How does believing stress can help you change actually do to your body? That's so interesting to me.

Well, so stress, what happens is when we're feeling stressed, it actually limits our ability to see progress and possibility.

We become hyper-focused on the negative because we have a negativity bias that has, you know, that's how we've been f- since w- you know, humans [laughs] landed on this Earth or wherever, you know.

Um, but, uh, so my husband did a study, uh, with researchers from Yale University about rethinking their relationship with stress, and this was fascinating.

So they worked with stressed out managers from UBS, a bank during the banking crisis, and these managers obviously had a lot on their plate.

They taught one group, the experimental group, how to rethink their relationship with stress.

They talked to them about the advantages of stress because it actually improves your mental cognition, your agility, your memory levels, your energy.

Those options right there are things that I think start the dominoes moving for a lot of people.

So tell me about the science of optimism.

Well, what I came to see was that optimism is not a feeling.

It's a behavior.

This is from the work I've done at organizations like Microsoft or Google or NASA and And what I would see over and over is that where sometimes we didn't necessarily feel optimistic, we could make those choices that helped sustain and strengthen our optimism.

Optimism really is about focusing on progress, possibility, and expecting good things to happen.

But most importantly, it's believing our behavior matters, especially in the face of challenges.

And we get different results when we have a strong optimistic belief as opposed to you know, letting the problems and all the things that are negative in the world make us believe that our behavior doesn't matter.

If you're optimistic, you'll stress about money because I'd love to stress about money considerably less than I am.

Mm-hmm.

A lot of times, we inherit things from the person who used to do our job before us, or we think we should be doing stuff, and it just, our to-do list balloons.

When we really take a close look, we realize that there's sometimes you, you can put them on the not to do list, and you save yourself a lot of time.

And then there's a secondary work list.

This is stuff that we sort of have to do as part of our role.

There I think the question is, can you be more efficient? I worked with a therapist, and she was, uh, running a very busy therapy practice with many therapists under her.

She also was managing a home renovation project and continuing to raise her two kids, so she was exceptionally busy.

Mm-hmm.

... and how does that, what's the good news there for us as leaders?

So positive deviance in its traditional form, and I, so this was a concept that other researchers had come up with.

It's, it's a look back at the past and saying, "Okay, so we created some really positive outcomes in this community or at this job, and, and so let's look at the person who's the positive deviant that helped create that," right? But it's a, it's looking backwards.

This is looking forward.

How can I become the positive deviant? And the way we become a positive deviant, I, I give s- concrete examples in the book like spread positive gossip and, and really try to change the communication styles of other people.

But basically, you're, what you're looking for are those opportunities to rewrite the social script that's around you.

You are a leader.

But give people a couple of quick ideas about why that's so important for what we're trying to do in terms of creating the habit of being a resilient optimist.

How do you deal with that?

Yeah, so resilient optimism starts, uh, from a rational outlook.

So my, my husband, who is also a happiness researcher, a positive psychology researcher, he came home from a talk one time.

He says, "Uh, this is the craziest version of optimism that I've ever run into or what people perceive as optimism." So he gave a talk at a company, and the CEO afterwards came up and said, "I love the research.

I wanna figure out how to more deeply embed it in my organization." And, and the entire presentation was about optimism, how it drives performance, and how it can be a game changer in organizations.

So Sean...

So he offered Sean a ride to the airport.

I often wonder if the people who very reliably start complaining and moaning and groaning bring the room down, if they know what they're doing, if they understand the effect they're having on other people.

Can you talk to us a little bit about each of the five?

Yes.

So the first one's recalibrating your perspective, acknowledging that when we're stressed and or anxious, we can lose touch with all the positive pieces of our reality as we focus on the negative.

And so it's doing practices that help you recalibrate to you know, to widen your perspective there and rebalance it.

One of them is about recharging smarter.

A lot of times we think when we're busy, we need to just put our head down and work double hard.

And what we find clearly in the research is that there are strategic ways to get your brain offline from a task positive network to a default mode network to let it relax, recharge, and come back stronger.

ask you for help, things like that when you're trying to build and practice resilient optimism?

How does one go about doing that?

Well, so we are inundated with messages that might lead us to believe that our behavior doesn't matter.

And so recalibrating our mindset is about consciously searching out information that helps us see a different reality.

A really great example actually from my life that hit me so personally was our daughter was born 10 weeks early and she ended up in the NICU for 50 days.

And it was during that time, as you can imagine, I was like flush with uncertainty and anxiety and all the things.

So where I couldn't think like an optimist at that point, I didn't feel optimistic.

I knew I could behave like it.

there are some other behaviors as well that they exhibit.

Okay.

Case in point, there was a phenomenal study done at the University of California, Riverside.

They got three groups, they got three people, groups of strangers, lots of different groups, to sit in a room for two minutes in silence with one another.

And what they did is they tested each person's mood and mindset before and after the two minutes.

And what they found was over and over with these groups of strangers, the person who was most non-verbally expressive of their mood and mindset actually impacted the other two people.

So if they were relaxed and smiling, they made the other two people feel more positive.

If they had a scowl on their face or their arms crossed, they made the other two people feel more negative.

Okay.

Tell me more about that relationship, Michelle.

Yeah.

Optimism is one of the best performance advantages that we have available today.

It's the best investment in your ROI, in my opinion.

There's, of course, a lot of other things that we wanna get better at, uh, but the more we build an optimistic mindset, I see it fueling performance across the board: 31% higher levels of productivity, 37% higher sales, 40% greater chance of promotion over the next year.

You live longer, your quality of life is better, you're more likely to survive a cancer diagnosis.

I could go on all day.

Obviously, your book is packed with some great strategies around how do you manage your time and how do you manage stressors, and so the resilience piece, I was like this all sounds great, but, like, what happens when, like, someone just wreaks havoc on your day or, like, the world implodes? [laughs]