How my dog is teaching me to let go of the wrong kind of optimism and stay hopeful

I recently got a rescue dog who helped me realise that the biggest challenge in our future together might be my unrealistic optimism. Here’s how I’m working through it.

A little while ago, I adopted a 6-year-old rescue dog. He has a history of negligence and abandonment. That means there are several misguided behaviours to unlearn and some to heal. 

Training him to become a confident, domesticated dog requires a lot of patience and calm nerves. He’s a high-energy dog and easily distracted. He needs his humans to be the epitomies of zen vibes and not get bothered by his hyperactive states.

Training him requires consistent short training sessions every day, many times a day. We practice sit, down, stay and a variety of other tricks with him over and over again. He never gets bored with them.

But I do.

I’d like to move on to new tricks as soon as I see improvement. I must pace myself to set him up for success and not confuse him with new advanced-level practices before he’s properly completed the beginner set.

The nature of dog training is similar to any project or commitment we make. Big wins never come fast.

This is not an entirely new lesson for me. So I’m reeling back in my personal history to get guidance on how to best approach my dog training project.

I used to be great at setting unrealistic goals and optimistic timelines, and I took far too much on my plate because I believed I could accomplish whatever I set my mind to. I wasn’t wrong. I often succeeded in managing chaotic situations. However, these attempts came at a cost. I struggled with burnout and many its additional symptoms.

After years of trying to understand my key drivers to overachievement, I learned that I needed to fall in love with realism. 

As a creative and ambitious human being, I had taken on a belief that realism is a boring dream killer. I also worked in environments where my clients often had unrealistic expectations that I had to match. As a consultant, clients would pay me by the hour and every hour needed to be productive for someone to see value in it. Realism can become expensive so people will rather buy and sell dream scenarios. 

And it’s not just the world of consultancy but the world we live in. In a society driven by neoliberal capitalist values, fast is good and slow is to be fixed. Efficiency is accepted as a virtue that all organisations and professionals should strive toward. 

And I too love efficiency. I get a kick out of ticking off my todo lists, completing a piece of writing in record time and finishing meetings early. I get restless and fidgety if things take too long and meetings lack an agenda.  

But the problem is, that even if efficiency gets projects completed, it doesnt’ take you very far as a life skill. Getting things done is great but getting them done by forcing unrealistic expectations upon yourself and others is a fast track to misery. 

Why realism is a necessary asset for a hopeful life

Research shows that whereas optimism generally delivers positive consequences in people’s lives, unrealistic optimism may result in negative outcomes. A literature review by professor of psychology James Shepperd and his colleagues lists several examples of studies where unrealistic optimism has led to negative outcomes such as the following, cited directly from the article: 

• College students who displayed unrealistic absolute optimism about their academic performance suffered declines in self-esteem and well-being over time (Robins & Beer, 2001).

• Smokers typically overestimate their ability to quit smoking if and when they decide to quit (Weinstein, 2001), which may lead to persistence in smoking well beyond the time when smoking becomes an entrenched behavior. Relatedly, smokers who displayed unrealistic absolute optimism reported lower intentions to quit smoking (Dillard, McCaul, & Klein, 2006).

• People who are unrealistically optimistic about paying off credit card debt make poorer decisions about credit card features, opting for cards with lower annual fees rather than cards with lower interest rates (Yang, Markoczy, & Qi, 2007).

One of the key moments on my path to embracing realism arrived when I studied a degree in coaching. The art of coaching is based on setting goals and helping people meet them. From the viewpoint of positive psychology-based coaching, we can achieve any goals if we understand all the nooks and crannies along the path of getting there.

Studying the ideology behind goal-setting was one of those aha moments where I realised that achieving anything is really very simple. We just make goals hard by overcomplicating things and asking too much too soon. 

So throughout the years, I’ve started to see realism in a new light.

It isn’t just a boring way to kill your ambitions but also an efficient strategy to achieve results and impact. Becoming more attracted to realism has also made me more committed to my personal goals. I’ve realised how reachable they are if I’m willing to look at the pathways realistically and put in the effort. This logic is aligned with the hope theory I’ve introduced in my earlier post.

Embracing realism has also made me more forgiving to myself and others for not achieving goals that were unrealistic to begin with. 

Now I can say, with a hand on my heart, that realism is worth embracing because: 

✨ It forces us to accept the current situation as it is. 
✨ It pushes us to take responsibility for the steps necessary to meet our goals.
✨ It encourages us to place our big dreams into the context of the real world where they can manifest themselves. 
✨ It teaches us what exactly is required to achieve the goal.
✨ It makes us pay attention and celebrate the small wins along the way.
✨ It helps us succeed and get exactly what we want.
✨ It makes us more compassionate human beings. 

Realism connects us to our communities 

Shepperd and his fellow researchers conclude that people tend to display more unrealistic optimism toward events they perceive to be under their personal control. This is because people rely on on their own history, skills and attitude when making judgements about the future. When we control situations, we can decide how well or fast they get done. 

But as we live in a complex world, not too many actions beyond brushing our teeth are under our control.

Often we are, at least to some degree, dependent on others. And if we fail to acknowledge that others don’t possess the same strengths, motivations and logic as ourselves, we can easily set unrealistic goals and expect others to meet them. And on top of that, we might expect them to meet the goals in ways that make sense to us – not them. 

This is why I believe that realism is, to a high degree, an act of empathy and compassion. Being empathetic requires us to view things from the perspective of another. If we lack this ability we’ll have a very narrow view of the world.  

And the inability to empathise with other people’s (or animals’) perspectives and abilities makes us disappointed in them when they don’t follow through in the ways we’d like them to. This creates disconnection and causes friction in our relationships. If we lose trust in each other, it’s unlikely that our collaborative efforts will result in success.  

This is why I need realism in training my dog. This is why my relationship with them needs to be the number one priority that exceeds the other goals I’ve set for them. If I lose trust in our relationship, success is unlikely to occur on any timeline. 

I also need to practice empathy toward myself when I fail to complete my part as the dog parent. I need to forgive myself for the days when I’m less than eager to do all the practices, the times when I get it wrong and the times when I get frustrated. Being realistic about our future also requires self-acceptance. I am far from perfect and my actions don’t follow a linear success curve either. 

And no, unrealistic optimism isn’t all bad either, but…

I know some of you are surely thinking that unrealistic optimism can’t be all that bad. And you’re right. Researchers are not fully aligned when it comes to the dangers of unrealistic optimism. Shepperd and his colleagues refer to literature that shows that positive outcome expectations can foster goal persistence, positive affect, and hope.

However, they also conclude that these benefits may be unproductive if the outcome is largely uncontrollable. There’s some evidence that unrealistic optimism may be “beneficial for people who are already actively coping with a problem, and for events that are temporally distal rather than proximal”, they say.

So, to conclude, unrealistic optimism can help us set ambitious, long-term goals as long as we’re also willing to face the difficulties that will likely arise along the way. 

How to unlearn unrealistic optimism and practice realism 

Here are a few ways I’ve nourished and continue to embrace my relationship with realism:

✨ Trusting my intuition. Often, there’s a fleeting moment between an idea or a proposal to do something and saying yes. At that moment, my intuition tells me if the proposal I’m given has a realistic chance of success or whether it’s something I should say no to. 
✨ Practicing extra patience in any situation that requires teamwork between many people. Because I know and can hear my impatient brain very well, I try to brace myself when going into situations where I have to understand the people around me have different strengths, expectations and timelines for our collaboration. I always try to put myself into their shoes, understand their situation beyond my interests and listen so that I can practice empathy instead of being pushy. 
✨ Lowering my expectations. Easier said than done but sometimes the best way to make yourself feel like you’re succeeding is to set the bar low. This is especially useful in tough times, when you know you’re not at your full capacity or the situation demands extra effort. In the end, you’d rather be positively surprised than disappointed.
✨ Allowing other people to take charge. By letting go of control, I create distance between myself and the goal and am more willing to accept a more realistic approach that suits everyone. 
✨ Always paying attention to the good. I try to train my brain to notice small wins whenever I see them. This stops me from going from unrealistic optimism to unrealistic disappointment and keeps me reminded of the progress even when it’s slow and inconsistent. 
✨ Lengthening the timeline. Whenever I’m hungry for something difficult to achieve, I try to push the timeline further. This way, I don’t necessarily have to give up on my unrealistic goals but I can accept that they will take time and persistence. This serves as a good reminder to keep working toward the goal that feels meaningful.
✨ Remembering that realism is a friend and not the enemy. It’s not there to kill dreams but to set them on the right trajectory. Realism shouldn’t be the only voice in our heads but it should have a say in the commitments we make.

This is not an exhaustive list and I encourage you to add your own practices to it.

I believe in things that work and these have worked for me in the past. I’m convinced they will work for me and the doggo as well. However, I’ll keep you posted on how things proceed for us.

I hope this piece of writing has been useful for whatever makes you frustrated or impatient right now. I wish you and myself luck and realistic outcomes, and most of all, patience.

Thank you for reading. By doing so you’re helping me believe in the effort I put into this newsletter.

Every action counts.

Become the hope you wish to feel in this world.

With kindness,
Aurora