Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 21008. Today we're talking about

this subtle trap of leadership that often goes unnoticed. It's the allure of pessimism.

Pessimism and pessimists, they sound smart, they sound cautious, calculated,

they sound very, they sound intellectually superior to people. They're good at spotting flaws,

they're good at poking holes and ideas, they're good at naming all the reasons that something

might not work. And in most rooms,

it's actually helpful to have this kind of person, a person who can do this and who can think

like this in the room. It's actually very helpful. It looks like wisdom and it sounds like strategy.

And in many cases, it's actually very valuable.

It sharpens thinking.

It helps us assess probabilities, play out scenarios, avoid reckless mistakes.

And leaders who have this pessimistic error to them or this this this trait to them it helps them

make smart sustainable decisions but there's a danger if you let it go too far pessimism isn't a

protective mechanism it could actually paralyze you it It could derail action. It can hold you

back from swinging for the fences. And what starts as prudence and calculated risks can quietly

become fear. You can stop before you even start. And when you lead in that way, the team begins to feel it.

And the people who you lead start, stop swinging for the fences as well.

Optimists are different.

They are not naive.

They don't ignore the odds. They just choose to take full ownership of what they

can control. They're not putting their heads in the sand, they're looking for reality dead in

the face, and they're asking themselves, what are we going to do about it? Even if the probability

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