Back in 1994 I completed the self-assessment in Martin Seligman’s now-classic book, Learned Optimism. With most quizzes, I answer the questions, think about the interpretation for a few minutes and promptly forget about it.

Not this time.

The insights I gained from that thought-provoking test had a profound, lasting effect on the way I think about and explain what happens to me in life.

Dr. Seligman helped me understand that the way you talk to yourself after an event – whether it’s a positive or negative experience – impacts the way you view yourself and the control you have over your life. He calls it your “explanatory” style, and the good news is, it’s not set in concrete.

If you currently tend to see the world through the eyes of a pessimist, you can learn to alter your perspective so that you acquire a more balanced view.

So how does he define the differences in the explanatory styles of an optimist and a pessimist? There are three related areas.

1. TIME: Permanent vs. Temporary

Will this event persist, or is it just a short-term phenomenon?

Optimists tend to explain positive events as permanent and pervasive (“I’m always lucky”) whereas a pessimist uses language that reflects a temporary condition (“I guess it’s just my lucky day”).

Conversely, when something negative happens, an optimist explains it as temporary (“You don’t seem to be listening right now”), while a pessimist uses words like “always” and “never” (“You never listen to me”).

2. SPACE: Specific vs. Universal

Are you able to isolate the effects of an undesirable incident, or does it impact everything else that happens in your life?

Pessimists will take one bad experience and allow it to influence everything else around them. As Dr. Seligman says, “When one thread of their lives snaps, the whole fabric unravels.” For instance, if they experience a disappointment or setback on the job, those at home can end up paying the price.

Optimists, on the other hand, are more likely to look at a specific incident and detach it from other aspects of their lives. They don’t conclude that a failure in one area means they are incompetent or inadequate in all others.

3. FOCUS: Internal vs. External

This area relates to personal responsibility and blame. Do you blame yourself, or do you blame the outside world?

The key is to understand who and what you are responsible for.

If an event is beyond your control, it makes sense to take the optimist’s approach and recognize that you could not influence the outcome. It would be inappropriate for you to blame yourself, but that’s exactly what pessimists tend to do when these kinds of situations happen. The effect is that an optimist’s self-esteem stays intact while the pessimist’s suffers a serious blow because of unwarranted self-criticism.

On the other hand, there are many times you can influence the position you find yourself in. Optimists will assume personal responsibility and do what they can, whereas pessimists will put themselves in the role of victim by blaming external factors for their plight.

If you recognize yourself in any of the pessimist’s reactions described here, there’s good news. You have the power and ability to condition yourself to think and behave with greater optimism. Use these strategies to make the transition to a more positive, balanced way of viewing yourself and the world:

• Recognize when you have the power to exercise control over your environment, and then take action. Don’t look around for someone else to rescue you, and don’t play the blame game.
• Dispute the internal criticism if your negative thoughts attack your worth as a person. Challenge this line of thinking by presenting evidence that contradicts the thought. Prove to yourself that what you’re saying is factually incorrect by listing other situations where you have had positive results.
• Learn to encourage yourself after a setback, just as you would a good friend. Monitor what you say to yourself, and keep the internal dialogue positive.

As Dr. Seligman wisely states: “Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.”

Question: One of the toughest things about chasing the dream is managing the disciplines of persistent action and hopeful patience that are required to ultimately see the vision come to be. This is an area of huge tension. How do dream chasers manage that tension and thrive?

Fulfilling your dreams and your ability to thrive in the areas of your life that matter most can be simplified by breakthroughs—a moment in time when the impossible becomes possible. If anyone wants to thrive in any area of their life, they have to reach a point of breakthrough where they will not settle for anything less than extraordinary in that area.

Whether someone wants a breakthrough in their:

• Business
• Intimate life
• Emotional well-being
• Health
• Finances
• Career

There are only three areas to break through in order to feel lasting success.

One breakthrough area is your STRATEGIES. I personally live for finding strategies—those shortcuts that help people get more done in less time. What is it that gets some people to succeed while others fail who seem to have equal enthusiasm or passion for the tasks at hand? They have insights, distinctions, and strategies that allow them to achieve more quickly.

For example, take someone who was born very poor, without an education, and had emotional and financial challenges but found a way to be highly successful and living an inspired life. I don’t believe that’s lucky—luck is what you do for a day or a week—strategies are what make it consistently happen for decades. A strategy can be found in the simplest or slightest distinction and it can happen in an instant.

As I described above, there are three elements that effect the long-term success or failure of a person and whether they break through or not. For example, there are hundreds or even thousands of strategies out there for losing weight, and frankly most of them are proven to work—if you work them! We’re not hurting for strategies. There are fitness clubs on every street, dieticians, health coaches, training videos, audios, books, etc. Yet 65% of the United States is overweight and 33% is obese, and those numbers are only growing geometrically. I would suggest to you that the problem for most people is not that they don’t have a strategy—it’s that they’re not using a strategy that works for them or acting upon it. Why? Because they have a disempowering STORY.

We all have stories—narratives we tell ourselves about why we can or cannot do or achieve something in our lives. Whether we believe we can or can’t, we’re usually right, because our expectation controls our focus, perceptions, and the way in which we feel and act. When a person succeeds it’s because they have the right strategy, and they found it usually because they have a story that it was possible or they could make it happen. Often people are not losing weight because they have a simple story that says, “I’m big boned.” With that as your core belief system you are never going to find a strategy, and even if you do you won’t follow through on it.

Your story may be true—you may have been through a horrific experience–but that’s not the reason why you can’t have the life you want. For example, you might have had a bad breakup five years ago, but that’s not the reason you haven’t found the passionate and loving relationship you deserve.  A disempowering story is one of the things that controls people and makes them stuck in their beliefs.

Most people tell a story in a selective way so they don’t have to ever maximize their effort towards a strategy because they’re afraid they will fail. In order to get out of a story you have to be triggered by hunger and desire—if someone wants something strong enough they will break through the story that’s limiting them.

Of course, whether you have an empowering story or disempowering one is influenced most powerfully by the mental and emotional STATE you’re in at this moment in time. As human beings we all develop emotional patterns—moods—that are mental or emotional states that tend to filter how we look at our lives.

This influences the stories that we make up about who we are, what we’re capable of, or what’s achievable or not. The states we go into most often then become the most powerful filter of all that will determine whether we find the strategies necessary to succeed and whether we come up with a story that will empower us. The big question then becomes, what is it that we can do to change our state of mind when we’re not able to maximize our true potential? One of our greatest scientific discoveries has been that you can change your emotional mood by a radical change in your “physiology.”

For people who are experiencing stress at any given moment, a form of relief can be to simply change your physiology—take a couple of deep breaths. Most people only use 20% of their lung capacity taking small short breaths, but 70% of the body’s toxins can actually be released when taking a full breath! By taking the time to fill your lungs and release, you can not only improve your health but also radically decrease the anxiety related to that moment. There are many ways to change your physiology and in our seminars we prove this time after time by taking people who feel depressed and having them make a radical shift. Intuitively we know this can be changed not only by the way we move, but our breath and body temperature as well.

The second thing that affects our state is what we focus on. For example, if you’ve been at a funeral honoring someone you cared about and everyone is in a sad state and afterwards someone shares a story or anecdote about something that person did that was extremely humorous, suddenly everyone goes from tears to laughter. In an instant our states can be changed by what we focus on. What’s wrong is always available—but so is what’s right. Whatever we focus on effects our state and our state then effects the story we have about who we are, what’s life about, what’s possible and what’s not. From that story we will often determine whether or not we will maximize our capabilities and the strategies that will help us achieve what we’re truly after in a sustainable way.

Learning to put yourself in a peak state consistently is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself and your life. It can transform your stories and give you the strategies to breakthrough. This is a huge focus that we just don’t tell people but what we train people to do with their minds and bodies in an instant, on cue, so they can shift the quality of their performance. Whether it’s a peak performance athlete like Serena Williams, MMA champion Jon Jones, a president of a company, a parent, or someone in prison—if we’re going to shift our life it comes down to these three fundamentals.

Change your strategy, change your result.

Change your story, change your life.

Change your state—you change it all!

I’ll tell you right off, I’m not a slacker! I take care of more than my business of work and responsibilities and make the most of the time I’ve been given on this earth. Talk about multi-tasking–I’m the queen! But I cannot think of any good reasons not to nap when you’re tired, even when it’s the middle of the day. Even if you’re driving and get whoozy, stop and nap! If your brain is so tired and your thinking is going nowhere, nap! We all have our natural biorhythms you know?

Many countries have this down. I remember when I was in Greece, it irritated me that shops were closed and the world was at home napping after their mid-day meal when I hadn’t had mine yet! I was hungry! Same thing in parts of Italy. But one day I felt like my brain was mush and I took a full out nap and it did wonders!

Before you judge, read on.

Why Napping is a GOOD Thing

I have a friend, Cindy, who napped during her lunch hour the 12 years she was on a particular job . She took her alarm clock and snoozed along a shady spot on a nearby road. There was even another person at that spot who did the same..for TWELVE years! It made a huge difference in her afternoon productivity!

HR Daily Adviser recently pooled people about this subject and got varied answers, mostly positive:

• “How I wish our company would permit even a 30-minute nap at work!!! I experience an energy dip daily around 2-3 P.M.—I am definitely less than productive then. We’ve had a recent surge in accidents (most of which were determined to be due to inattention to detail and loss of focus). I’m going to ask our safety team to see if there is a correlation to the “drowsy period”. I have a very private office and could probably take a short nap … if only I didn’t snore!”
• “During both my pregnancies I napped at work in our lounge. I have napped at practically every job I have ever had (usually in my car over lunchtime). Now that I have children (and am subsequently up a lot at night), I frequently take naps in my supply closet.”
• “As the workforce ages, I can see naptime as a very valuable recruiting tool.”
• “Seven years ago, when I was working overseas, we had two-hour lunch breaks and I know that part of the secret to the mental acuity and high productivity of the more senior executives was their afternoon naps.”
• “I am currently in the midst of a post-grad for NeuroLeadership and one of the areas I would have liked to have done my research assignment is on the area of napping—particularly as it relates to recharging the pre-frontal cortex. However, the major issues, I suspect, are still social views of napping equaling laziness and also having the appropriate spaces to do this.”
• Napping Trick: “One trick: drink a cup of coffee just as you are about to take your nap. If you’re taking a 20 minute nap, it will hit your bloodstream at the time you’re awakening. Makes it a lot easier.”
• “As a labor and employment lawyer, I often experience the need for a mid-day nap. I close the door, close the blinds, put the phone on “do not disturb.” I enhance my sleep with noise-canceling earphones plugged into my iPhone that plays background noise (waves, rain, etc.) and certain wave sounds that stimulate particular brain waves conducive to sleep, dreaming, etc. After 20 minutes I awaken and am refreshed and ready to go forward for several more hours (til 8 pm usually).”

Show Me The Evidence!

With workers doing more with less now, stress is at an all time high. We need to manage this to stay healthy and productive! Here, look at this:

MedicalNewsToday.com says that “dozens of small medical studies have shown that napping for about 30 minutes to an hour in the early afternoon increases a person’s productivity, alertness and sometimes even their mood.

“Still, unsanctioned napping —or to put it more precisely, ‘drowsiness’ —on the job actually costs U.S. businesses $18 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a recent report in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.”

Medical researcher Sara C. Mednick (author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life”)  says that “… without a midday rest, we are not able to perform at optimal levels throughout the day. In fact, our performance falls apart. Napping maintains and even boosts our skills.”

As reported by ABC News:

• Prime nap time is 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. That minidip in energy you experience is biological, not because you just ate lunch, Mednick says.
• Sleep has three stages:

1. Stage 2 Sleep. Within 20 minutes, you experience “Stage 2” sleep, which increases alertness and motor skills.
2. Slow Wave Sleep. Within 40 minutes, you’ll experience slow wave sleep, which increases memory.
3. REM Sleep. This is deep sleep you’ll get if you nap for up to 90 minutes, and it increases creativity.

• Low light and low noise will help you fall asleep faster.
• Studies show that naps up to 90 minutes won’t interfere with your sleep at night, so don’t sleep too long. And don’t nap within three hours of bedtime.

F. John Reh, of About.com, says “One of the reasons for the changing attitudes towards ‘sleeping at work’ (as opposed to ‘sleeping on the job’) is the growing recognition of the cost to business of sleep deficiency among employees. These costs include:

• increased errors and accidents
• increased absenteeism
• increased drug use
• increased turnover
• higher group insurance premiums
• decreased productivity

So there! Would it be so bad to take a recharging break mid-afternoon? I think not!