Imagine for a moment that you are about to take on a new challenge, whatever it may be.
At this point, your inner dialogue plays a decisive role in how you feel and how you approach the situation. If you are telling yourself: “I’m not good enough for this”, you are putting up a mental barrier that will limit your ability to tackle the challenge effectively.
On the other hand, if you tell yourself: “I can do this, I’m going to give it my all”, you are adopting a growth mindset that drives you towards success and boosts your chances of achieving what you set out to do.
Many people tend to adopt the first kind of message, justifying their choice with arguments such as: “If you expect the worst and it goes badly, you’ve already accepted it and it doesn’t hurt as much. And if it goes well, then that’s a bonus.”
This attitude is what we call defensive pessimism.
Defensive pessimism is an attitude that many people adopt automatically and unconsciously. It involves projecting yourself into failure, or into the negative side of a situation – not because you are genuinely convinced of it (if you were, you wouldn’t even put yourself in that situation), but to lower the pressure and expectations when you are unable to manage them properly. Let’s look at an example:
A young woman decides to prepare for the competitive exams for a civil service post. When she picks up the books and sees the whole syllabus she has to study, she tells herself: “With all this material and so many people trying to get a post, there’s no way I’ll make it, but oh well… here goes.”
As we were saying, this inner dialogue helps to ease the pressure she feels in the face of an overwhelming mountain of notes, so that her goal now feels simpler. The weight of expectations and the complex emotions involved in this challenge lose their meaning the very moment she takes it for granted that she will not succeed. (Once any possibility of success has been ruled out, there is no point in being afraid of failure.)
So we could say that, in the short term, this inner message does its job, but at the same time, without realising it, she is mentally programming herself to fail.
At first, defensive pessimism gives us immediate relief by lightening the weight of expectations, but the key to how it works lies in self-deception. Pressure and expectations are part of the goals we want to achieve, so when we try to lower them, we are also lowering our main goal. Now “getting a civil service post” has become “studying for a civil service post that I myself have decided I won’t get”.
This message is completely absurd.
The mindset with which the young woman in our example begins her studies never allows for the possibility of reaching her goal. In fact, for defensive pessimism to work and for the pressure to stay at bearable levels, the denial of any possibility of success must remain firm. The moment this denial loosens and the person starts to believe she can achieve her goal, the pressure will automatically increase. So the defensive pessimist, unable to handle the pressure the challenge involves, works hard to keep any possibility of success at bay.
When a person holds on to this pessimistic thinking, in the medium term the absurdity of the inner message keeps growing (“studying to achieve nothing”) until it becomes unsustainable. Thinking that you are putting in effort, time, money… only to achieve nothing becomes extremely frustrating. At this point, the young woman in our example may well end up giving up her studies. The self-deception becomes increasingly obvious and defensive pessimism starts to lose its grip.
But if the young woman in our example managed to sustain this pessimistic dynamic in the long term, the most likely outcome is that she would sit the exams without really being prepared to get a post, because that possibility has never been entertained in her mind. Sadly, the most obvious outcome is that her prophecy ends up fulfilling itself and she fails to reach her goal, since she has been preparing for exactly that from the start.
Beyond the example used in this article to illustrate how defensive pessimism works, this mechanism shapes and greatly influences every area of our lives, not just the professional or academic sphere.
Take someone who, for example, wants to introduce themselves to a new group of people and tells themselves: “I’m sure they won’t find me interesting, but since I’m on my own anyway, I’ll try talking to them…”. Or someone who decides to confess their feelings to the person they like and thinks: “I’m sure they’ll turn me down, but keeping quiet won’t get me anywhere either, so I’ll tell them…”. In both cases, defensive pessimism gives the person the courage they need to try to approach others and achieve their goal. However, their lack of conviction that they will succeed means their approach is weak, awkward, clumsy… This way of thinking shapes how the person comes across, and therefore makes it more likely that this is how others end up perceiving them. With that kind of introduction, their chances of being liked do indeed go down.
And the worst part is that, when this happens, the person becomes even more convinced that they were right to think pessimistically, since their prophecies keep coming true. Unable to grasp how much this pessimistic thinking influences the results they want to achieve, they keep feeding this strategy and deepening the self-deception by piling up more and more failures. And so the wheel never stops turning.
But there is a solution!
The most appropriate response in these situations is to equip the person facing a demanding challenge with the ability to manage pressure and expectations properly, which in turn means being able to manage the complex emotions that may arise on the way to the goal they have set.
With better self-management, the person will be more able to see themselves in a positive light and to bear the mental and emotional weight of the challenge they have chosen to take on, so they will not need to resort to mental strategies to avoid feeling that pressure, because they will be able to face it.
When a person is able to meet challenges in a healthy way, the pessimistic messages change:
“If I put in the effort, I can do it. I’m going to start studying to get that post.”
