The Benefits of Optimism

To draw this series of blogs about optimism to a close, I want to finish by explaining the benefits of optimism.

Developing high levels of optimism in both yourself as a leader, and your wider team, has significant benefits for the health of your workforce and your organisation.

Here are just a few of them.

Reduced stress

Research shows that high levels and prolonged exposure to stress can have a negative impact on you mentally and physically.

Holding onto optimism through stressful situations can help lower the impact they have.

It helps you keep a clearer head and not react emotionally—which ultimately helps make stressful situations less stressful. This means that you’ll not only feel less of that high tension, but your body and mental well-being will finally be able to relax.

Enhanced productivity

If you keep an optimistic outlook at work, you’ll likely feel more motivated to get things done. Being optimistic helps strengthen your brain, increase your energy levels, and make you more capable of carrying out tasks.

Optimists solve problems rather than getting overwhelmed by them.

They spend time creating better versions of themselves and don’t let any challenges depress or distress them. 

Enhanced resilience

While optimism might decrease your stress levels, it won’t completely get rid of stressful situations.

We all experience setbacks and standstills at work. They’re stressful, they’re hard to get through, and they can put a damper on your motivation. Unfortunately, there’s no magic trick to get these situations to disappear. Instead, you need to change how you respond to them.

However, optimism helps increase your ability and willingness to get through stressful situations.

Improved problem-solving

Workplace optimism keeps you thinking logically and gets problems worked out quicker. If you work in a team, optimism will allow more room for everyone to figure out solutions.

Optimistic people are more likely to view multiple options and various solutions. On the other hand, negativity makes you more narrow-minded.

Enhanced collaboration

We’ve all worked with that one person who could never shed their negativity. They dragged the whole team down by only looking at worst-case scenarios and made it hard to work through things.

Don’t be that person.

Optimism helps prevent that. People are generally more attracted to those who exude a certain optimistic aura - they want to be around those that won’t dampen the mood.

Maintaining an optimistic outlook makes it much easier to get work done and to work with others.

In turn, this Improves team cohesion and adaptability and enables a strengths-based approach.

Reality

As optimism is grounded in reality, it leads to quality conversation that actually identify the real problems ahead.

This creates behaviour improvements, fosters creativity and innovation, improves trust, enhances emotional intelligence and removes any performance blocks.

Overall, this makes conversations and decisions more authentic and eliminates gaslighting and bullying.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this latest series of articles on optimism. If you need further information about this approach, or any other resilience topic, please contact russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk.