defensive pessimism

Setting goals can be a daunting task for defensive pessimists. Many of us have internal conflicts about just how goals should be set, and our need to be realistic about the challenges ahead make us hesitant to “go for the gold” if we aren’t certain we can reach it.

Self-help mavens advise us to to set aside our concerns and perceived limits, to shoot for the stars, to think BIG. “Make the goals concrete,” they say. “Write down dates, and numbers. Dream big, and dream specific, and COMMIT… and.. ”

and… and… I don’t know how to do that!

Trying to do that gives me anxiety attacks. But it *should* give me anxiety attacks.

The one-size-fits-all extreme-sports approach to goals (Just Do It!) requires setting aside one of my best tools for success: the ability to predict potential problems, plan for them, and prevent them. This preventative thinking is the strength of the defensive pessimist; asking anyone to go against their natural strengths is a recipe for failure, not success.

So blindly setting wild goals isn’t appropriate for defensive pessimists like me. But there is still the problem of goal setting — even defensive pessimists need a destination before we can start anticipating potholes and plotting the best paths around it.

So what is a defensive pessimist to do?

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution like “shoot for the stars” but I have found a few tricks that seem to work.

1. Beta test your goals. Keep goals flexible. Don’t set them in concrete, don’t commit to them, don’t make them something you can fail at — just something you can test. View them as trials, that you *expect* to have to debug, refine, and maybe even trash. Expect your goals to have ever evolving “versions”.
2. Make a concrete commitment, then intentionally break it. Write the goal down, as clearly and firmly as possible. Make it public if you want to….. then dramatically let yourself off the hook. Take the sheet of paper the goal is on, wad it up, and throw it away. Burn it, shred it, eat it for all I care. But don’t leave it pinned to your desktop, staring you in the face. If you do that, your inner pessimist will fret and point out how much you haven’t done on it, every time you’re off track. But tear it up, declare that it was wrongheaded and you’re not doing it after all, and your inner pessimist will be smugly satisfied and glad that you finally listened to reason. Meanwhile your subconscious quietly chugs away on the goals anyway. You’ll be amazed at how freeing this is.
3. Keep your goals vague. “Lose Weight” instead of “Lose 20lbs” “Write every day” instead of of “Write 10 pages every day”. “Build relationships” instead of “find the partner of my dreams”. Let the specifics develop on their own, gently and naturally.
4. Use active visualization to discover potential goals. Get around your natural pessimism by picturing yourself in an already successful future, a future where you are happy, wealthy, well adjusted, successful, whatever… Don’t force it…. Don’t try to imagine how you got there, just let that “future” appear. Then look around. Set what you see as a beta goal, to be tested and tweaked and taken apart.
5. Use your defensive pessimism to your advantage. Find a potential goal, then reverse engineer it… find the problems, the flaws, the challenges. see if they can be overcome, and at how much of a cost. Repeat this, as many times as you need, to, until you have a set of goals that make sense and are realistically achievable.
6. Balance your goals between big and small. When setting goals, set two of them. One should be the vision of your wildest success (a trilogy of books on the NYT best sellers list) and the other something you KNOW you can achieve (getting your novel written, published and for sale at Amazon) Again, you get the benefit of a wildly positive goal that your subconscious mind can work on, but you also have a very doable goal that you can focus on consciously. This gives you something you KNOW you can achieve, that won’t trigger your defensive pessimism. The pessimist in you will be happy finding the problems with the big goals, leaving you free to do the actual work which leads to both the big and small successes.

If you decide to experiment with these methods, expect criticism from your positive thinking/DayPlanner carrying friends. My way of doing things goes against popular wisdom, and I’ve gotten more than a few lectures on the importance of focus, commitment, and firm plans over the years, if it means finding new measures of success, happiness, and productivity in life? I’ll sit through the lectures.How about you?

MindTWEAK: “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist, the parachute.” — G.B. Stern (British Novelist)

More on Defensive Pessimism:

Negative Thinking, Positive Results

Are You A Defensive Pessimist? Take This Quiz And Find Out

Back in my school days, I had an annoying little mantra used before every tough exam: “I’m sooo going to fail!” I’d cheerfully declare.

The negative enthusiasm inspired eye-rolling by fellow students ( I was making straight A’s, after all) and occasionally a teacher would admonish me to think positively. At that point, I’d join my peers in their eye-rolling.

Popular wisdom has it that if we can only be optimistic, and shoot for the stars as if they are already ours, astounding success is sure to follow. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t work for some of us. We’ve never developed the skill to willfully ignore the potential for failure, and trying to do so makes us a nervous wreck.

If I’d waltzed into my classrooms and declared “I’m going to ACE this test!” most people would have believed me, and I might even have believed myself. But then the actual test would start. I’d find a question I wasn’t sure about… and then, oh gods, I’d realize I wasn’t acing the test at all. Performance anxiety would take over, and all of that stand-up-and-salute-confidence would vanish and leave me limp and unable to cope.

But by assuming I was going to fail, and setting my goals low, my confidence would grow at each question I felt confident about.. or even *thought* I might know the answer to. Through the negative assumption of failure, I successfully routed my mind around the pot holes of anxiety, and improved my performance.

Turns out, there’s actually a name for what I did: “defensive pessimism.” According to author Julie K.Norem (who I discovered while researching this post) it’s a successful coping mechanism for some people.

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