How to Make Optimism Your Practice – Part 2
Written by Constanze Zientek, Women's Coach
Constanze Zientek is a women's coach who works with highly sensitive women in their thirties, helping them to cultivate inner strength, embrace embodied leadership, and build an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust.
In Part 1 of this article, I spoke about different reasons why optimism is actually an act of defiance. If you haven’t read it, check it out right here. So, with all the outside influences, as well as our thoughts being programmed to notice negativity over everything else, how do you actually get to practice more optimism? It can surely be a workout for your thoughts, and it may come more easily to some people than to others. It can also highly depend on the phase of life you are in and on the happenings around you, as well as how directly you can apply the following steps.
But if you feel like you really want to apply more optimism in your life, yet you are struggling with it, there are ways to practice it that will significantly increase your ability to do so.
Most of the time, these tools don’t work miracles overnight. They need to be applied, internalized, and practiced on a regular basis. They are not meant to bypass the negativity that is inherent in many situations.
But continuously training your mind to apply them will make it a lot easier to get out of negative thought spirals. They can also help you open up to inviting more and more reasons into your life to experience goodness and to actually allow yourself to feel it without downplaying or second-guessing it.
1. Acknowledge what hurts
Since optimism isn’t supposed to override negative emotions, it is important to take the time to acknowledge what hurts and why. Not bypassing what the first step to standing in your own power is. If you feel hurt by a situation, that matters, and so do the reasons that cause it.
In some situations of deep grief, the loss of a loved one being one of them, it seems simply impossible to force a positive thought about the situation. In these cases, let it be and let it sit. Give yourself as much time to heal as you need. As you do so, slowly start opening yourself up to the possibility of feeling uplifted again and know that this process will take time.
2. Look for what works to build optimism
Take a few moments every day to remind yourself of what actually works very well right now. If there’s nothing big, think of something small. No matter how dark a situation looks, there will most certainly be things to appreciate in another part of life, whether these things might be big or small.
If a situation seems to be exclusively bad without room for anything else, try to think about at least three things that could become positive outcomes of that situation. Write them out and, if possible, read them out as often as possible. Let yourself feel the words.
If you absolutely do not believe there is anything positive to see at all, try to check in with yourself to see if you would actually tell the same thing to your friends if they were in the same situation. Many times, we tend to be meaner and darker toward ourselves than we would ever be toward any other person. Checking in with your situation from an outside perspective can help you gain a different perspective on something that feels stuck.
3. Don’t downplay what’s good
Many times, when we actually see something that has good in it, we just don’t acknowledge its existence as “Yes, this is good.” We start downplaying it, taking it as beginner’s luck, an exception to the rule that we’re not lucky, or simply as not that big of a deal.
If someone compliments us, we downplay our being or abilities. When we speak about things we love, we try not to brag about them.
As a practice, try to observe and adjust your speech as much as you possibly can. When someone compliments you on an achievement, instead of saying, “That was just luck,” say, “Yes, I’m glad that happened.” Speech is an incredibly powerful tool in bringing power or disempowerment to yourself, as well as negativity and positivity. The more you realize how your words actually shape your outlook on things, the more carefully you are going to choose them.
4. Decide that you bring in good things
Decide that you are a person who deserves to have and experience great things. Just because you are. If that concept does not resonate at all on the inside, claim it with authority. Imagine you are a boss giving orders and commanding your life to deliver better outcomes to you. You can even say that out loud all by yourself and make it sound slightly bossy, which might feel weird but can be effective.
Leave room for how that outcome should exactly look. It can be as simple as, “Whatever is the best and highest for me and my surroundings.”
It might seem like a completely new concept to your brain and nervous system and can therefore feel distant and pretty cringe. But the more often you practice authority, the easier it gets to actually build it and attract goodness from life. Because sometimes, improvement just needs a little energetic push, and authority builds just that.
5. Ask for more good things out loud
This brings us to another important step. Do you remember the saying, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease?” Many times, we feel like we would really like something, but we feel way too shy to ask for it, especially loudly. Many times, we can even feel anxious to ask in the first place because we fear rejection.
But the thing is, people are not mind readers. So expressing your needs out loud, not in an offensive way but clearly (“This is very important to me,” or “I really want this to happen”), often brings something to other people’s awareness.
Even just mentioning something (“I like volleyball”) might have someone think of you, and before you know it, they invite you to a gathering. Expressing your wants and needs out loud to others more often can certainly increase the chances of more of them coming your way.
6. Become more versatile
As someone who pretty much loves comfort, this isn’t always easy for me to follow. But I find it pretty necessary to balance my mood and overall inner state of being. That is being active. Not only through sports and body movement, though that is one way.
I’m talking about becoming more versatile in general. The more new things you try out, the more variety comes into your life, and the more new connections your brain makes. It is not necessary that you stick to all of them, as it might be pretty much impossible. Also, be careful not to overdo it if you already live a pretty full life.
But trying out new things on a regular basis brings you together with possibly very different people, habits, and perspectives.
7. Shorten the timespan of annoyance
It’s normal to be upset or anxious when things go wrong or not as planned. The problem is not that we feel that way, but how long we stay in these states sometimes. Take a moment for the feeling. Then ask yourself what the thing that has just occurred really means to you. What do you want to make it mean? What will your next steps be, now that this has happened? Getting into active mode helps you to get out of the feeling quicker and to create positive results.
8. Look for the advantages of a situation
Sometimes, we think we want a person, a place or a circumstance to work out in a certain way and we become really jaded if that doesn’t work out. Only in hindsight, we get why it wasn’t supposed to work out or how going through a certain phase actually brought us so much further. Many times, we come out in a way better place, because something has, in fact, not worked out how we wanted it to. By asking yourself „What advantages can this bring?“, you allow yourself to open up for positive change, even if you can’t make sense of a situation yet.
9. Trust in a higher power
This might be a bit controversial for some readers and also goes into a deeply personal sphere, but I’ve found people who believe in a higher power to be open to the idea of getting help from the outside as they move along in their lives.
This is not aimed at any particular religion or religion itself. In fact, even people who don’t consider themselves religious at all but still believe in a higher power of some kind experience the same openness when it comes to receiving help from outside.
This is not a call for you to start believing in something if you don’t. However, if you somehow do, you can definitely use that as a way to affirm that a higher power will sustain your growth in the most aligned way.
10. Seek mentorship and coaching
Since optimism isn’t equally easy for everyone and can require continuous practice, good coaching can have a long-lasting effect on your ability to build and maintain it, despite whatever challenges you are confronted with and despite the opinions of those around you or society at large.
Reach out to me here to learn more about my coaching program, where you can work on that with me one-on-one over a longer period.
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Read more from Constanze Zientek
Constanze Zientek, Women's Coach
Constanze Zientek is a women's coach working with highly sensitive women in their thirties. She supports them in cultivating inner strength, embodied leadership, and an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust. She furthermore practices as a lawyer with over ten years of work experience, specializing in inheritance law. Her work with clients in emotionally complex transitions, combined with her own journey through her thirties, led her to coaching. Today, she integrates structure and intuition to offer clear, deeply human guidance.
