The 3 Good Podcast: Episode 5 Talking about optimism

In this episode, Sukh has a guest on the show - Mark Gilroy. Together, they discuss the topic of optimism. It's a longer episode than normal, coming in at just shy of 1hr and 15 mins, so tuck in, it's a deep exploration!

 

Sukh and Mark discuss a range of related topics to optimism:

- They explore how optimism is a psychological construct, and what it helps with for a healthy mind.

- They discuss pessimism, how it's the opposite of optimism, can offer a healthy balance to being too optimistic, and how it can be a healthy way of thinking.

- They make a clear distinction that optimism and pessimism are not related to mental health disorders, and how they are useful for healthy human functioning.

- Mark shares a really useful model to identify overly pessimistic attitudes where someone may use language where the following is evident:

• Permanence - describing things in ways that indicate there's never a positive outcome and there is no hope for their to be a positive outcome
• Personal - describing things in ways that are detrimental to the individual e.g. "why does it always happen to me"
• Perseverance - describing things and extrapolating things to pervade across a group unfairly

- They discuss how optimism can be overused and may impair quality of judgements that need to be made.

- They discuss the role of data, evidence and examples and how they either support optimism or pessismism.

 

This was a really good deep exploration of the topic of optimism, and Mark was really generous with his insights and sharing of research that is related to the topic.

Links that Mark has shared which are useful for people to explore further:

The book by Tali Sharot - The Optimism Bias: Why we're wired to look on the bright side - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Optimism-Bias-were-wired-bright/dp/1780332637/ref=la_B004ANWOX4_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1519468999&sr=1-2

Tali Sharot's TED Talk - The Optimism Bias - https://www.ted.com/talks/tali_sharot_the_optimism_bias

The book by Dan Ariely - Predictably Irrational - The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-Decisions/dp/0007256531

Dan Ariely's YouTube video on Loss Aversion and The Endowment Effect - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpiGVWO-C64

 

Finally, you may have noticed there's no intro music to the podcast! Big thanks and love to Mark himself for producing the piece for the podcast.

You can connect with Sukh on Twitter @sukhpabial.

You can connect with Mark on Twitter @thatmarkgilroy and find out more about the work that TMSDI do at www.tmsdi.com.