Change Your Focus: Look for the Good
Look for the Good: Optimism as a Resilience Practice
In a world that serves up a nonstop stream of bad news, choosing to notice what is going right is not naive. It is a trainable skill, and it is one of the more overlooked tools in a leader’s resilience toolkit. The habit of looking for the good is not about ignoring real problems. It is about training your attention so you can see clearly, respond well, and keep going.
Dr. Martin Seligman’s 350,000 person study at the University of Pennsylvania found that the top 10% of executives are almost universally optimists. That is not a coincidence. Optimism shapes how leaders interpret setbacks, how quickly they recover from them, and how much energy they have left for the decisions that matter.
Key Takeaways
- Optimism is not positive thinking in the dismissive sense. It is a cognitive orientation linked to longer life, better immune function, and faster recovery from setbacks.
- The top 10% of executives in a 350,000 person study were almost universally optimists, according to Dr. Martin Seligman’s research at the University of Pennsylvania.
- Optimism is trainable, not fixed. Daily practice builds it the same way exercise builds strength.
- Looking for the good is a discipline of attention, not a denial of difficulty.
What Optimism Actually Is
Optimism, as Snowden describes it in Stress Express!, is not positive thinking in the dismissive sense. It is a cognitive orientation that research consistently links to longer life, better immune function, faster recovery from setbacks, and stronger leadership performance. Optimistic leaders are better at reframing adversity without denying it, maintaining motivation through uncertainty, and sustaining team confidence during volatile conditions.
This is part of what makes looking for the good different from toxic positivity. It does not ask you to pretend the hard thing is not hard. It asks you to also notice what is working, who is showing up well, and what is still possible.
How to Build the Habit
- Keep a daily written record of progress. A few lines at the end of the day on what went well, no matter how small, trains your attention toward what is working.
- Pay deliberate attention to what is going right, not just what needs fixing. This does not come naturally under pressure. It has to be practiced on purpose.
- Reframe setbacks as temporary rather than permanent. This single shift, from “this is how it always goes” to “this is what is happening right now,” is one of the most evidence backed tools for building resilience over time.
These are cumulative practices. None of them fix a hard day on their own, but repeated over weeks and months, they change how much capacity you have left for the leadership decisions that matter most.
Optimism is one piece of a larger system. It sits inside the Focus element of the Leadership Resilience System, alongside the other tools covered in Stress Management Strategies. If you want to build this and the other resilience elements deliberately rather than relying on willpower in the moment, that is exactly the work behind Leadership Resilience Coaching.
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And if you’d like to go deeper on kindness as a related practice, here is a segment from my TV show, Ignite Success!
Kindness Enriches Your Life
©2019, 2026 Snowden McFall, Fired Up! You may reprint if you credit me with content. Follow me on social media @snowdenmcfall