Pollyanna. Naive. Delusional. These are three words that critics of a positive or optimistic coaching style use and, let’s face it, in some cases, they might be more accurate than we’d like to admit. One of the problems with using the phrase, “positive coaching,” is that people associate it with The Power of Positive Thinking that if you believe something it will come to pass regardless of your actions or external limitations.
Realism is absolutely needed in many situations that coaches and athletic directors run into on a daily basis such as student safety, fiscal policies and procedures and transportation. Although you want ourselves and our coaches to have hope and optimism for a bright future, you also need a healthy dose of realism to ensure success.
Vice Admiral James Stockdale was shot down during the Vietnam War and spent seven and a half years in a brutal prison camp where he was tortured and left in solitary confinement for much of his time there. How was he able to survive while others succumbed to the terrible conditions of the camp?
Stockdale said that prisoners who thought they would be home by Christmas and when that came and went, would say they’d be home by Easter would eventually wear down and lose all hope as these mental milestone came and went. Stockdale said it was “naive optimism,” that got you killed in those prison camps.
Stockdale had a different approach. As he put it, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great coined this concept as the Stockdale Paradox.
So then the question arises, how does one both remain optimistic in the face of extreme adversity or negative situations?
Recently I came across the concept of what Martin Seligman refers to “Explanatory Styles.” An explanatory style is essentially your internal dialogue when something happens. Seligman through research identified two basic explanatory styles: optimistic and pessimistic.
Seligman further identified three crucial dimensions to your explanatory style:
- Permanence: Is it likely to continue? Is it permanent or temporary? If it’s a bad thing, the optimist tends to think it’s a fluke. If it’s a good thing, they tend to think it’s permanent.
- Pervasiveness: Is it reflective of your whole life? Is it “universal” or is it “specific”? With a good event, the optimist is more likely to extend it to her whole life. With a bad event, she will tend to isolate the incident as specific to that situation.
- Personalization: Internal or external? Something good happens. An optimist pats himself on the back (internal)—saying he did a good job. Something bad happens. The optimist looks to things outside of himself (external) to explain the event—from bad luck to an off day.
Seligman took his theories to several places to study. At Metlife, Seligman was asked to screen all of the new hires at the company for their explanatory style. He found that insurance agents who scored in the less optimistic half of his test were twice as likely to quit as agents who scored in the more optimistic half. Further, the agents from the top quarter sold 50% more than the agents from the bottom quarter.
In the NBA he found that teams, and not just individuals, have a meaningful and measurable explanatory style. Following a loss, an optimistic team was much more likely to beat the spread. A team’s explanatory style for bad events strongly predicts how they do against a point spread after a loss.
So, how to become more optimistic? Pay attention to your internal dialogue, notice the patterns, and try to focus on the permanence, pervasiveness and personalization you ascribe to an event.
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