Why too much optimism can derail your goals

A positive attitude can help you navigate challenges, and a can-do approach often propels you forward in life. We know that having the right mindset is an important piece of the success puzzle, but focusing solely on positivity can backfire if you want to deliver results, says Caroline Adams Miller, author of Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life.

“A lot of people have a vision board or repeat mantras,” she says. “Some believe, ‘If I just think optimistically and look at images of myself succeeding, I will create a pathway to success because I’ll remain engaged in the goal.’ That’s not true.”

Adams Miller refers to the work of Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at NYU. According to Oettingen’s research, when you create positive fantasies, you begin to believe you’ve actually done things to pursue your goals. “In fact, it’s just you fantasizing about an outcome,” says Adams Miller. “People can mistake fantasies for actual work.”

Another pitfall of being overly optimistic is that you’re often not looking for obstacles along the path and the skills you’ll need to overcome them, adds Adams Miller. “Even the Stoics figured this out,” she says. “They had a phrase, ‘Premeditate the evils that are coming.’ When people don’t have a plan for the speed bumps that they’re likely to encounter, they often give up.”

Not anticipating obstacles taps into humans’ normalcy bias. “We start to think that what we’re experiencing now is what we’re going to experience in three months or six months from now,” says Adams Miller. “When we have too much optimism, we’re not taking care to look around every corner.”

A Better Attitude

If you were to rank your optimism on a scale from one to ten, you don’t want to be nines and tens, says Adams Miller. “When you do that, it’s a Pollyanna view of the world,” she says. “What you’re looking for is optimism that comes with zest. It’s self-efficacy, a belief that you can do something that you haven’t done before.”

Self-efficacy is a kind of optimism that brings the internal knowing that you can do hard things. If you don’t how to do something, you’ll find someone who does, you’ll read a book, or you’ll watch a YouTube video, says Adams Miller. It also requires a sense of knowing what you’re capable of and what you need to improve, such as upping your willpower or improving your self-talk.

A key ingredient is humility, says Adams Miller. “Arrogance goes along with unrealistic optimism, and humility tends to go along with grit and making better decisions,” she says. “Humility is the belief that you don’t know everything there is to know. It’s also that you don’t have to be the star of every conversation or every room. There are other people who can teach you how to behave and who can tell you when it’s time to pivot.”

Finding the Happy Medium

This form of healthy optimism requires finding the right balance. Research published in 2005 by the American Psychological Association called The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect found that all success in life is preceded by being happy or emotionally flourishing first.

“People need to understand that that well-being and the happiness that you feel, you create for yourself,” says Adams Miller. “Being overly optimistic is one error. But you can also be under optimistic, under flourishing, and sabotaging yourself before you even get started.”

Fortunately, positive interventions that help get you to the correct balance work for most people, such as mindfulness training, a gratitude practice, journaling, and exercise. “Doing these as a precursor to pursuing your goals is really the rocket fuel of success,” says Adams Miller. “You have to start there.”

Happiness and optimism go hand in hand, says Adams Miller. “When you are happy and you’re flourishing, you’re more likely to be zestful,” she says. “And when you’re zestful, you’re more future-minded, open to the world, and optimistic about things working out in your favor. You can’t have optimism without the flourishing.”

When it comes to optimism, consider the words late poet Maya Angelou wrote in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, “Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.”