"The main ingredient of success isn’t positive thinking it’s non-negative thinking," says Kevin following up on last week's show on Learned Helplessness. Do you have a sense of your explanatory style? Do difficult things ALWAYS happen to you? It turns out that shifting a helpless explanatory style to an optimistic or deserving explanatory style is not as hard as it seems.

When something difficult happens, take the time to notice how you are thinking about it. Are there resources available to you that you can reach out to for help? What do you have control over? De-personalize the event by not generalizing against yourself. You may not resolve the situation today but there is always another chance, another way, another outlook that supports an optimistic, realistic mindset and an experience of success.

Kevin and Niseema talk about the three ways to shift from a helpless explanatory style to optimistic thinking:

* View the situation as temporary rather than permanent.

* Don't personalize. Externalize by seeing what the outside factors are that you had no control over.

* Notice when you say "always" and "never" and get specific about this one time.