This article is written by Rosalinda Scalia, Policy Officer in Plant Health at European Commission

As public servants, we all know how important it is to be resilient.

We learn in our profession how to build and develop it, as well as how to present it in ourselves when sitting for interviews. The European Commission even includes resilience within the core competences for screening during competitions.

But optimism, now that’s another story. No-one teaches you how to “become an optimist”, nor do employers list it as a useful skill for working in the civil service. Aside from this, opinion on whether it's even a good idea to be optimistic generally tend to diverge anyway.

Pessimists can help as well as hinder

A few years ago, I participated in a training course for Spanish public servants on how to deal with crises.

While preparing for one of the exercises in a team of five, the trainer who had organised us into the groups announced something that very quickly caught my attention. One of the five team members was to elect to play the role of the team “pessimist”. The pessimist’s job was to anticipate the worst outcome to every decision and so allow the team to prepare for it.

I’d never thought of pessimism in this way — as having either a specific or productive role within a team. Until then, I’d associated the word with colleagues whom I had always found it hard to be around. Yet through the course, I learned that pessimists can very often be useful people to have on your side.

However, if the skill of a pessimist is to either interpret or intuit the worst outcome to every scenario, it’s unlikely they do themselves as much good as they might occasionally do others.

Optimists, on the other hand, are often considered naïve for interpreting the world around them with seemingly limitless generosity. If funds are being cut, workloads are increasing and management doesn’t appear to care, how can one justify speaking of a silver lining? To achieve only one project where nine have been left to fail or fade away — is surely no cause for cheeriness.

Stay cautiously optimistic

For the record, I’m no die-hard optimist myself. Much as I find pessimists a drain, I’m often sceptical when I see people starting in new roles with an ecstatic, inexhaustible energy to them. “Give it two months”, I often think to myself.

Optimism...is an inner scorecard of resilience that tallies not just those situations you’ve been able to change, but reactions you’ve learned to control

Nor however am I a self-defeating pessimist. What I’ve learned is that true optimism lies in the balance between both ends of the spectrum. What I call “optimism” isn’t the determination to see the positive in every negative, but rather an inner force that builds over time as the result of many disappointments and many subsequent recoveries.

The key to being an optimist is resilience, or self-confidence, whereby you continuously compare new and possible future situations with what you know you have achieved or survived in the past. Optimism, thought of in this way, is an inner scorecard of resilience that tallies not just those situations you’ve been able to change, but the reactions to those you couldn't which you’ve nonetheless learned to control.

Controlling how you respond to an unpleasant negotiation, a failed project, a niggling disappointment with performance, all with a faith that what you’ve done is good and that the future will prove it so: that is optimism.

Protect your inner light

Living by this definition of optimism has honestly helped me lead a better life as a civil servant, especially in hard times.

Part of it is not allowing my optimism to show too easily. It may come across occasionally in informal settings, though never in decisive moments. I don't want my optimism to be mistaken for superficiality by my peers.

Remember that the essence of optimism is not sincere ignorance, but that all-important thing: ‘resilience’.

There’s a saying here in Italy: “Time is a gentleman”. It means that your hard work will always pay-off in the long run. Time is kind to most of us in the end, so in the meantime, I work, wait and smile, knowing that time will deliver for me sooner or later.

I suggest you do so too. — Rosalinda Scalia

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