High Performers Don't Follow Pessimists | Here's Why

Did you know that optimistic sales teams outperform pessimistic sales teams by as much as 37%? If being an optimist is a choice, well, it's a profitable one. And while pessimists might be right more often, it's actually the optimists who change the world. So, if you want to be ready for the C-suite, stop preparing for the worst and start architecting the very best. That's what I want to talk to you about today. Welcome into the channel. My name is Tom. I'm the founder of Vertical Motion. We help good people become great leaders. If you're somebody who's authentic, empathetic, and audacious, you want to help everyone around you as you grow in your own career or your business, check out the link down below in the description to learn more about how we can work with you on these things. But today we're talking about optimism and why optimists actually are the people that you want in leadership roles. And if you are struggling to get into a leadership role, maybe it's because you're being a little too pessimistic. All right, so first of all, let's address what optimism is because sometimes people get this wrong. There's two types of optimism, right? There's blind optimism, which is like naivete, but then there's also strategic optimism. And strategic optimism is all about acknowledging that, yeah, there are problems, things suck, this is hard, but believing in the team's ability to overcome that. Strategic optimism is what I'm talking about today. Blind optimism really is about just hoping for the very, very best without necessarily having a plan to get there. Strategic optimism is taking a look at the situation, looking at the resources you have, and saying to yourself, we can overcome this or we can turn this around. And so, I'm specifically talking today about strategic optimism. And there's some excellent research about this. In fact, research done by Dr. Martin Seligman, who's the father of positive psychology, he found that optimistic insurance agents sold about 37% more than pessimists, and they were much less likely to quit. And also there's a bunch of health research that shows that people who are optimistic tend to have lower cortisol levels and they're actually better at executive functioning which is the part of our day where we make decisions and actually do things. Finally, there's this weird effect when there are high expectations because the founder or the leader has this optimistic view of the world, well the team tends to perform better for those kinds of leaders than performing for pessimistic leader. So I want you to put yourself into a situation here. I want you to imagine that you are working for a boss and this boss is just a Debbie Downer. She comes in, she's got a furrowed brow and a frown every day and she's telling you nothing ever works out for us. Let's just do our best and you know, hopefully we don't get fired. I know we don't have the resources we need to get this project done. Just do the best you can anyway. Now let's talk about the opposite scenario. You go to work for this very optimistic and energetic boss and she's telling you, "Oh my gosh, I know how difficult things are right now for us, but I just got to tell you I know we're going to come through because I have seen what this team can do. And let's just all get together and figure this out and I'm right here beside you." It's a very different energy. It's a very different motivation style. Working for pessimistic people just kind of makes you feel pessimistic which isn't a great feeling. Working for optimistic people can be annoying sometimes. You can work for someone who is too optimistic and I would sometimes put myself into that category. I can be too optimistic. Can kind of get over my skis a little bit and so it's good to have pessimistic people around, but you don't want the pessimistic person to be the leader. You want the optimist to be the leader. The person who believes in things that don't exist or aren't true yet but possibly could be. Understanding what's possible is what makes a great leader. Right, we talk about what leadership is and one of the things that leaders do is they see around corners. They can also create what I call reality distortion bubbles. Steve Jobs was great at creating reality distortion bubbles. He was kind of an boss, but that aside, what he was best at and probably better than anyone I've ever seen do this is that he had the ability to bring you into his world and he had this vision of the world that was very different than the reality of the world. And in his world everything worked seamlessly without having to deal with drivers and cables and all these things. He just saw this amazing ecosystem of hardware and software working together in symphony and he brings people into this ecosystem before it even exists. And even after he builds the products and services, they don't quite work exactly how he envisions, but he keeps bringing people in. Like, see how this can be? See how this could be? So, Steve Jobs, while kind of a terrible boss, was actually an amazing optimist. And optimists are the people who get like A players to come and follow them. Who wants to have a job where they're working for someone who's just like, well, I guess we're running this into the dirt. You know, I guess we better plan for when this all winds down to zero. So, flip this around now to understanding how you show up as a leader. If you want to move into the leadership ranks, the executive ranks, you want to build a company and have people follow you. If you want to build a nonprofit and have people donate to you. If you're trying to lead a tribe. Anything that you're doing that puts you in a leadership role, you need to be a little bit more optimistic. Because if you show up as a pessimist or as some people like to call themselves realists, well, reality is boring. And reality in the state that it is today isn't good enough. And leaders are leading us to something better, something higher, something more. And so, if your job is to maintain the status quo, you're a manager, not a leader. And so, let go of this pessimism. And I think a lot of people have pessimism, and they're realists, because at the end of the day, they're really good at calculating the odds. And yes, the odds are usually stacked against optimists. That's why pessimists tend to be more accurate and more right, or more often right, than optimists are. But, they don't change the world. They don't create that new reality distortion bubble that people find themselves inside in, and then pop, one day what's in the reality distortion bubble becomes reality. That's what optimists do. And that's who we want to follow. People who are optimistic about our future. People who believe in the audacity of hope. People who believe in doing something great because we can do something great. Right now, as I'm filming this, Artemis is out there. Artemis 2 is on its way around the moon, I think, today. And wow, like I didn't think we'd do it, but here we are, 50 years later. Before I was born was the last time that we sent people to the moon. And now, here we are, 50 years later, we have people going to the moon. And I was a little bit pessimistic about whether this mission would happen or not, but when I saw that rocket launch, and I saw the video stream from them in that capsule, it brought me optimism again. It made me feel like, okay, we can still do great things in this world. We can still build. We can still explore, and we can still try to expand beyond what we know how to do today. And I want to follow leaders who believe that. I want to follow leaders who create that kind of opportunity. And so, if you want to be a great leader, you have to do the same. You have to become the kind of person that people look up to and look forward to hearing from and look forward to seeing. Hopefully, you enjoy watching these videos because this is me. I love love love love giving people energy. I love getting excited for people, for their success, for whatever is happening to them. I want them to know that even if it's the worst time, you're learning something from it. You're experiencing something and at the very least you can teach someone else what you've experienced or change your perspective of the world. So, if you find yourself being somewhat pessimistic or realistic in the way that you approach things at work, I want you to consider this mindset shift. Shift from thinking we have a problem to we have an opportunity. And I know that sounds terribly cliche. Even as I'm saying it, it's kind of cringe. It actually works. It's a real thing. Instead of thinking about things as, "Well, this is a problem." It's what can I learn from this? What can we do to overcome this? What's the way that we can build something that we didn't have before that will fix this problem? I have found this time and again when we have problems in our business, whenever there's something that starts to break or doesn't work anymore, it's very easy to get into a state of pessimism. It's like, "Well, there you go. See, everything broke and now nothing works and I guess that's the end of this." That's not what you want to hear your CEO saying. That's not what you want to hear the founder say. Instead, what you want to hear the CEO saying is, "All right. Well, that broke. What are we going to do to fix it? I have a couple ideas. What are yours?" That's very different angle. And so, instead of thinking about things as like, "Well, we have a problem." Think of it as like, "We have an opportunity to fix a problem." And I get to fix a problem instead of I have to fix a problem. It's this little mindset shift that again, I know it sounds corny. It sounds cliche. But cliches exist for a reason because they're usually true. And in this case, I really resonate with this one. And this has worked for me whenever get to a situation where I'm really depressed or upset about how something didn't go the way I wanted it to. When I can actually reframe my thinking into like okay, what can I learn from this? Like I I once lost a $330 million contract and I had spent six weeks working 100-hour shifts and we had built this thing over nine months and took 27 people on a team to do this. And we lost the program and it was brutal and it was exhausting and like you could feel all the energy coming out of us. And I remember sitting there like okay, well what did I learn from this? And as I reflected back on what we had done over those previous nine months to get to that point where we were a finalist and we were kind of number two. Someone else won but we came in second place. We were not a kind of organization who could have even come in the top 10 before we started that project and we got pretty close to winning. And it occurred to me that I had learned a whole lot about technology, about new ways to do things, about the proposal process for that particular program, that particular customer. And on the other side of it, I had some incredible stories to tell and I had some incredible realizations about what matters and what doesn't. And so when you realize that things just aren't working out the way that they should, take stock of what you've learned in a bad situation and how you can reuse your resources, your team, your own skills to reframe that into something that's positive. And so after that very disappointing program that we lost, I wound up building several new products that were amazing and they were revolutionary for our industry at the time. This was back in like 2006. But the point is is that like it changed my perspective of how things go together and it created this entirely new concept which we called Sky Blocks. But the idea was very modular, it was really cool, it doesn't matter, none of it matters anymore. The point is is that the pessimism sank in for a minute until I got optimistic about, okay, what can I do with what I've learned? And all these amazing ideas came flooding out and we built some really cool things. And I think that if you let go of always being right and instead focus on always looking for the best alternative out of the situation, you're going to be a better leader. So, to summarize, optimism is actually a competitive advantage that can be learned and measured. I want to challenge you to take one aspect of your organization, uh something you're very pessimistic about or something that just looks like it's garbage or not working. And I want you to reframe that by the end of today. I want you to think about something that just isn't working for you. Something that's like a pessimistic area of your business or your organization. And I want you to reframe that into what can we do? What can we learn from this? How can we try to turn this around? Try that mindset shift. Think about this negative situation that you have. How can you turn it into something positive? And be creative because that creativity is actually what's going to help you realize how you can benefit from something negative. I know like lemons and lemonade is another terrible analogy. I won't even use that one. But I will say that when you are dealt a challenge, there are ways to turn that challenge into a positive for yourself and for others. And it might not look obvious. Maybe you have a terrible boss who's just making your life miserable and he's berating you and hiding you from the rest of the corporation and taking credit for your work and all. That's pretty negative situation. You can be very pessimistic about that situation. How can you take away from that how you can be a better boss when it's your turn to lead teams? You'll never treat your people the way that he treats you as an example. Can you write a story about that? Can you share your learnings with people who are coming up in the ranks to watch out for certain types of bosses? Can you train and coach leaders to be better than that person? There's always a way to take a bad situation, turn it into something a little bit more positive. And that's what makes me an optimist because I see that. I see those opportunities. I get depressed like everyone else. But you can change the way that you frame the situation and turn it into something like, okay, what can I recover from this situation? So that's what I want you to do. I want you to go away and think about how you can reframe a negative situation at your job or your business and turn it into something that might actually be positive. Finally, the future belongs to those who see it before it's obvious to everyone else. And so if you want to own the future, if you want to be the person who points the way towards where things should go, be optimistic about what's possible and think about what could be, not what is. And if you take that approach, you'll definitely be moving in the right direction in your career. I hope this was helpful to you and hopefully I'll see you in another video soon.