Here’s how…
The ‘ABCDE’ exercise asks you to keep a journal or events that happen to you, and then you analyse them thus:
‘A’ is the ‘adversity’ or event itself. This can be anything from being stuck in traffic, your child being bullied at school or your book proposal being rejected for the tenth time.
‘B’ is your belief and how you interpret that event. The traffic is always against me, the teachers are rubbish for not protecting my child, my book proposal must be lousy.
‘C’ is the consequence of that interpretation – your feelings and reactions. Typically, these might be getting angry at the traffic jam, having a rant at the teacher or firing off a terse email to the publisher.
ABC is automatic. It’s how most people live their lives. They stop at C and, as a consequence, there’s a lot of negativity and anger.
In the journey to healthy optimism you have to experience A, B and C but before you curse, shout or fire the angry email off, get to ‘D’, which is learning to dispute your interpretation of the event.
Professor Martin Seligman suggests you do this by providing counter-evidence, or simply asking more questions.
So this might be, I am overreacting? Is a 10 minute traffic jam actually worth me pounding my steering wheel and screaming like a banshee? Is it worth an ulcer?
Or, Is it the teacher’s fault? Does the teacher even know about the bullying? Is my child actually being bullied or have they just taken an unfortunate remark a little too personally?
Or, was my book proposal really so bad? Or is it that there are lots of similar proposals landing on their desk every day, in which case I’ll have another go and be a bit more creative.
The book proposal questions take us to ‘E’, energisation, a positive feeling. Some optimism, which clears the blockages of thinking allowing a way forward to emerge.
Over time, you get better at disputing your interpretations it can lead to positive feelings and a rewiring of your mental circuitry. Hence, you can learn to develop an optimistic explanatory style.
