Optimism and Benefits at Work

A few years ago (mid 1980’s), Met Life hired Dr. Martin Seligman to help them improve their hiring processes. They were spending a lot of money on training agents that weren’t sticking around. At the time, over half of their agents quit within the first year!

Dr. Seligman was a psychologist who studied optimism and positive psychology. He created an optimism screening test and followed a group of Met Life new hires (appx 15,000 agents) over one year. The result? The agents with an optimistic outlook drastically outsold the pessimists by as much as 21% in the first year and 57% in the second year!

And to make these results even more drastic, here’s this. The top 10% of the optimists (with the highest optimism scores) sold 88% more insurance than those ranked in the most pessimistic 10%.

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