Life Imagination

2007 lifeimagination e-Newsletter

The day Transformational Thinking came off the press signaled the fulfillment of a dream to bring the Life Creation Process into tangible book form after years of presenting and clarifying these life-planning concepts. I haven’t stopped learning about and refining the concepts I had clearly explained in that volume. Some of these were improved upon in Designing Your Life Vision, the whimsical, visual version of the Life Creation Process that was published in 2006. Ideas continue to come in clarifying ways, such as the following about explanatory style captured from Marti Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism that relates to Chapter 5 of Transformational Thinking, “Exploring Intentions” (p. 61). I will document, validate, or further clarify earlier written concepts now and then with this lifeimagination newsletter. Tune in for more aha’s in the months to come.

Explanatory Style
Self-esteem is about doing well in the world, about persisting, and therefore overcoming obstacles. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to one incident.

At the core of the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon—that of helplessness. Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you. Two principal concepts are important: 1) Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter. Personal control—the ability to change things by one’s voluntary actions is the opposite of helplessness. 2) Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain yourself why events happen. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness, whereas a pessimistic explanatory style reinforces helplessness.

Think of your explanatory style as reflecting “the word in your heart.” Each of us carries a word in his or her heart. Is the word in your heart a “yes” or a “no?” I’ve learned from my own experience that a no says I’m helpless—there are too many barriers. A yes in my heart dispels helplessness. I see possibilities. Once you become aware, you can choose. With that clarification, you will understand why I enjoy this delightful poem:

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds.
      –ee cummings

How do you think about the causes of the misfortunes, small and large, that befall you? Some people, the ones who give up easily, habitually say of their misfortunes: “It’s me, it’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything I do.” Others, who resist giving up to misfortune, say: “It was just circumstances, it’s going away quickly anyway, and besides, there’s much more in life.” People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent: The bad events will persist, will always be there to affect their lives; they use always and never. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary; they use sometimes and lately; and they believe good events are permanent.

Some people can put their troubles into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is suffering. Others bleed all over everything; they catastrophize. When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives yet they march stalwartly on in the others. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope.  (Notes condensed from Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, paperback reprint, January 2006)

A related quote comes from The Silent Pulse by George Leonard: “We live in an expanding universe, a universe of plenty. Perhaps the safest prediction we can make about the future is that it will surprise us . . . . Our key choice is whether to become aware and take responsibility for the power of our intentions.”