Explanatory Style

Optimist or Pessimist

Your Explanatory Style has a lot to do with your success. It is how you habitually explain the cause of the good and bad things that happen to you. It is how you explain your successes and your failures, to yourself. Was it your fault or credit? Was it someone else's credit or fault? Was it something you did or someone else? Do things always happen that way for you? Are you pessimist or an optimist?

Explanatory Style explains not just if you are an optimist or a pessimist. It explains shyness. It explains depression. It explains a happy disposition and a sad disposition. It explains feelings of helplessness and hopefulness.

Dr. Martin Seligman coined the phrase Explanatory style to account for the different way people react to the same event. He has studied this for over 30 years. His book, Learned Optimism, is his best break down and analysis of this research.

He started out studying why people become depressed and came up with learned helplessness. Learned helplessness explained that some people give up easily because they learned early in life that when things go wrong, there is nothing they can do to fix it. They give up and often fall into depression.

But not all people, given the same stimulus, gave up. He was challenged to find the reason. And the reason he found for this difference is their Explanatory Style. The way they normally explain events to themselves, both good and bad. In other words, their thoughts. How they THINK about events.

What they say to themselves; not necessarily what they say to others. We've all said one thing to someone, while thinking something totally different to ourselves.

For example:
A group of your friends want to do go to the bar, but you don't feel up to it and really want to do something quiet, like watch videos at home. You say to them, "Go ahead. I'll be fine staying home." While what you are really thinking could be "You inconsiderate jerks, you don't care that I'm not felling well." or "I'm left out again. Nobody cares about me." or maybe even "Good riddance. I thought I'd never get rid of them. Now where's the popcorn".

Most of the time, when we say something different than what we are thinking it is because we care about others feelings or what they think about us. We want to be polite and considerate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with thinking and saying 2 different things, unless it harms others or ourselves.

When we think to ourselves things like: "I'm no good"; "Nobody likes me"; "I'll never amount to anything"; "I can't do anything right". We are harming ourselves.

Your Explanatory Style comes from how you view your self and your place in the world. If you view yourself as 'valuable and deserving. or worthless and hopeless'. This you often learn at an early age, but sometimes it seems part of our genetic make up.

Two of my grandchildren, from the same parents and raised in the same way, were very different, right from birth. One was very quiet, content to mostly observe what went on around him. The other was always reaching, stretching, touching. between the ages of 2 and 4 we saw an even greater divergence. The quiet one started to say things like "I can't do it. I don't know how. You do it for me." The other said things like "I can do it myself. Let me try." Which do you think is the better attitude?

We are trying to change the quiet ones' attitude by challenging him to do it himself. And pointing out his successes. How smart, capable and clever he is by doing these things by himself. He can only gain self confidence by accurately judging his accomplishments. But I digress into talking about the trap of the positive self esteem movement.

Three Dimensions of Explanatory Style

Dr. Seligman found 3 critical dimensions to Explanatory Style which determines if you are a pessimist and likely to give up or an optimist and likely to persist until you have success.

• Permanence - is this a one time happening or is this the way it always is?
• Pervasiveness -does this happen in all areas of life or is it specific to this one area or person?
• Personalization - is it my fault or someone else's?

These three dimensions are just as relevant to optimism as pessimism, but in opposite ways. You can probably understand fairly easily without much explanation how Permanence, Pervasiveness and Personalization about a negative event can lead to low self esteem and depression. After all if the bad thing always happens, in every circumstance and it's all your fault, that's pretty depressing. But if that negative event is a one time thing that only happened in that specific circumstance and it was someone else's fault. Well, you can put it past you. It won't happen again.

But how do these dimensions of Explanatory Style work in positive events? For positive events you WANT it to be Permanent, Pervasive and Personal. You want good things to happen all the time, in every circumstance and because you do something good.

The first two areas of Explanatory Style help define your level of hope or hopelessness. If the misfortune was temporary and specific, we can have hope that it will never happen again. If the misfortune was permanent and pervasive, hope is gone. The misfortune will always be there, everywhere you turn and there is nothing you can do about it. That sounds like depression to me.

The personalization aspect of Explanatory style affects how you FEEL. (guilt, shame, remorse, relief, innocent, free) The other 2 affect what you DO. All of this, of course, affects your Self Esteem

Read the articles on each of the dimensions then read about Changing Your Thoughts to become more optimistic.

The Power of Belief is also very useful.

Let me know what you think about this article by submitting a Comment. I'll post appropriate comments. Maybe your comment will help someone else.