(c) M. Killoran, Hendersonville NC, 2004

Optimism is also a powerful antidote to anger. Many participants in our anger management classes report their anger lessening as they learn to replace negative thinking with positive thinking.

GOOD NEWS FOR NEGATIVE THINKERS You can learn how to replace pessimism with optimism.

The starting point is to access your vulnerability to pessimistic thinking by taking self evaluation test you can find at http://www.authentichappiness.org.

Your responses will be compared to thousands of other people in various categories, down to your Zip Code.

If you scored lower than you’d like, you can become more optimistic. As Dr. Seligman writes in Authentic Happiness his latest book: “the trait of optimism is changeable and learnable.”

LEARNING TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC THINKER There is now a well-documented method for building optimism. It’s based on first, recognizing, and then disputing, pessimistic thoughts.

People often do not pay attention to their thoughts and thus do not recognize how destructive they can be in leading to negative emotions.

The key is to recognize your pessimistic thoughts and then treat them as if they were uttered by someone else—an external person, a rival, whose mission in life is to make you miserable!

Basically, you can become an optimist by learning to disagree with yourself— challenging your pessimistic thinking patterns and replacing them with more positive patterns.

Note: this view of optimistic thinking is not process of “positive thinking” in sense of repeating silly affirmations that you really don’t believe.

Rather, it is process of correcting distorted or faulty thinking patterns that create health, career, and relationship problems for you.

By teaching yourself to think about things differently, (but just as realistically), you can morph yourself from a pessimist to an optimist—and tame Anger Bee in process.