Polyanna refers to an excessive or blindly optimistic individual.

A person who refuses to “see” the obvious, looming, unavoidable downside. Sounds like the description of an extreme individual who doesn’t want to acknowledge the reality of a situation. Okay, but what if you truly adopted a positive outlook as a strategic approach to solving the challenges you face on a day to day basis?

It means you would put into place an attitude which would not automatically presume a negative outcome as being inevitable. What if you were to give yourself the opportunity to think out of the box of cynicism and entertain other possibilities?

I call this “hopeful analysis”

Let’s assume for a moment that no situation is really a forgone conclusion regarding how it must pan out. Viewing a situation this way, you could conceivably imagine alternate endings. Then reverse engineer backwards from that ending to create the necessary alternate pathway through the situation. In other words, what aspects of the situation must change for it to work out in a new way? Are these things that you can influence? Is it worth you time and effort to try?

Whenever I need to make a situation work out I have always applied this simple formula…And it has always worked! Sometimes the various aspects of the situation didn’t change in the way I thought they would… but because I applied my energy and action, the situation ultimately came out the way I had hoped. Often times better than I had hoped.

If it’s important for something to turn out a certain way, (other than what appears to be a foregone conclusion) it’s going to require you to observe the situation from a different perspective. Play the “what if” game. Then focus your time and energy on accomplishing the simplest and most easily doable tasks which will alter the pathway through the situation.

Sometimes it only requires a 1 or 2% alteration to the current pathway of a situation to change the outcome!

-Bob Baran