fun prize. They’re simply not assuming anything at all.
If the event is negative, the positive individual benefits from the fact they haven’t been mulling over every possibility and creating a million-and-one negative scenarios in their head. This makes them more prepared to manage the real results of the situation, less likely to overreact as result of pent-up emotion, and generally more able to resolve any issues that they are faced with. In this way, positive people are problem-solvers and rely on coping skills versus venting or fixating on the issue at hand.
I should share that this has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to learn. In the early stages of my career, when a problem would arise, I would have to tell no less than every single person in my office, the doorman, and several strangers I wrestled into conversation on the street before I could put the issue to rest. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. I’d find myself like a car caught in quicksand—spinning my wheels with all this excess emotion, but getting nowhere. Venting our issues, while seemingly harmless and perhaps even possibly therapeutic, can cause us to fixate on the negative aspects of an incident rather than invest our energy in resolving its challenges.
I remember talking with my boss about an issue I was, once again, ruminating on. He stopped me dead in my tracks, looked me square in the eye, and said: “Is talking about this actually making anything better for you?” It wasn’t. I apologized, and he grinned. He stood up from his desk, spread his arms wide, leaned back, and started to sing. “Let it go… Let it go-oh-oh-oh.” To this day, whenever I find myself obsessing over something that does not deserve my emotional energy, I stand up, spread my arms wide, and sing that song. It never fails to turn my mood around. It took a Disney princess for me to break one of my most resilient pessimistic habits.
Let this story help you to remember that you have a choice as to where you invest your energy. Perhaps when things go awry, you too can be like Elsa, the famous ice princess from Frozen—let it go and remember that most of the stress in your day-to-day life can be avoided or even reduced by keeping an upbeat attitude. Research has found that optimists not only create less stressful situations, but also experience less overall stress than non-optimists.