Optimists are better performers than pessimists

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Depends whether you're an optimist or a pessimist.

But those two words are more than casual labels: research has established that optimists have a consistent and upbeat way of dealing with adversity and that they are more successful in work, health and life in general than pessimists.

Optimists bounce back from trying times, generally with good grace, and see failure as a stepping stone to success. Any problem tends to be minimised and dealt with later while the rest of life goes on as usual.

Their upbeat approach, resilience and perseverance makes them ideal for jobs in high-pressure areas where setbacks are part of the territory: sales, brokering, public relations, presenting, creative jobs and high burnout posts. They are often a company's visionaries.

Pessimists, however, risk unravelling and sinking into depression when one thread of their life breaks. They are less likely to cope well with setbacks; they give up early or seek excuses.

Both types can be identified through optimism profiling, based on the pioneering work of American psychologist Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania.

Increasingly used by New Zealand employers, it identifies how people respond to setbacks, and predicts their probable success and determination to do well.

Jamie Ford, a former Salvation Army drug and alcohol counsellor-turned-HR consultant, counts Australasian packaging company Amcor, local dental supplies company Henry Schein Regional and Quality Bakers among those clients who have added optimism profiling to their basket of HR tools.

"It's been outstanding for us," says Garth Bradford, the managing director of Henry Schein and also Regional Health, majors player in the dental and medical equipment fields respectively.

"People can use all the cliches in the world to sound like they know what they're talking about [in job interviews]," says Bradford, "but you can't get inside their heads.

"Optimism profiling helps us to uncover people who are not everything they crack up to be in terms of attitude."

Bradford's sales representatives, who make up one-third of his 41 staff and are usually university graduates, need to be super-resilient. Doctors and dentists are among the hardest to convince, he says: highly qualified, they tend to laud themselves and have a tendency to test the reps' knowledge.

"They can attempt to trap [reps]," says Bradford, "and you have to have confidence to overcome that. You have to be resilient and persistent to stand toe to toe with them and debate the arguments you've put forward."

But in using profiling, the company is not necessarily looking for perfection. Profiling offers such specifics on people's attitudes that training can be arranged to deal with people who have gaps, but who are otherwise good contenders.

"Knowing people's score allows us to plan their training," says Bradford. "For example, we know who is likely to embrace new methods and who is more likely to find faults."

Amcor has profiled more than 150 of its staff across Australasia. In New Zealand as a result, says Amcor Kiwi Packaging's general manager of marketing, Peter McElroy, "we have reduced our sales force turnover from in excess of 30 per cent in volatile regions to less than 5 per cent".

Various studies, quoted in Seligman's book Learned Optimism (Random House, $29.95), found that pessimists have twice as many infectious diseases as optimists.

In hundreds of studies, people with high optimism scores out-performed and out-produced those with low scores, equating in sales terms to 20 to 40 per cent greater productivity.

More recent research, says Ford, shows optimistic and resilient people's belief that they have control over seemingly uncontrollable events enables specific molecules to be released by the brain that increase stress resilience, reduce anxiety and make for a less vivid emotional memory of stressful events.

More than 600 studies have backed Seligiman's optimism profiling and New Zealand is run its first. Auckland University of Technology associate professor Brett Collins and graduate student Patricia Fulcher are about to start working with call centre company Teletech, and expect to find strong links between optimism scores and productivity.

Ford, who has profiled about 3000 people in the past five years, says that what you think and how you explain good and bad events to yourself - explanatory style - is the key to resilience, and is one of the things optimism testing captures.

The test, which Ford sent me by email, took about 10 minutes, though there is no time limit.

It sets up 12 situations - half good and half negative - and asks you to vividly imagine them, and record a likely major cause for each.

The first situation - "You meet a friend who compliments you on your appearance" - was easy enough to imagine. I scribbled "wearing something unusual/interesting".

But pinpointing likely causes for other scenarios was tougher: "You give an important talk in front of a group and the audience reacts negatively" and "You meet a friend who acts hostilely towards you."

The test requires you then to rate the cause for each scenario on one-to-seven scales, which measure:

* Personalisation - Is this cause something about other people or circumstances, or something about you?

* Permanence - Is this a one-off cause or always a part of life?

* Pervasiveness - Does this cause affect just this thing, or all areas of your life?

The results deliver measurement of two specifics - reaction to adversity and reaction to success.

Your reactions to both success and adversity are rated on a scale of one (low optimism) to five (high optimism). Then everything is crunched into an "overall optimism rating" (see graphic), with each band representing 20 per cent of the population.

I came out a five overall, but the profile pointed out a tendency to be overly hard on myself.

It's a level of detail useful to business as "soft" interpersonal skills rise higher up the job description. And as I could choose attitude training to overcome that overly harsh internal voice, so too can greater optimism be learned.

Although one's outlook is formed early in childhood, it is "plastic", says Ford: "It's amenable and open to change."

He admits he is a pessimist by nature, but has trained himself away from that: "I have taken my own medicine." And he says New Zealanders could do with a gulp too: "A level of pessimism is endemic in New Zealand society. Look at the rate of suicide."

Heavy pessimism can be moderated, says Ford. Change is about putting people "on manual while we provide the tools for them to rewire the brain".

Among the techniques is "thought-stopping", a way of blocking unhelpful rumination.

"You make an appointment with yourself to worry about it," says Ford, "and the unconscious mind feels relieved of it."

And in practice, people generally never get around to the appointment - the need to worry has gone.

Another major technique, says Ford, is learning how to dispute one's own critical internal explanations.

However, mild pessimism does have its place.

According to Seligman, the mildly downbeat do well in low-turnover, low-pressure settings on jobs requiring a keen sense of realism: design and safety engineering, contract negotiation, law, statistics, technical writing, quality control, industrial relations management, and technical and cost estimating.

Says Seligman: "The company also needs its pessimists; they must make sure grim reality intrudes upon the optimists.

"The treasurers, the business administrators, the safety engineers - all these need an accurate sense of how much the company can afford, and of danger."

* Jamie Ford offers optimism profiling to individuals for $279 plus GST, which includes the test and interpretation.

Check the Foresight Institute or on (09) 478-4066.

Martin Seligman Research Alliance