This article provides a tip for becoming most optimistic. It first  looks at the challenges associated with becoming more optimistic. It finishes with one way to  start to increase your ability to notice positive behaviors in those around you. 

Not happy with what you see. Try looking for something else.

I qualify this post with the acknowledgment  that there are external factors or situations where something need to be done about changing the environment that we are living in.  Issues  such as domestic violence are a good example of this. Or workplace bullying. These are never acceptable.

I also noticed a difference class of situations, particularly when working with parents who have come to therapy based on challenging behaviour in their child. They often find it difficult to notice changes in the child’s behaviour. This also happens with couples where they find change in their partner’s behaviour outside of therapy sessions are difficult to spot, but examples that are consistent with historical difficult behaviours are much easier to see.

Why is this so ?

You might be thinking why is this the case. Firstly, we take in a vast amount of data through our perception system which includes components such as our senses. This data is filtered in a number of ways before, and if, it gains conscious attention.  Both of these are huge areas of science and theory but I will discuss here a couple of interesting things I have learnt. Situations that have been stressful we will give a higher priority as we have learnt that we need to be aware of these so  we can deal with them. In our early evolutionary days  if we had a bad experience with a tiger (if we were still alive) we would want to be on the look out for them. This is also true with our body. If we have had an injury in a part of our body we will notice lower level of discomfort in that area. Even though we are advised we are healing, we may notice pain more often. This is because we have trained our attention system to be on the look out for problems in this area of our body.

Unfortunately this same approach can be taken to our five year old son or daughter’s  difficult behaviour. Or the things our partner does wrong. Or issues with our manager or co-workers. We look for it more. This issue is compounded by the fact that our attention span is limited, so noticing one thing precludes us from noticing something else.

So what can i do?.

So how do we change what we notice you might be thinking. We need to utilise the cognitive strategy I call the “Red Car phenomena”. If you even a bought a red car, or in fact a car of any colour,  just after you took ownership you might have been surprised at the number of cars of this same colour. Whilst there might be some factual truth to this, most likely there would also been a degrees of subjective assessment. This supports the idea that we can consciously prime our attention system to look for particular situations, and one of the reasons for doing this is our own personal motivation. In this case we have a degree of motivation to determine how many people have made a similar choice to us and this motivation is used to prime our attention system.  The underlying motivation might be to validate our choice of this car colour.

The tip !!…

So the way to see things differently varies from person to person, but keeping a log, diary or a list of the number of times something happens can be useful. An example of a changed behavior might be when your son or daughter doesn’t provoke their sibling, or does something without being prompted multiple times. It might be when your partner does something caring for you, or when they just listen. It could be when your manager or a co-worker  gives you positive feedback.

Whilst the list itself is useful, the associated priming of our attention system to look for this is equally useful. For some people a personal challenge to notice a certain number of times a changed behavior has occurred can be useful, as it increases motivation and priming.  I encourage you to become your own attention scientist and see what happens.

Further Reading Cognitive biases