Negative Affects of Optimism

While optimism is not native to every leader or would-be leader, it is a trait that can be acquired or even lost. In his groundbreaking research, psychologist Martin Seligman observed that both laboratory animals and humans have a capacity to “learn helplessness” to react to adversity by losing faith in their ability to control or improve circumstances. “Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter,” Seligman (p148) notes. In contrast, those animals or humans who retain a belief in their ability to control events can overcome significant obstacles. Seligman contends, remarkably, that this has less to do with filling the mind with positive messages than with subduing its tendency to transmit negative, despairing messages.

Psychologist Shelley Taylor goes farther, finding that “positive, self-enhancing illusions” are necessary to buffer negative experiences and impressions and are in fact a normal ingredient in human mental health (Taylor, 79). “In order to maintain a positive yet adaptive view of the self, it is necessary to be self-deceptive,” Taylor writes. “Negative information must be recognized for what it is and simultaneously kept from awareness as much as possible” (Taylor, 82).

One of the most impressive and memorable qualities of successful leaders is the way they respond to failure. Like Karl Wallenda (1905-1978), the great tightrope aerialist who once remarked that “the only time I feel truly alive is when I walk the tight-rope,” these leaders put all their energies into their task. Not only do they not think about failure, they do not even use the word, relying on synonyms such as mistake or glitch or bungle or countless others, such as false start, mess, hash, bollix, or error. Never failure. One of them said during the course of an interview that “a ...