Case Studies The Power of Positive Thinkers   By Jill Neimark (Reprint from Success Magazine)       Robert Dell should have been crushed. Two years ago, the meat-packing plant where he worked closed on a half hour’s notice. "Severance?" asks the blond, 47-year-old Dell, who is married with two children. "I got what was in my wallet." Within weeks he had traded in his butcher’s apron for a business suit. He then applied for a sales position at Metropolitan Life. "It never occurred to me that I didn’t know how to sell," explains Dell, who last year joined other top sellers in the Leader’s Club at Met Life.       By most standards, Dell was an average Joe. He’d been punching time clocks for 26 years, as his father did before him. He hadn’t sold so much as a glass of lemonade when he was a kid, and when he took the standard insurance industry certification test, he barely passed. So how did Met Life recognize the supersalesman in the sausage stuffer? Dell possessed one trait that made up for everything he lacked: relentless optimism.       Just before Dell lost his job, Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, had convinced Met Life to launch a highly original pilot program to hire new recruits. Management’s best predictor of success, Seligman argued, is the employee’s level of optimism. Met Life was intrigued, but wondered whether tests could really recognize and measure optimism.       So Seligman sold them on his 20- minute written exam to identify upbeat people. Met Life used it to test 15,000 recruits – many of whom failed the industry exam the first time around. If these novice salesmen performed, the insurance carrier would agree to expand the program. Within months, the recruits were dramatically outselling those hired using the traditional way. Since then, Met Life has commissioned Seligman to sift through 20,000 other applicants to identify the optimists. By next year, Seligman estimates this new hiring practice to boost revenues $10 million.       Seligman demonstrated that people tend to "learn" helpless and hopeless behavior after suffering a series of bad events. Later, he discovered that if you change a pessimist’s outlook on the events that befall him, you can help him become an optimist.       Seligman’s research shows the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. The way a person explains events in his life, Seligman says, can predict and determine his future. Those who believed they are masters of their fate are more likely to succeed than those who attribute events to forces beyond their control. Seligman’s tests contain 12 hypothetical and open-ended situations, from the tragic to the mundane, that provide clues to the test taker’s personality. For example: "Your mate walks out of the room, slamming the door," says Seligman. "How do you explain that? Very simply, a pessimist might say, ‘I’m unlovable,’ while an optimist would think it’s no big deal, saying something like, ‘Everyone gets in bad moods.’" In short, optimists see themselves in control of events, or at least not at the mercy of events. Pessimists, like characters in a Kafka novel, feel victimized by events and powerless to do anything about them. Due to Seligman’s work, it is now possible to quantify whether an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. Seligman calls this kind of attribution "explanatory style." The test, the Seligman Attributional Style Questionnaire (SASQ), dissects a person’s explanatory style from three directions to reveal how he/she views events:       Stable. Does a person see events as controllable? Or does he feel life is out of his control? Take two people whose investments in the stock market have just doubled. An optimist would call it a smart move, a success. A pessimist would say it's just a stroke of luck, like winning the lottery. If, on the other hand, a stock suddenly plummets, the optimist would deem it a fluke. To the pessimist, it could not have happened any other way.       Global. The optimist feels his windfall is general proof that he's a success in life. He may sometimes even give the event more weight than it truly merits. But to the pessimist, it's just an isolated case of luck. With a bad event, however, the tables turn dramatically. Optimists dismiss each as an isolated occurrence, while for pessimists a bad event casts a dark, depressing shadow over their lives.       Internal. Optimists shrug off the bad and internalize the good. Pessimists attribute the good to outside forces and the bad to themselves.       Of course, there are times reality is so clear-cut that optimists and pessimists will give the same response. In years when the job market is tough, for instance, Seligman has found that both optimists and pessimists will cite the lean market as the cause of the hypothetical event, "You have been unsuccessful in looking for a job."       At Met Life, Bob Dell doesn't get deflated by rejection. That allows him to push ahead with new prospects, his enthusiasm unabated. "This week I got a 'no' from a guy I'd been working on for three and a half months," he explains. "But I didn't get depressed about it. The client isn't rejecting me personally."       In the next breath, Dell takes full credit for successful sales: "I have a good, substantial client list. I got it through prospecting, and I work very hard to maintain it. These people would never deal with someone they had no faith in. If I sell, it's because they're accepting me."       His answers are absolutely consistent with his performance on the SASQ, though he can barely recall the questionnaire. Dell invariably separated himself from bad events, like rejections, but he instantly internalizes good events as proof of his skills and diligence and how well his life is going.       Seligman's broad studies of explanatory style show the remarkable impact optimism has on achievement and well-being.       Longevity. In a retrospective study of 34 healthy Hall of Fame baseball players who played between 1900 and 1950, optimists lived significantly longer.       Good Health. Among 99 Harvard University graduates who were also World War II vets and have had physical examinations every five years since graduation, the men who were optimists at 25 were significantly healthier at 65 than the pessimists.       Peak Performance. Seligman analyzed the explanatory styles of members of several professional baseball teams and found that optimists regularly surpassed expectations. That is, optimistic teams built momentum, developing a kind of synergy that helped them beat the point spreads. This makes a good case for staffing a company with optimists.       Persistence. Pessimists give up, optimists persevere. In contrast to pessimists, Seligman found, even children who are optimists keep trying something until they master it. And these tendencies can last a lifetime. As adults in the work force, pessimists are twice as likely to quit their jobs as optimists.       Risk taking. Because optimists have unflagging faith in their abilities, they're more likely to take risks.       "It's not reality itself that's the problem," Seligman concludes from his studies. "We all suffer tragic realities, but it's how you see reality that makes the difference." We all interpret events and develop a point of view about life, which in turn colors the way we approach the future. This is why optimists like Robert Dell 'stay with it' and outsell others with a more pessimistic explanatory style. Met Life - along with hundreds of other companies have benefited - dramatically reducing turnover, improving performance and creating a more resilient workforce since implementing the SASQ. The results speak for themselves.       Seligman had never intended to study optimists. Back in 1966, he developed a novel theory of depression. People, he felt, taught themselves to be depressed. They learned to feel helpless, out of control. In a series of studies, Seligman and his colleagues found that when rats were repeatedly exposed to painful and inescapable electric shocks, they'd stop struggling to get away. They "learned" that attempts to escape, they wouldn't even try. They would lie there as if they were helpless.       For the next 10 years, Seligman searched for insights into "learned helplessness." He began to question why some people became pessimists while others resisted and didn't become helpless no matter what happened to them. That's when he started to investigate optimists.       Then, on a flight to Philadelphia in 1983, John Leslie, an ebullient 60-year-old businessman, sparked Seligman's interest in business. "It was one of those airplane conversations," Seligman remembers. "I told him about my studies and he said, 'Have you ever thought of the applications to business? I'm talking about people who think they can walk on water.' Learned hopefulness. I'd never thought of that before."       Leslie was right. Optimism does indeed have an impact on everything from business to war. By analyzing an explanatory style, you can help determine just how far someone's going to go. Take President Lyndon B. Johnson. Seligman found that Johnson's decisions during the Vietnam War were strongly foreshadowed by his explanatory style. Seligman analyzed 10 press-conference transcripts and found that the two made right after Johnson became president showed he had "an average explanatory style." But transcripts made right before the bold and controversial Gulf and Tonkin resolution and during the period when Johnson sharply escalated the war showed his explanatory style to be "wildly optimistic," which correlates with high-risk behavior. Later, in press conferences given right before his decision not to run for president again, his style had veered toward depression and passivity.       Seligman's most controversial assertion is that explanatory style - which is simply a belief style - can be changed. Even depressed people can reshape their explanatory styles and learn to believe in their own power to mold the future. In a study of clinically depressed patients, Seligman discovered that 12 weeks of cognitive therapy (reframing a person's approach to the world) worked better than drugs because the change endured. "They were less vulnerable to depression the next time something bad happened," explains Seligman.       Managers can use a similar process to nurture an employee's optimism. They can present alternative explanations for bad events. Their feedback can help people understand the cause-and-effect relationship between their efforts and results, good or bad. The message: They are in control of events that shape their lives. Constant reinforcement is important. How often? Anytime a manager talks to a subordinate. The process should become second nature.       Consider how the founder of cognitive therapy, Aaron Beck, helped transform one woman's feelings of hopelessness. A first-year graduate student came to him with a paper from another psychology class after getting a C. She was discouraged and wanted to drop out of school. So they sat down and thought of some other explanations for the C. One interpretation was that she wasn't a bad student - the class average was a C - but that she just needed to work harder. When she called the professor, that was the explanation he gave.       But can you change your style just by changing the words you use to explain events? That's where Seligman's theory takes the biggest leap, and where other psychologists take issue with him. According to Suzanne Ouellette Kobasa, a psychology professor in the Graduate School at City University of New York, whose studies on executive stress have been widely cited: "I don't think it's easy for someone to make a complete personality change. A basic shift has to occur first. You can't 'reprogram' a person unless he wants it."       Indeed, says Seligman, it's far better for managers to hire optimists for positions with a risk of high rejection, such as sales. They tend to perform better. Seligman discovered they outsold pessimists by 37 percent in their first two years. For Richard Calogero, a management consultant at Met Life, the greatest benefit of optimism is its infectiousness. "We have a high turnover rate in this business," he says. "So the more optimists we have, the more pessimists we can convert. A bright future becomes of a self-fulfilling prophecy."       At a recent insurance industry convention, Seligman's tests were the hot topic. Since then, over 50 companies have asked Met Life for more information on them.       Curiously, Seligman has never used this theory to examine his own success. "I'm really blind to my own style. I could go back to my teenage diaries and analyze them," he says, "but frankly, I've locked the things up." Seligman doesn't want to know. But then, neither does insurance salesman Dell. Today he's thinking about just how to capture the sale that slipped through his fingers yesterday.         Back to What is EQ?