The ABC Technique

The three cognitive distortions (3P’s) that need to be changed:

• Personalization: Optimists tend to externalize any failure, rather than taking it personally or blaming themselves.
• Pervasiveness: While pessimists tend to close the doors after...

Interestingly, life provides the same problems, tragedies and setbacks on both an optimist and a pessimist, but the optimist is able to weather them better and live a happy, successful life. It is possible to learn and teach optimism and change one’s perception of life.

People tend to see things differently, and this affects their perception. Our selective attention can see things in contrasting ways and also form different opinions based on what information is processed.

• A positive impact on many aspects of physical and mental health.
• Provides motivation to work harder.
• Greater career success in life.

Pessimism is defined as the anticipation of good or bad things to happen in the future, while optimism is generally considered the opposite. Optimism can be defined as the individual difference variable reflecting the extent of which we hold positive expectancies for the upcoming event.

This is a concept that suggests that we can always change our attitude and behaviour, be aware of our thoughts and stop our negative self-talk.

Learned Optimism is a positive psychology concept, and is the opposite of Learned Helplessness, which states delves into people w...

We all have either an internal or an external locus of control. This cognitive mechanism provides us with confidence that we can change the elements of our lives.

Having the locus of control on the outside makes it subject to every twist and turn of our lives, making us f...