A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

When you see an opportunity, is your first reaction to note the potential problems or are you instantly infused by all of the possibilities that it presents?

Opportunities create thought processes in which we are transposing our collected life experience on top of current circumstances with the expectation that in our most focused perspective, we can forecast the potential that is presenting itself at such a moment.

Our ability to recognize how and why we are programmed internally to perceive such moments in time, enables us to better define that which makes us more optimistic or decidedly more pessimistic in our approach to most things in life.

The ability to see an opportunity under the most difficult of circumstances, affords us a unique chance to look at that scenario through our unique filter, such that we might transpose our combination of collected life experiences atop the current situation at hand, and project the pathway to all plausible fortunate outcomes.

If we are more inclined to doubt that these are likely to come to fruition and therefore leave us in a tenuous position from which we must ultimately extricate ourselves, we are much less inclined to engage, and will most likely shy away from these moments whenever possible.

I don’t believe that anybody is necessarily born an optimist, nor a pessimist, but I do think there are certain personality traits that cause one person to aim towards the positive outcome perspective, based solely on their internal tolerance of risk, mitigation of fear, and their ability to logically project outcomes as circumstances dictate. These are the ones who are able to forecast the lemonade from the lemons.

Whereas a personality that is much more risk adverse, shy, timid, and less daring will be much more likely to avoid opportunities and instead, seek safe harbors, wherever they may.

We are continuous work in progress, so there is nothing to say that if your life has continually left you on one side of the fence or the other, that you cannot learn to acquire mindset and traits that will fortify more of the opposite response as you encounter circumstances upon which you must make your determinations, should you so desire.

Life gives us countless opportunities to discover whom we truly are and these filters are among the most salient details in life.

Happy Sunday!