There was a season when my son had to be out of school for an extended period. It was difficult for him, and it was difficult for us. Imagine being a teenager with that many emotions going on inside you, trying to reconcile them and make sense of them. It was very hard for him.
The way that frustration and anger came out made living with him draining for us, emotionally, physically and mentally. You still had to deal with all of that at home, then go to work and do your day-to-day. Those two did not mix well at all.
That season was part of a longer stretch in which the evidence did not point the way we wanted it to, and there was a reasonable case that nothing was going to change. It was during that time that my wife and I started saying one sentence to each other, again and again: “This is who he is right now. This is not who he’s always going to be.”
We did not say it because we knew how it would turn out. Nobody knew that. We said it because we were not willing to let the evidence of that week decide who he was, or who we would be in front of him.
If you have started to feel pessimistic about something in your own life, this one is for you.
Saying that sentence did not make anything better. We still had to get him through that season, and we had to get ourselves through it as well.
As you read this, you have your own version of this in your life. It might be about work and the people you lead. It might be about your environment, and the fear that comes with things around you changing so quickly and so suddenly. It might be something you are going through as a parent, or in your relationship. Everywhere you look right now, a lot does feel uncertain.
I have written about Admiral Stockdale before. He told Jim Collins that the prisoners who did not make it out of Vietnam were the optimists, the ones who kept setting a date for going home. Stockdale held on to how the story would end with no date attached, next to a clear look at how bad things were.
I have always had a name for what I take from that, and it is defiant optimism. I refuse to let the evidence of my present day decide how I look at my world and how I approach it. I had to go back to it this year, because this year has been hard in. Remembering who I am, and remembering that defiant optimism, got me fired up and moving in a way that is still pushing me forward.
Being right about what is wrong does not make you right about what is possible. A pessimist can read the evidence perfectly and still be wrong about what comes next. The evidence only describes where things stand today, and a leader who treats it as the whole answer has stopped asking the second question.
It shows up in ordinary places. A colleague gets judged on their last six months, and nobody asks what they could do in the next six. A hard market gets managed for survival, and the plan quietly stops including anything that would need things to improve. A project falters once, and the team stops proposing anything bold, because the last attempt is treated as the final word on what is possible.
None of this is an argument for cheerfulness. Defiant optimism is not telling people it will be fine, because you do not know that. Pessimists belong in the room too, since they see risks the rest of us miss. A defiant bet can still lose. The point is narrower: the evidence tells you where you are standing, and you decide what you are willing to work towards from there.
I said that sentence to my wife again and again, and it never once made it true. All it did was settle how we spoke to him the next day. Somebody on your team is living inside whichever version of it you have decided about them, and they can tell which one it is.
Three questions to sit with this week
- Who have you quietly stopped expecting more from, and what are you basing it on besides how they have performed lately?
- What have you stopped asking for, from the market, from your team, from yourself, because the last answer was no?
- What are the people around you learning to believe is possible, based on the way you speak and respond when things are difficult?