Coping With Life’s Challenges Using True Optimism

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We are living in uncertain and dangerous times. Globally, we face many formidable challenges in the political, social, cultural, and economic systems upon which our societies depend. On the individual level, our most basic human needs, such as security, community, self-esteem, and achievement, are also being challenged.

We are also facing rapid changes that pressure our ability to cope. Fundamentally, it is our mindset that will determine whether or not we will cope with and, hopefully, thrive in these new circumstances.

The world-renowned psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl is perhaps best known for practicing and espousing “freedom of will” in terms of choosing an attitude when experiencing unavoidable or inescapable suffering.¹

Let’s face it, human beings are, by nature, creatures of habit. Searching for a life that is predictable and within our comfort zone, we rely on routine and learned thinking patterns. We create pathways in our minds in much the same way that a path is beaten through a grass field from repeated use.

Because these patterns are automatic, we may believe that these habitual ways of thinking and behaving are both necessary and beyond our control. Thus, we rationalize our responses to life and fall prey to forces that limit our potential as human beings.

By viewing ourselves as relatively powerless, driven by instinct and outside forces, the possibility that we create, or at least co-create, our own reality becomes difficult to grasp. Instead, we often lock ourselves inside our own mental prisons. We lose sight of our own natural potential and that of others. In essence, we become “prisoners of our thoughts.”²

However, in line with Frankl’s teachings, no matter how desperate our situation in life may appear or be, we always have the ultimate freedom to choose our attitude. This responsibility is personal and cannot be transferred to someone else. It can be viewed, moreover, as both the foundation of and the driver behind our ability to cope with and respond to whatever challenges in life, including societal changes, come our way.

Frankl relied upon an overarching belief system, or mindset, about coping, which he called his coping maxim, to help him sustain an optimistic and passionate view about his own chances of survival in the Nazi concentration camps. His extraordinary story of finding meaning amid the horrors of his imprisonment vividly showed that we don’t have to be prisoners of our thoughts and that we can exercise what he called the “last of the human freedoms,” the ultimate freedom to choose one’s attitude in response to whatever life circumstances we face.

We all struggle with situations in life that are beyond our control. Whether these situations involve the personal and collective challenges from an unexpected shift in the political landscape due to an election or from any other changes that disrupt our life in some way, we can still find and learn that life doesn’t just happen to us; we happen to life and we make it meaningful. And it is by changing our mindset, beginning proactively with our choice of attitude, that we can respond to life, as Frankl famously espoused, by being responsible.

As we venture through life, we encounter both joyful and sorrowful times. Although we might wish to experience only the happy times, we know that to live a full life, we must be prepared to experience challenging and often painful situations. Life is about opposites: day and night, sickness and health, good and evil, wealth and poverty, and so on. Opposites are beneficial because they help us define and contrast things; we need to know one to know the other.³

Importantly, it is in the wholeness of life that we build our resilience and coping abilities to face all of life’s challenges. It is in the wholeness of life that we experience the most meaning.

Building our capacity to cope depends upon and significantly benefits from our choice of attitude. In this regard, it is important to underscore that when we choose an optimistic attitude, or what can be called “true optimism,” we make three choices:

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1. Choose a positive attitude toward the situation at hand
2. Choose an attitude that supports a form of creative visualization about what is possible
3. Choose an attitude that generates passion for the action needed to make the possible become a reality

In other words, being a “true optimist” requires more than just positive thinking. Positive affirmations, like good intentions, aren’t enough in and of themselves. We need to be able to visualize the possibilities that may or can result from our choice of attitude and, moreover, be able to feel the emotion and passion behind our choice of attitude that will help us actualize or realize such possibilities.

In the final analysis, although we may not be totally free from the various conditions or situations that confront us in both our personal and work lives, the important thing is that we can choose how we respond, at the very least through our choice of attitude. The keys to freedom from life’s prison cells—real and imagined—are within, and within reach.

So how about you? Are you ready to escape the inner mental prison that may be holding you back from achieving your full potential? Will you choose an optimistic attitude to cope with whatever life throws at you? Are you a “true optimist?”