What your explanatory style is costing you

Photo by Nothing Ahead, on Pexels

A project stalls, a pitch falls flat, an organisational redesign is announced. In that moment — before you've had time to think it through properly — your brain is already telling you a story about what happened and why.

That story matters more than you think. And for many of us, it's being steered by a rather unhelpful autopilot.

The three Ps

Psychologist Marty Seligman spent years trying to make people feel helpless in laboratory conditions. (I know, right? His experiments would definitely be considered unethical today.) He succeeded with most of them. But a stubborn third simply wouldn't comply. No matter what he threw at them, they kept trying.

The difference wasn't personality. It was how they explained events to themselves — what Seligman called their explanatory style. He found three dimensions that matter:

Permanence. Is this temporary or forever? "I messed up that presentation" is temporary. "I'm terrible at presenting" is permanent. Same event, completely different story — and the permanent version makes it much harder to get back up and try again.

Pervasiveness. Is this about one thing, or everything? "That project didn't work out" is specific. "Nothing I do ever works" is pervasive. The pervasive version can start to leak into the narrative for parts of your life unrelated to the original problem.

Personalisation. Is this about me, or about the situation? "I failed because I didn't prepare well enough" is internal and specific (and probably quite useful). "I failed because I'm not good enough" is internal and fixed (and not useful at all). The trick isn't to blame everything on external factors — it's to be honest about what was in your control without turning it into a verdict on your character.

Pessimists tend to explain bad events as permanent, pervasive and personal. Optimists tend to explain them as temporary, specific and influenceable. And crucially Seligman found you can change how you explain these things. It's not fixed. He ran a massive mental health study with school children in the Philadelphia suburbs, teaching them to identify their automatic assumptions and then challenge them. It cut the rate of depression nearly in half over the following two years.

Learned optimism is just as achievable as learned helplessness. That's a sentence worth sitting with.

What this looks like at work

In my experience, explanatory style shows up most clearly in how leaders respond to setbacks — and how that response cascades through their teams.

I've watched two leaders receive the same bad news about a programme being cut. One went quiet, withdrew, and for a long time after struggled to perform confidently in their other work (pervasive). The other leader was visibly gutted, said so, and then spent the rest of the week working out what could be salvaged, what she'd learned and where opportunities to apply it might lie (temporary, specific). Both responses were understandable. But only one of them resulted in a major hit to team morale and momentum.

And it isn't just about big dramatic moments. Explanatory style shapes how you respond to an email that irritates you, to a meeting that goes badly, or to a colleague who doesn't deliver. Every one of those micro-moments is an opportunity to rehearse either helplessness or agency. Over weeks and months, those optimistic instincts deepen.

The art of disputing (ABCDE)

Seligman's practical method for shifting your explanatory style is adapted from Albert Ellis's ABC model. It goes like this:

Adversity — the thing that happened. Stick to facts. What would a camera have seen?

Belief — the story you automatically told yourself about it. This is where the three Ps live. Listen for the words "always," "never," "everything," "nothing" — they're the linguistic fingerprints of a pessimistic explanatory style.

Consequence — what you did (or didn't do) as a result of that belief. If your story was "this always happens and there's nothing I can do," the consequence is probably inaction.

Then Seligman added two more steps to Ellis’s model:

Disputation — challenge the belief. What evidence is there against it? What alternative explanations exist? If the evidence isn't enough, ask: even if this belief is correct, how useful is it? Even when all other arguments haven't worked, a negative belief is unlikely to help you move forward.

Energisation — what shifts when you challenge your initial thinking successfully? Remind yourself of the value in it - do you feel lighter, see new options, feel motivated to take action?

It isn't fooling yourself. The negative stories running through your mind are no more objectively true or false than the positive ones. Except they don't help you. The most realistically optimistic story you can tell yourself about a challenging situation isn't a lie — it's a choice to focus on the version that keeps you moving.

Something to try this week

Pick one thing that went wrong this week — it doesn't have to be dramatic, just something that bothered you. Write down your automatic response to it. Then run it through the three Ps:

Did I treat this as permanent or temporary? Did I treat this as pervasive or specific? Did I make it about me as a person, or about the situation?

Then write the realistically optimistic version. Not the toxic positivity version ("everything's fine!") and not the pessimistic version ("everything's ruined"). The one that's honest about what happened and also honest about what's still possible.

Do this for five days and see what pattern emerges. Most people are genuinely surprised by how automatic their explanatory style is — and how much it's been costing them without them noticing.