"The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case."

"Learned helplessness is the giving up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen. It is the great modulator of learned helplessness. An optimistic explanatory style stops helplessness, whereas a pessimistic explanatory style spreads helplessness." ~ Martin Seligman from Learned Optimism

An Application of Seligman's theory...

To begin with seligman's theory of learnes helplessness consisted of a experiment done with dogs in order to prove his theory of learned helplessness. An example that proves learned helplessness is being bad at painting or drawing since a young age. This example proves learned helplessness because when you decide you want to dedicate some time on a certain activity like drawing and the one time you try to draw a tree you are unsuccesful at it and therefore give up on drawing in general. Giving up on a certain idea or activity would be proving learned helplessness since you just settle for something and do not fight it.

Another example of learned helplessness would be if you were to be bad at making blogs because the first time you tried it the computer wo0uld not react of would not accept you name even if you tried it a million times. Therefore you would give up, and never tried to create a blog ever again. This is because you tried such activity and did not have a good experience at it. This also applies to a some one who does sports and turns out not to be good at it. This are some of the examples that prove learned helplessness and how it affects our daily life.

Learned helplessness example...

One example that really proves learned helplessness is when in school we are already used to gettin bad greades and therefore give up on them. In school many kids are used to being lazy throughout their whole lives and because of this they get upsetting grades. Then they get use to the idea that they will never improve and will always get these grades. later on in their lives by the time they are in high school they might even consider to drop out because it is useless for them to go to school since they believe they will never improve. This then becomes learned helplessness because these students will just adapt to this enviorment and will no longer allow a change. this will cause such student to fail in life and never have the chance to become successful because he has given up on life.