Have you ever wondered how some people seem to always find something good in life? They somehow manage to see the light at the end of the tunnel even when everything feels uncertain. They keep going after what they want, they don’t let every rejection change how they see themselves, and somehow, even when life does not look exactly the way they imagined yet, they still seem convinced that everything works out for them. Well, I can tell you exactly how they do it, because I can proudly call myself not only an optimist, but a radical optimist.
And no, that does not mean I’m happy all the time.
I’m not all sunshine. I have bad moods and overthink sometimes. There are moments I get disappointed, frustrated and impatient. I have days where I don’t feel motivated at all and moments where I wonder why something still hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to.
But underneath all of that, there has always been one belief I return to:
Things are going to work out for me.
Maybe not exactly when I expect them to. Maybe not through the path I originally imagined. But I have this almost stubborn certainty that if I continue doing my part, keep moving and don’t completely abandon myself because of one bad chapter, eventually life will meet me somewhere along the way.
If there is one thing people have admired and, at the same time, criticized about me, it is probably my supposedly “unrealistic” ideas about how my future could unfold.
I believed that the right things would come at divine timing. I believed that I didn’t have to take every path simply because it was considered the safe or realistic one. And most importantly, I strongly believed that I had to approach my life in a way that still felt right to me. You can probably imagine the reactions this sometimes caused from the people closest to me.
My intention was never to ignore advice from people who genuinely wanted to help me. And the goal was definitely not to walk around pretending everything was perfect. There was simply always this certainty in me that things would come naturally if I did my part and trusted the rest.
And now, looking back at certain chapters of my life, there are moments where I can genuinely just thank God because some of the things I once wanted turned out even better than I had imagined.
That is what radical optimism means to me. Not to pretend to be happy when you’re not, but knowing you have still a choice to believe in the better after all.
What Is Optimism?
If I described myself as optimistic, you might imagine a loud, extroverted, permanently cheerful person who walks into every room radiating sunshine. Which is funny, because that is probably one of the least accurate first impressions people have of me.
I’ve heard bold. Serious. Cold. Even mad. I ten dto have that rbf somehow.
And no, I’m not suddenly a completely different person as soon as someone gets to know me either, although I definitely give more warmth and a better mood than people initially expect.
Am I happy all the time? Certainly not. But I hardly believe anyone is.
So what actually makes someone an optimist?
You’ve probably heard the famous question:
Is the glass half empty or half full?
It’s such a simple example, but I think it applies to almost every situation in which we start doubting our progress, wondering why our desires haven’t arrived yet or simply dealing with a bad day.
Your food got cold. Are you now annoyed that it got cold, or happy that you finally get to sit down and eat?
It’s unbearably hot outside. Are you now going to spend the whole day thinking about how much you’re sweating, or can part of you think, well, at least I’m finally getting some sun I’ve been waiting for all winter?
Your phone dies while you’re outside. Annoying? Absolutely. But maybe, for once, you’re forced to look up and actually be present for a moment.
This doesn’t mean that every bad situation secretly has to be wonderful. Sometimes something does really suck. And that frustration still matters. However, there’s a point where you’ve felt the emotion, nothing more can be changed in that moment, and you have a choice:
Where do I want to direct my attention now?
That is where optimism begins. So, how do we move towards it?
1. Become Aware of Your Inner Voice
Our inner voice affects our emotions much more than we often realize.
The difficult part is that most of the time, we aren’t even consciously listening to it. Our thoughts move so quickly that one small disappointment can become an entire story about ourselves before we even notice what happened.
Imagine you’ve studied incredibly hard for an exam and then receive a result that disappoints you.
It starts with: Oh, bummer.
Then suddenly: The teacher must hate me. Maybe I’m not actually that smart. Why did I even put so much effort into studying? What if I can’t do this?…
Then the weather turns bad.
Your train is late.
You forget something at home.
And suddenly your brain has collected an entire folder of “evidence” proving that today is terrible, you’re failing and life is somehow against you.
But what if you interrupted that thought process?
Oh, bummer.
Ugh, maybe the teacher really hates me. Or what if I’m just not that smart? What if—
Wait. This was one result. This specific approach didn’t work as well as I hoped.That is unfortunate, and I’m disappointed. But I know my strengths and what I’m capable of. I can review my mistakes, see where I lost points and try a different approach next time. And how the teacher personally feels about me should not determine how I see myself anyway.
Do you see the difference? We didn’t dismiss the emotion. We didn’t pretend like the grade doesn’t matter to us. Instead, we felt into the emotion, reflected, and learned something without blaming it on others or ourselves. And then we moved on without allowing one experience to become our entire identity.
2. Practice Gratitude for the Life You Have Now
We’ve all heard about gratitude. It raises your vibration, improves your mood and helps with manifestation. Suddenly life feels brighter and everything starts blooming. I absolutely believe gratitude can be incredibly powerful.
I just don’t always approach it in the way we’re traditionally taught to. Sometimes it is really difficult to force an emotion, especially if we feel the quite opposite at the moment.
If you wake up exhausted and slightly grumpy every morning, writing I am grateful for my beautiful life three times into a journal might help a little, but it isn’t necessarily going to perform magic on its own. Your brain has no proof right now why your life is so beautiful.
I think gratitude becomes much easier when you slowly change the way you look at your everyday life.
Maybe you hate your current job. Every hour sitting in that office feels demotivating. And that’s fair if the job or the enviroment doesn’t suit you. But if you had to pick three things from this current job that you’d actually want for your next one, which would they be?
Maybe you genuinely enjoy your coffee breaks. You might have cool coworkers. Or the job itself isn’t fulfilling, but the salary is helping you become more independent. Maybe you’re learning something you know you’ll use later.
Those things don’t suddenly mean you have to love the job. They simply remind you that your current life already has qualities that you still want for your next chapter, and you choose to pour your focus more on that.
The best thing is, you can apply these tiny focus shifts everywhere.
You miss your train. Annoying! But maybe you get twenty unexpected minutes to slow down, listen to music or read.
It rains on the day you were supposed to meet your friends and everyone cancels. Very unfortunate. But maybe it becomes an evening where you make your favorite warm drink, put something comforting on in the background and finally return to a hobby you’ve neglected.
Not every situation is ideal. Almost every situation opens another path. Whether that path leaves you feeling better, teaches you something or simply gives you a moment you otherwise wouldn’t have experienced, there is often something there.
And the more often you practice it, the more naturally your brain begins doing it on its own. At some point, all your friends might be complaining about the unbearable summer heat while you jokingly say:“Well, at least we’re getting a free sauna.” And suddenly you realize that somewhere along the way, your attention learned to look for another light.
3. Have Faith in What You Can’t See Yet
Whether you’re religious, spiritual or don’t believe in any higher power at all, I don’t think you need to give up the concept of faith. Sometimes a tiny amount of delusion doesn’t hurt either.
To me, having faith means trusting that whatever comes your way either blesses you or prepares you for the blessing.
There are moments where we work incredibly hard for something and still cannot seem to reach it. Those are usually the moments where people start questioning everything.
Maybe I’m not good enough. I might be asking for to much. My standards are unrealistic. Maybe this just isn’t meant for me…
And this is where faith becomes especially important. Faith is easy when life is already giving you evidence. It’s much harder when absolutely nothing around you seems to confirm what you believe. Having faith means maintaining a certain confidence even when your present reality has not caught up yet. It means saying:
I don’t know how this is going to happen yet, but I don’t believe this is the end of the story.
One of my clearest examples of this was my job search.
I remember I wasn’t feeling fulfilled in my previous position, and I constantly felt like there had to be something more fitting for me. But I dod’t put much thought to it because I assumed I could for sure stay at least a year.
Then suddenly, I received the information that I could no longer stay at my company because there simply weren’t enough positions available. I was pushed into a situation where I had no choice but to start applying. And then came half a year of searching.
Applications.
Interviews.
Rejections.
More applications.
There were interviews I left feeling incredibly hopeful only to receive the coldest rejection afterwards. And people close to me tried to analyze why I wasn’t finding anything.
“Maybe your expectations are too high”
“You should lower your standards and apply for any job”
“The way you do it is wrong”
And yes, I was sad when I got rejected. I felt dismissed. I even cried when I would get rejected after some hope arised. And I sure had moments where I was frustrated and tired of the entire process.
But one thing I can genuinely say is that I never completely doubted my abilities, my applications or the way I was approaching it.
You probably would’ve heard me say:
“This door closed because a better one is supposed to open.”
Over.
And over.
And over again.
Until eventually, one did.
The position I have now fits so many things I had been visualizing for years: the atmosphere, my salary expectations, the possibilities for career growth and even parts of the work environment that once seemed unrealistic for a junior position.
Was it luck? Or it the result of trusting my own approach?
Maybe both. No one knows. But I do know one thing. If I had interpreted every rejection as proof that I was unrealistic and abandoned what I actually wanted, I might never have reached the position I was trying to find.
I don’t believe manifestation or having faith is sitting around pretending you already have everything you want. Sometimes it’s simply refusing to let the absence of something convince you that it isn’t coming.
4. Learn to Love Life Before the Manifestation Arrives
This might actually be one of the most important parts. Optimism should not turn into spending your entire current life waiting for your “real” life to finally begin.
You might be waiting until you move out, get into a relationship, loose the extra pounds, found the job, made that exact amount of money, and believe that’s where you get happiness. And suddenly you have spent years waiting.
You should have desires, you should have goals. And I fully also believe that we should always aim higher and see how life unfolds. But one thing is not at the end of those goals: Happiness.
I don’t want my desires to become conditions I place on my ability to enjoy being alive. To me, manifestation is also about creating the inner world before the external one has completely arrived. There will be so much beauty in your future, but don’t forget that you have already things in your life that your past self was wishing for. There’s no rule that you can’t still seek new friendships while enjoying your current ones. You can seek moving out while still enjoying your life at your parents. You can desire an entirely different chapter without treating the chapter you’re currently living as disposable.
Radical optimism is partly the decision to say: I am not postponing my relationship with life until I get everything I want. I will build a life I enjoy now. And I will continue walking toward the life I want next.
5. Be Radical About What You Believe
As I’ve mentioned before, there have been people throughout my journey who genuinely wanted the best for me, but sometimes tried to shape my life according to what would have been best for them.
There’s nothing wrong with advice. I actually think being open enough to listen to perspectives different from your own is incredibly important. Sometimes someone will tell you something that fits your goals perfectly, and you should absolutely be capable of recognizing that. But sometimes advice is simply another person’s life experience projected onto yours. And you definetly don’t have to make it your truth.
This is what I think turns an optimist into a radical optimist.
You remain grounded in your own perspective even when everyone around you thinks you’re crazy. You can stand in a room full of people who see the glass half empty and still choose to see it half full.
One thing I’ve learned immensely throughout the past few years is that there will always be someone who sees your path as wrong. Sometimes people will even strongly attack your decisions while genuinely believing they’re helping you. And that is exactly why you cannot take every opinion personally. They judge possibilities through the lens of their own experiences. And that’s okay – if something went badly for them, they might genuinely believe they’re protecting you by telling you that it will go badly for you too. But their experience is not automatically a prophecy for yours.
Going back to my job search, I had very specific expectations for the position I wanted. I could probably name ten things off the top of my head that mattered to me. And if a position didn’t meet enough of those expectations, I simply didn’t apply. I also didn’t want third parties controlling the process to the point where I felt like I had lost ownership over my own decision. These were simply my decisions I made through the entire job search process.
I received an incredible amount of criticism for this approach. My standards were questioned. My strategy was criticized. At some point, people even questioned my abilites.
Strangely enough, every time someone told me my approach was unrealistic, something inside me became even more determined. I would call this the radical part. Every external rejection of my path became motivation to continue. It reminded me that I wasn’t trying to squeeze myself into a box that didn’t fit me. I wasn’t searching for just any position. I was searching for the right match for me.
So I stayed optimistic.
Until eventually, I found exactly that.
Radical Optimism Is a Choice
I think this is the misconception I want to destroy most.
Optimists aren’t people who magically wake up happy every morning. No one floats through life untouched by disappointment. We’re not incapable of sadness, anger, jealousy, frustration, fear or doubt. These feelings actually make us human aswell.
Sometimes I’m incredibly optimistic and still have a horrible day. Both things can exist at once. What makes the difference is what happens afterwards.
At some point, after I’ve complained, cried, overthought or felt whatever I needed to feel, I eventually return to the same question:
What do I want to believe now?
Do I want one rejection to mean I’m incapable?
Is one lonely period the proof that I’ll always be alone?
Does one difficult month to become evidence that my entire year is ruined?
Do I want today’s reality to dictate what I believe is possible tomorrow?
Or can I say: This hurts. This isn’t what I wanted. I wish things looked different right now. And I still believe something beautiful can come from here. That is the choice. And the more often you make it, the more naturally optimism becomes part of you.
Practices I Use in Everyday Life
Like every mindset shift, simply deciding I’m going to be more positive now probably won’t change much on its own. Our thoughts are habits too. And habits become easier when we repeatedly practice them.
These are some simple things you can implement into your everyday life.
Morning
Start with prayer or quiet gratitude.
After waking up, take a few quiet minutes before immediately consuming everything happening on your phone. If you pray, pray. If you don’t, simply think about what already exists in your life:
- Your health.
- People you love.
- Food.
- A home.
The little things you usually overlook because they’ve become normal.
This is especially helpful if you’re someone who wakes up slightly grumpy. Believe me, I understand. I’d choose the bed over the first 5 minutes of the morning every time. And you really don’t have to wake up overflowing with graditude. It’s just about taking a few minutes in the quiet and directing your focus to the things that matter.
Do a five-minute journal.
If visualizing gets difficult, sitting down with a journal and actively writing your thougts down might help you more. You don’t even have to start with the graditude right away – sometimes it’s easier to write down first what’s on your mind. Just try to end by finding at least three things you’re genuinely looking forward to that day.
Create one ritual you’re excited about.
If there’s nothing exciting planned, create something.
There are plenty of days I don’t wake up thinking, Oh my God, I can’t wait for today. But there are always little things I know can make me happy. It is for sure my morning coffee. Or I have my workout planned that day. Or I get to put one of my favorite outfits on. Okay no, it’s definetly the book I’m currently obsessed with.
Whatever your day looks like, give yourself at least one tiny moment to look forward to and pour some energy into that.
During the Day
Watch what you consume
We often adapt our mindset to our surroundings. And while it can be difficult to change our workplace, circumstances or even the people around us, we can at least become more intentional with our digital surroundings.
Think about it this way: You listen to sad music and depressing lyrics, watch endless drama, like every “relatable” video complaining about life and constantly consume news about scandals and tragedies. No wonder life starts to feel like a black hole when your brain is barely given any other evidence.
That doesn’t mean you have to avoid everything sad or serious. The point is simply to notice what you repeatedly feed your mind. Instead of doom-scrolling during your commute, watch a show you genuinely enjoy. Create a “good mood” playlist for moments when you feel drained. And instead of constantly consuming breaking news, try documentaries that give you more context and a calmer perspective.
You don’t have to ignore reality. Just make sure you aren’t seeing it only through its darkest parts.
Choose the topics you talk about wisely
Gossip is fun, and sometimes complaining is too. But both can become draining when they are all a person talks about.
The way we speak about our lives also shapes the way we see them. If you constantly complain about yourself, joke negatively about your appearance or talk other people down, you’re not only creating a certain impression on others — you are repeatedly confirming that story to yourself.
Maybe you didn’t like how your body looked in the mirror today, but you also reached a new milestone in your fitness goals. Mention the milestone. You’d be surprised how much other people can hype you up when you give them something good to hype you up about.
This doesn’t mean you should never vent. Sometimes you genuinely need to say that your day was horrible. But there is a difference between talking about a difficult experience and making negativity the main language through which you talk about your life.
Evening
Reflect on your day without romanticizing everything.
Write down the moments where you felt an intense emotion. Maybe something annoyed you, you felt rejected or something embarrassed you. Or maybe you had an unexpectedly beautiful moment.
Then ask yourself what you want to take from it.
Can it become a lesson? Can something positive come from it? Is it simply something you need to feel and leave behind?
The purpose isn’t to turn every painful thing into something wonderful.
Sometimes the lesson is simply:
That hurt me, and I don’t want that experience again.
That’s still information.
The practice is about teaching your brain that an unpleasant moment does not automatically need to become an unpleasant story about your entire life.
I don’t think I’m a radical optimist because life has always given me reasons to be one.
I think I’m a radical optimist because life has repeatedly given me a choice about what I want to believe next. And I like the person I become when I choose hope. I believe there is more awaiting me. I like trusting that the desires I have aren’t ridiculous simply because I can’t see them yet. But what I can take most from it is that I keep romanticizing the tiny moments while still working toward the big ones. And I like knowing that even if something goes completely differently than I imagined, I’ll eventually find a way to continue.
Some people call that unrealistic. Others call it manifestation or faith. I call it optimism in this blog. But I don’t really care what name we give it.
All I know is that I would rather spend my life believing beautiful things happen and I keep looking for them than fearing everything could go wrong. And that doesn’t mean I have bad mornings, bad days, maybe even full bad weeks. But I have them knowing I for sure don’t have a bad life.
Because every day, we have a choice. And whenever I can, I choose to see the glass half full.
I hope you loved this blog as much as I loved creating it! If you’re interested for more, here’s my latest post <3: Daily Routine Tips for Sustainable Productivity – RomComToMe