Ep.82 Choosing optimism to build resilience

Maria Rampa: Hi, I’m Maria Rampa, and welcome to Engineering Reimagined. Have you ever noticed how two people can face the same challenge, yet one sees opportunity while the other sees only obstacles?

In this episode of Engineering Reimagined, Aurecon’s Chief Executive Officer Louise Adams sits down with clinical neuropsychologist Dr Kim Hazendonk to explore the science behind optimism — and how choosing a positive mindset can help us to reshape the way we think, lead and navigate complex problems.

They discuss how we can re-train our brains for optimism, despite the negativity bias all around us, why happiness isn’t a destination, and how dopamine, gratitude and psychological safety play a vital role in building resilience, creativity and productivity at work.

Whether you’re leading teams through uncertainty or simply want to feel more motivated and energised, this conversation will inspire you to see the world and your potential in a whole new light.

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Louise Adams: Welcome to this episode of Engineering Reimagined. I'm delighted to be sitting here today with clinical neuropsychologist Dr Kim Hazendonk, and we're talking about optimism, what it is and how we can use it to navigate complexity and solve what might seem like insurmountable challenges. So welcome, Dr Kim. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Kim Hazendonk: Thank you, Louise. It is a pleasure to be here.

Louise Adams: I've always been fascinated by how you got into neuropsychology and particularly your passion for positive psychology and you know leading to you having this company called Positive Brains. So can you talk to us a little bit about how you got into it and what drew you to neuropsychology.

Kim Hazendonk: Right back when I was a child, I was interested in the paranormal and the unexplained. There's a Dutch clairvoyant, Peter Hurkos, and he got his abilities after he fell off a ladder at age 30 and had a brain injury. So, I was fascinated by that. At high school I was really interested in science and I was good at math, but I wanted to work with people, so I ended up signing up for a university degree in behavioural science, which is psychology. And there I learnt more about the brain and that we're still doing a lot of research to understand how it works. So I've worked in Canada and the UK as well as Australia as a neuropsychologist, and my passion really is to help people understand their brains, to tap into their full potential to help with wellbeing and success at work and in their personal lives.

Louise Adams: And can we train our brains to be optimistic or to have a more positive mindset?

Kim Hazendonk: Absolutely, that's a really great question. And a lot of people ask is, can we think more optimistically? Because of neuroplasticity, so that's our brain's ability to rewire itself based on all the things that we see, and we do and experiences that we have every day. Our brain is constantly updating and rewiring. We're absolutely able to have a more optimistic mindset.

Louise Adams: I've always considered myself to be an optimistic person and when I stepped into the CEO role, I saw an opportunity for this concept of optimism as a strategic choice. Can you talk to us about how you would define optimism?

Kim Hazendonk: It seems to be in two parts. So one part is about how we see our current situation and whether we can see the brighter side of things. The second part of it is how we see our future. So, people who have an optimistic mindset tend to expect that there will be desirable outcomes for them in the future. Victor Perton, who works at The Centre for Optimism, I really like what he says. It's about, not “I will succeed”, but “I can succeed”. So, Martin Seligman, who is the "father of positive psychology", he became the president of the American Psychological Association in 1998. He said we have focused a lot in psychology on the negative and suffering and what therapies can alleviate suffering. But what about what's above zero? You know, so let's look at the positive side of psychology. And he got interested in optimism, and he's known for his theory around learned optimism. So, he says that it can be described by the explanatory styles that we adopt when we experience negative events in our lives. So, pessimists tend to see negative events as personal, so it's their fault. It's pervasive, so it's across all domains of their lives, and it's permanent, so it won't change. But optimists are the opposite. So, say you go for a job interview and you're not successful. So optimists tend to see that as well, you know, this is not permanent, it's you know, one instance, and I can apply again and I may be successful. And they see it as an external factor to them. So it's not that I am not good enough for a good job, they're perhaps I didn't fit the criteria at this particular time. That is one way that we can train our mindsets to see events as more optimistic.

Louise Adams: And so we've got a lot of engineers and scientists that work at Aurecon and that listen to this podcast and we all work in highly complex environments and our role is often to think critically, identify risks and find solutions for some of our clients' really complex problems. I think back on my career and you know, I ended up, once got a opportunity, it was in South America in Guyana, and I was quite young and I was there with a colleague of mine who was similar age and they had just had massive floods that had decimated all of their infrastructure, flooded the city, and they were trying to recover, and we were there to help the local contractors identify how to fix the infrastructure and then draw up the contracts and get them to do the fixes that were necessary. It was really early in my career, but I'm fascinated by when you're thrown into challenges like that, how an optimistic or solution focused mindset and behaviours can help, particularly in complex situations where you may not necessarily think you haven't done it before.

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, it can be really difficult in those situations, regardless of your mindset. An optimistic mindset is a problem-solving mindset. So, what that does is it helps people to be resilient and adaptable and innovative in how they see and approach the situation. So people who are optimistic tend to see obstacles as opportunities and that allows them to enable their people to find the resources required in whatever particular situation they find themselves in.

Louise Adams: So I remember early on when we were talking about optimism and I was sharing my vision, and I said to you that I wanted to focus on optimism and happiness. And you cautioned me and said that I should stick to optimism and positivity. And we talked about the seven universal human emotions. Can you explain those seven emotions and why happiness is not a destination?

Kim Hazendonk: Okay, so what we'll do is I'll call out the seven emotions and they're considered universal emotions because they have distinct facial expressions that are recognised across cultures. So I'll read them out now and if you can just keep a tally of how many you consider to be positive versus negative, just go with your kind of first impression. Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, contempt and disgust.

Louise Adams: So I would have said for me there's five there that are what I would say is negative emotions. There's one that could be either negative or positive contextually and then happiness one is the one for me that is the probably singular positive emotion.

Kim Hazendonk: Right. Yeah. So in the Journal of Positive Psychology a few years back there was a study looking at people who, because people fall into one of two camps generally, those who focus on being happy and those who focus on being optimistic and positive. Which do you think is the healthier one?

Louise Adams: Well, I guess I know now because you've taught me that it's better to focus on the optimism.

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, and the reason is that people who focus on being happy, happiness is their goal, inevitably they are going to fail because there are going to be times, a lot of times in fact, where it's quite normal for us to experience negative emotion. It's normal and it's healthy for us. We can't experience happiness unless we experience sadness. So that's a normal part of being a human. So if we focus on happiness as the goal, we can't always have that state. So optimism and feeling positive is about having a mindset where when we come across problems and challenges in our lives, which we inevitably will, we'll work on finding a solution to those and to overcoming them. So it's a much healthier way of thinking.

Louise Adams: Yeah. And I guess in the same way if we have a bad day and we're feeling one of those negative emotions that a positive mindset will say that it's a temporary space for us and we can navigate our way forward from it.

Kim Hazendonk: That's right. That it's okay. I'm okay to be with this emotion right now.

Louise Adams: Can you explain this concept of arrival fallacy for us then?

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah. So arrival fallacy is a mistaken belief that if we work hard and we attain our goals, that we will be fulfilled. And that's the end of the story. What actually happens is that we use dopamine, which drives our motivation and energy toward goals. And once we achieve a goal, we work hard and we achieve a goal, it feels good temporarily, but then that feeling is quite fleeting. And that's because of how our brain chemistry works, that we need to continue to motivate ourselves to move through life and to achieve further goals. So the fallacy is that, well, I'm going to get the next job or I'm going to get the bigger car and that will then I'll be happy. Where in fact, that's not the end of the story. We get there, we achieve our goal, and that feels great and we get a little burst of dopamine, but we want more. You know, after a while we say, you know what, that felt okay, but I want the next promotion or I'm going to get the next biggest car. So, we continually move the goalpost. And if that's the case, just arriving at the end goal means we're never going to be fulfilled or completely happy. So the antidote to that is to celebrate the journey along the way, you know, to celebrate the small wins and that we might do that in business as well, instead of waiting for the end of a project, six months' time, you know, have a look along the way at what we can celebrate and enjoy as part of the journey. There are small wins that we can focus on to keep our motivation.

Louise Adams: And so much of our society is, I suspect, set up around that fallacy of arrival, your school and unis and sports and business and...

Kim Hazendonk: Yes. We're taught that at school. You work hard and you achieve your goal and you'll be happy. And I think economically it makes sense. You know, we want people to spend money so you buy the next TV or the next big house, that'll make you happy. But that's actually not the full story.

Louise Adams: When people hear us talk about optimism, sometimes people might think, well, therefore I can't talk about things when things go wrong. I've got to be optimistic and positive all the time and I can't raise issues, can't raise concerns. Can you talk to me about optimism versus realism? And then perhaps how do you create, if you've got to focus on optimism, a psychologically safe environment for people still then to feel like they can be optimistic but they can talk about things that aren't quite right.

Kim Hazendonk: I think there is a common misconception that optimism is just about Pollyanna and everything's pie in the sky and happy. Whereas optimism actually takes work. It's about facing challenges and seeing opportunities, but you know, amidst a whole lot of chaos and discomfort and disruption. I highlighted before, we have to train our brain to be more optimistic, to prime our brain to see the opportunities. With psychological safety, Amy Edmondson talks about this concept and broadly it's being able to speak up with your concerns, your ideas, even if they're different from your leaders, and feel like you're going to be heard. So for leaders to encourage a culture of psychological safety, one of the things that they can do is encourage positive thinking. This also means though that they're building things like trust and connection. They are setting challenges, they're giving constructive feedback. So, people know where they are in the organisation, they know what the vision is, they know what they're working toward, and they know that they are comfortable and safe to speak up because leaders are wanting to hear a diverse range of views and opinions. If we're going to get through these obstacles, we're going to have really good problem solving. We need to have everybody on board, and we need to hear your concerns. We need to hear where you see opportunities or where you think something could be done differently or better. So psychological safety is absolutely imperative for businesses to thrive because we need to hear from the people in the organisation.

Louise Adams: So many of us are familiar with the acronym VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And I mean it's been used so much in the last number of years going through COVID and all of the challenges and everything that's happening in the world. And I think, we've in recent years, started to talk about a slightly different version of the acronym, a vision, understanding clarity and agility, really as a means to help people overcome that real sense of being overwhelmed by everything that's happening, whether it's around the world or in your personal lives or in your workplace. How do you think choosing optimism can help with that overcoming overwhelm both professionally and personally?

Kim Hazendonk: I think particularly in chaotic and complex environments, maintaining an optimistic mindset is critical because of the solution focus. So, what happens when we are thinking optimistically is that our attention turns less toward the obstacles and more toward opportunities. In complex, like VUCA environments, it also is helpful for leaders to be inspiring positivity and optimism because that helps build resilience and it also helps us think more adaptively, so we can think with kind of an agile mindset. So particularly in difficult environments where the future is uncertain, it's helpful for us to focus on opportunities, to have a creative and problem solving mindset, and for us then to be able to mobilise the resources that we need to navigate through those times.

Louise Adams: And I'm interested in the role of dopamine in creating higher energy, better mood and greater motivation. They're all elements that we know help people become more productive and successful both in life and work. So can you explain a bit more about the benefits of dopamine and perhaps some tips on how we can increase it in our brains?

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, so this is a topic that I could talk to for about a whole day. I love talking about dopamine. So dopamine is a neurochemical mostly produced in the brain and its role is to motivate and reward us. So if you take the dopamine receptors out of a rat's brain and you put food about a body length away from it, the rat won't move toward the food. It will starve. So that's how essential dopamine is for us to move toward our goals. Dopamine then is helping us in terms of staying motivated and energised and it's got a critical role to play in optimism. In fact, it works on the brain so we pay more attention to positive information coming in versus negative, so we have a more optimistic view of how the future is going to turn out. So it's a little bit of a bias that happens there in a healthy way. And certainly, for businesses and organisations and individuals, we want people to be able to focus on positive. For us individually, how we can do that is to maintain a healthy base level of dopamine. So as we move through our day and we go through challenges and we move toward our goals, we're using up dopamine. If you think of it a bit of like a splash pool, right? We're splashing the dopamine out of the brain. So we need to replenish dopamine. And in fact, you need to replenish it as you use it up, because if you let it deplete, it takes a lot longer for us to get the dopamine back in there. So in terms of some neuro-hacks or some tips to do that, one of the biggest ones is sleep, restorative sleep. So when we sleep, our dopamine gets replenished, dopamine levels. And people don't like me saying this, but the use of caffeine is important in sleep. So caffeine is a drug and it has a half life of about five to six hours. So if you're drinking caffeine straight before bed, or even you know, the ten hours before bed, it might interfere with your quality of sleep. A lot of people tell me I can still sleep after I've had a coffee, but that's the deep sleep or the architecture of your sleep that can be interrupted. So I'd say sleep is a big one. I also advise people to get outside in the morning when they wake up and see sunlight. So getting sunlight in your eyes starts a whole cascade of neurochemical changes in the brain. But it can certainly help raise your dopamine levels throughout the day and help keep you motivated. Similarly, by viewing sunlight in the late afternoon, it helps protect the dopamine levels from not dropping too low overnight because they do drop naturally overnight. Exercise is another one and eating certain foods can help release dopamine in the brain. Yoga nidra and meditation type activities are also good ways to replenish dopamine.

Louise Adams: And what about this concept of cheap dopamine? We talk about our kids getting dopamine from a phone. How is that not a good thing?

Kim Hazendonk: Well, I guess you've got to look at the cheap dopamine like video games, gambling, drugs and alcohol. These are all things that will release dopamine, but we need to assess it against, is that helping us get toward our long term goals? I watch my teenage son trying to study and he's on his computer but he's got the basketball scores popping up and his phone is going off, his watch is vibrating and it's grabbing for his attention. And even though getting a like a post on Facebook or Instagram, it will release a little bit of dopamine, it's temporary and it's really not getting him toward the long-term goal of doing well in his exams and doing well at school. Yeah, it's a quick fix, same with gambling I suppose or it can feel good in the moment, but is it really getting us to where we want to go to have fulfilling lives?

Louise Adams: Some people, when you talk about optimism and positivity will say it's really hard in this world today to stay positive. We often get overwhelmed in all forms of media by negative news stories and some people would say that the world is getting worse, and worse than we've perhaps ever remembered it to be. Talk to me about negativity bias and why you think having a positive mindset is perhaps really crucial in this day and age to help navigate that.

Kim Hazendonk: There's Dr Steven Pinker and he's a Psychology professor at Harvard University and he's been looking at negativity in the media and since about the 1970s, the message that we get through media is becoming more and more bleak. That's partly because they know that we have what is called a negativity bias. So our attention is drawn more to negative information than positive information. This comes from our ancestors. If you think about many moons ago when the, you know, the world had a lot more scarcity and our brains were designed to keep us alive at the end of the day. So if we were sitting in a camp at night time and on one side, a fellow, you know camp member brought in a casserole on the other side, a bear wandered into the camp, then you'd better hope that our brains will focus on the threat rather than the reward. And in fact, those ancestors that did focus on the threat are the ones that stayed alive and we have inherited their brains. So that's all well and good, except we don't have too many bears wandering into our workplaces these days, but our brains are still wired, very much so, to be looking out for threats and negativity, hence the negativity bias. But if we go into work every day thinking, well, there could be a bear I need to watch out, then you know we're kind of going to ruin you know some of the experience that we could be having around positivity. So one thing that we can do to counteract this negativity bias is to train our brains to focus more on the positive. As I mentioned before around neuroplasticity, we can absolutely rewire our brains to do that. One part that has been spoken about a lot is the science of gratitude. So the way that works, if I ask you now if have you ever bought a new car and then you've gone driving on the roads and you've seen the same car everywhere?

Louise Adams: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the same I've got a when I got my dog in COVID, I'd never seen this breed before and now I see it everywhere.

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, exactly. And so, the other dogs were already there, they were on the street but you weren't noticing them. But when you had the same dog, then your brain was primed to see them. The same with when you buy the car, you suddenly see the same car everywhere, even though they were already on the road. So, what's happening there is that you're priming your brain to notice things in your environment. And so, we can do that to prime our brains to notice the positive more so than the negative. The science of gratitude works that if you write down three things a day that bring you happiness or that went well for you that day or that you're grateful for, and you do that for one month, the science shows that your brain rewires. So you start to notice more of the positive things happening in your environment, even though they were already there.

Louise Adams: Yeah, that's great. Sounds like a great thing to get onto with, no doubt for us but also for our children and in the workplace as well. And speaking of being able to reframe our brain or prime our brain, I understand that you've got a really interesting test that we can use to demonstrate for some people how our brains can react if we can precondition them to see something or hear something in this case, and then re-train them to think differently.

Louise Adams: Alright, so explain to us what's gonna happen and we'll then play this audio and see what happens.

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, so this is a demonstration of how we can change the way we see the world by priming our brains to think in a certain way. We can see the world, we can even hear the world differently. So a few years ago the franchise Ben 10, you may have heard of that, came out with a watch and if you press a button it says the words brainstorm. So I just want you to visualise those words in your mind. Brainstorm and you can say it.

Louise Adams: Brainstorm.

Kim Hazendonk: Yep. Right. So now we'll play.

Kim Hazendonk: Okay, so what did you hear?

Louise Adams: I definitely heard brainstorm.

Kim Hazendonk: Okay, great. We've been doing a lot of brainstorming today.

Louise Adams: That's right. Definitely heard that.

Kim Hazendonk: All right. So now I want you to think about the words green needle.

Louise Adams: Green needle.

Kim Hazendonk: Yeah, fun fact, my name is Vietnamese, Kim, and it means needle or gold, apparently.

Louise Adams: Green needle.

Kim Hazendonk: So yeah, so visualise the even the colour green, the word needle. And then the same audio will be played. Yeah. And let's see what you hear now.

Louise Adams: Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. Like I definitely heard green needle that second time round.

Kim Hazendonk: Okay. Yeah. Right. So it's the exact same audio. Sometimes it can take a few times for people to hear something different or they might mix it up, they might hear brain needle or green storm. But I think this often works when I run workshops that people are fascinated that they kind of say, have you changed the audio? Is it something different? I absolutely have not. What I've done is just put an idea or a thought in their mind which has actually changed the way they hear and interpret sound. Yeah. So, optimism can work in the same way. You know, we if we work toward having an optimistic mindset that we can absolutely see the events that are happening in our lives, the difficult situations that we're navigating at work in a way that we can then put positive action toward, you know, solving, working through those challenges and arriving at their desired outcomes.

Louise Adams: It's been really fascinating. It's such a wonderful conversation and I just continue to be intrigued by so many of the concepts we've talked about today, but overarchingly the benefits of having an optimistic outlook and a positive mindset and I really appreciate you joining us today on the podcast and sharing all your wisdom on this topic.

Kim Hazendonk: Oh, it's an absolute pleasure, Louise. I love talking about this and in fact, that's something that people can do as well is when you talk about optimism and motivation and positivity, it actually is priming your brain again, just like the gratitude exercise, to be thinking more in that kind of mindset. We can leave it on a really good note.

Louise Adams: Excellent. Appreciate it. Thanks so much!

Kim Hazendonk: Thank you.

Maria Rampa: It’s such a fascinating conversation isn’t it: reframing how optimism isn’t about ignoring challenges but about re-training our brains to find solutions and see opportunity in complexity.

We hope this conversation inspires you to bring a little more optimism into your work and life. To hear more stories like this, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Until next time, I’m Maria Rampa and thanks for listening.