LEARNED OPTIMISM - LEARN HOW TO OVERCOME ALL ADVERSITY

Learned optimism is the idea in positive psychology that a talent for joy, like any other, can be cultivated. It is contrasted with learnedhelplessness. Learning optimism is done by consciously challenging any negative self talk.
 

Martin Seligman’s came to the concept of learned optimism through a scientific study of learned helplessness, the idea that a certain reoccurring negative event is out of the person's control. As he was performing tests to study helplessness further, he began to wonder why some people resisted helplessness-conditioning. He noticed that, while some subjects blamed themselves for negative outcomes, others blamed the experiment for setting them up to fail.
 

Seligman shifted his focus to attempting to discover what it is that keeps some people from ever becoming helpless. The answer was optimism. Using his knowledge about condition people to be helpless in the lab, he shifted his focus to conditioning people to be optimists. The result of these experiments led to defining the processes of learning optimism.