>>55093230there's a lot of ways to take this question, and i'll start with the more moralfag answer, which is just that ultimately the first steps you take have to be based on faith in yourself. i obviously don't mean religious faith, but i do mean that there is some degree to which you have to suspend your better judgment of yourself as a list of accomplishments, and simply believe in yourself as a person. a good way of putting it is that if faith is a currency you use to make up for deficits in proof and evidence, you have to make the active decision to gather up however much of it is in your couch cushions and spend it on yourself.
here's a more psychology based answer. optimism is a skill that can be practiced, and you should revise your understanding of optimism as a moral, wholly good, trait, and cognize it simply as another personality dimension. this is what the book learned optimism is about. learned optimism is not a faggy new age book about how u just gotta believe in yourself!!! it's a book about the personality dimension that amounts, essentially, to giving yourself credit for the good things in life and blaming circumstance for the bad things. a trite but illuminating example is someone who, rather than saying, 'wow, i happened to get the right lottery ticket', reinterprets it as somehow influenced by their own competency. 'i knew i'd pick the right numbers! all my luck's been stored up and spent right here!"
just to clarify by explaining another facet of it, one aspect of optimism is localized negativity and global positivity. you don't say 'i'm forgetful', you say, 'today is a bad day for some reason and i forgot some stuff.' meanwhile you don't say 'wow, i'm on a roll today in tennis, i wonder what's going on', you say, 'wow, i am fucking good at tennis.'
you may have noticed a very glaring flaw with optimism: that you can be delusional, that you can overestimate yourself, that you can use this kind of optimism as a way of lying to yourself. you're absolutely correct. and that's why this kind of optimism shouldn't be seen as wholly positive, and why i'm not describing optimism the virtuous trait. i'm describing optimism the psychological trait.
the practical thing here is that you probably are a pessimistic person, and you have plenty of room to shift over to the more optimistic end of the spectrum before you start having to deal with the questions of self honesty. i guarantee you that if you look into your personal monologue, you will notice evidence of globalized negativity and localized positivity in your attributions.
you'd genuinely be surprised how much of a difference it makes to say 'today is an off day' vs 'man, i am always so fucking bad at this.'
anyway i'd recommend picking up that book. it's a really useful and illuminating one.
