Interview with Victor Perton, Chief Optimism Officer at the Centre for Optimism
Victor Perton is the Chief Optimism Officer of The Centre for Optimism. Victor’s early working years were spent in the law, politics and public policy culminating in 18 years in the Victorian Parliament. After politics, Victor worked as Commissioner to the Americas working across North and South America as well as Senior Advisor to the Australian G20 Presidency. Returning to Melbourne, Victor was surprised by the negativity around Australian leadership and increasing levels of anxiety and depression in our community. This led to the founding of The Australian Leadership Project and, after a Eureka moment at the Global Integrity Summit 2017, the founding of its offspring The Centre for Optimism which has grown through COVID with 5000 members in 82 countries. Today Victor’s work centres on asking people the question “What makes you Optimistic?
Q: I’ve been watching from up in Sydney and wondering why all the great Aussie positive psychologists and optimism and happiness leaders are all down in Melbourne. What’s going on down there, Victor?
It’s because people dress in black. Tommy Hilfiger said ‘If only Melbourne women would put a little dash of yellow or orange on, doesn’t matter whether it’s earrings or a necklace. So, we’re so surrounded by black and whenever I go to Sydney, I’m amazed on the streets, you know, ladies wearing white suits and white dresses. And I think that’s the difference between Sydney and Melbourne, you’ve got that warmer climate, the humidity. We’ve got to find the happiness in a colder climate.
Q: I’d like to start by digging a little bit into your journey if you’re willing to share and letting us know how you became a proponent of optimism and what led you personally to this life philosophy?
Yeah, sure. So, it really… when I’m waxing lyrical… it really goes back three or four generations. So, my parents were refugees from Latvia and Lithuania. And I’m a stereotype, if you actually have a look at all of the research, the most optimistic people in any country are the refugees and the children of refugees.
There was a University of Melbourne study that reported a couple of years ago that said that the kids of refugees in Australia, 90 per cent of them felt they belonged. And 88 per cent of them were confident about their future profession, compared to 55 per cent of native-born children.
So, I’m that stereotype. And if I go back to that generation of my grandparents. My grandfather, he was a soldier in World War One, he had gone to Saint Petersburg in 1905, he helped to build a country. And in 1940 he was captured by the Soviets and tortured to death. My grandmother was sent to the gulag with her daughter and, you know, 12 years in the gulag, and then when you come back from the gulag, you’re black marked, people don’t like you.
But in 1987 she said to me, “come over, I’m going to the first anti-communism rally.” And she said, “Look, I’m going to outlive communism.”
And you know this woman, a woman who’s been in the gulag. She’s in a walking frame. But she took part in the million hands across Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and in 1991 of course, she not only lived to see the end of communism but celebrated the end of communism. So, she was a great example to me.
And then my other grandparents, you know, my grandfather had gone through the Depression, had built a business [and in] 1940 everything [was] seized by the Soviets, arrives in Australia, working in a factory, but never complained. Never complained. And then my father died when I was pretty young. My mother worked three jobs. She died in October last year, teaching yoga for 51 years. And again, you know, always the optimist, always lifting other people. And a week before she died, she said to me, “Victor, you’ve done lots of interesting things in your life, but this asking people what makes them optimistic, you’ve never done anything more important.”
So, on this personal journey, I was in politics for 18 years, and in 2006 I could just feel Australian politics becoming ever more negative. And it just wasn’t filling me full of joy anymore. So, I quit. And then out of the blue, the other side of politics asked me to go to America as Trade Investment Commissioner, working across North and South America. And everywhere I went, there was this astonishing positive stereotype of Australians and Australian leadership, and our work was made easier by that one chairman of a major corporation who said to me, “Victor, you Aussies remind me of the Americans of 100 years ago. Nothing is impossible.”
And so, you know, the work was easy, you know, through that positive stereotype. And then after that, I worked on the Australian presidency of the G 20. And at that super elite level of Presidents, Prime Ministers, Finance Ministers, Central Bank Governors, it was exactly the same. You know, this complete trust in us as Australians and then I came back to Melbourne in 2015 and I know I had changed, you know, from living in San Francisco. Flowers and what was left in my hair and dancing in the street as the Mamas and the Papas would recommend. But something had also changed in Australia, and I was astonished by the negativity of language.
You know, you say, “How are you?” and 65 per cent of people say, “Not bad or not too bad.” And we never say, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” It’s a sort of negative take. And the news had moved from 50-50 good/bad, to 95 per cent bad. You know, this 24-by-7 assault on the brain.
And then when you ask people about leadership in a country where real incomes have grown 30 per cent. We’re a peaceful country, a healthy country, this scoffing about leadership just astonished me and I, you know, scoffing about political leadership, you do it. And even in China and North Korea, people have got jokes about politicians. But here was this deeper antipathy towards leadership.
So, we started the Australian Leadership Project and we interviewed 2500 people on the qualities of Australian leadership and the science, and our research showed that the three qualities are:
- Egalitarianism,
- Self-effacing humour, and
- No bullshit. Plain speaking.
Now when you and I think of our circles, we know hundreds of people like that. We could probably walk down Pitt Street, Sydney or Collins Street, Melbourne and still be hitting 50 per cent of people with those qualities.
So, at the end of the project, I was still left bewildered at why people were so negative. And then I was fortunate enough to be on the final panel of the Global Integrity Summit in 2017. And my eureka moment came. It’s actually not so much the leadership, it’s the fog of pessimism.
Hence my pursuit. I realised what we needed to foster were beacons of optimism in the fog of pessimism.
That’s a long answer to a simple question, but I often say to people it goes back four generations of, of suffering, of resilience and coming through at the end because of it.
“It’s actually not so much the leadership, it’s the fog of pessimism.”
Q: It’s true that many of us have grown up blessed. Many Australians who have grown up here and who haven’t had those hard times are still struggling for ways to be thankful and to find optimism.
I did a radio interview during Covid, and the journalist said, you know, “Australian business has never had it this tough.” And I said, “Give me a break!”
Thinking about Australian business, people have lost their business in bushfires, people have lost their business in floods. All the refugees, you know, whether they’re Iraqi or Somali, who lost their businesses… blown up.
You know there’s lots of people and we need to tap their wisdom, tap their experience because they have then come to Australia, and they’ve built the country.
Q: So, is it just leaders that need this kick up the butt with optimism or is it all Australians? I know you focus on leaders but do all of us need to really take a step back and reassess how we view the world?
This was a great debate with my mother and me for almost 30 years. Because I, in all my speeches, I tell people to go and graffiti their mirror. So, everyone who is listening if you use red lipstick, it’s really ideal. If you can borrow red lipstick, it’s good, but if not a marker pen, go and write on the mirror at work in the toilet, men’s/ladies: “The leader looks like the person in your mirror.”
So that’s my philosophy that everyone’s got to lead at some point now. Now my mother’s view was always: to be a good leader, you need good followers. Whereas I say, it’s everyone. And it’s one of the really interesting parts of the research. You know, when you use the word leader in Australia, it’s often a ‘them’.
The word boss actually, is more resonant here. If you want to ask people about leadership at work, using the word leadership actually doesn’t seem to resonate in Australia as it does in the United States or Canada, you know where a lot of these books are written, leadership and self-leadership.
Here, there’s a nuance of language, where leadership is them, not us. So, the Centre for Optimism came out of the Australian leadership project, and someone who put it really well for me was Dominic Barton, who was then the head of McKinsey and now the Canadian ambassador to China who had to negotiate the release of the Canadian hostages who were being held for the Huawei executive. And he said to me, “Every great leader I have ever met is infectiously optimistic. But it’s not the big man or woman standing at the front of the stage. It’s the person who can unlock the optimism in the team from the youngest to the oldest from the least experienced to the most experienced.”
“Every great leader I have ever met is infectiously optimistic. But it’s not the big man or woman standing at the front of the stage. It’s the person who can unlock the optimism in the team from the youngest to the oldest from the least experienced to the most experienced.” – Dominic Barton
I was actually in Sydney, I was having a coffee by circular key at six in the morning, and there’s not so much company but there was this other bloke reading the paper on the table next to me. You know, I’m a bit chatty and garrulous, so he wasn’t reading his paper three minutes later.
But he was from Singapore, and we got talking about the impact of optimism and he said, “Look, every Monday morning, I give my sales team a rev up speech, and by Monday afternoon it seems to have worn off”, and I said to him, “Have you ever asked them what makes them optimistic?”
And in fact, he took it on board. And every month now, the start of the sales meeting on the first day of the month is, ‘what makes you optimistic?’
I did an event for Saint Ives Rotary a couple of days before we recorded this on the North Shore of Sydney, and there was a scientist there who talked about his experience, and he had been a teacher, and when he left teaching, he moved into an educational institution helping salespeople. And it was that classic Seligman sorry where he was actually driven nuts by the optimistic belief of the salesman.
But he said the more optimistic the salesman was, the more they kept confounding him by being right. When they come back, having met the unrealistic sales figures they’ve given them at the beginning of the month. So, for me, it is everyone.
But it’s complicated, and particularly in Australian language, where leadership is sort of ‘them’ and often times conflated with political leadership.
So, if you ask people, what do Australians want of their leaders? I’ve really got to give an explanation that says, well, I’m actually thinking of your boss or your manager rather than the Prime Minister.
Q: You’ve touched on language differences in Australia. Are there any other differences from a cultural point of view in Australia when it comes to optimism?
Well, it’s actually going backwards, we’re actually regressing. It’s a bit like our maths results. We’re actually regressing. So, in a country that has so much, so if you have measured optimism in Australia, both optimism for self and optimism for country. Twenty years ago, in 2000, Australia and our sister country, New Zealand, were the two most optimistic countries in the Western world. Today we are down around the middle. It’s actually going backwards, and there are some really concerning statistics around.
“Twenty years ago, in 2000, Australia and our sister country, New Zealand, were the two most optimistic countries in the Western world. Today we are down around the middle.” – Victor Perton
We were talking earlier about mental illness. The Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health Treatment, published a statistic that showed that we have doubled the rate of medicated anxiety and depression since 2016. Now if that’s happening in Victoria, it’s happening in New South Wales as well. Now, are doctors prescribing medication for the ordinary anxieties of life. You know, grief, loss of job, the teenagers are driving me nuts, or the teenager is being driven nuts.
So, are we medicating stuff? So, if we look at that that deeper Australian culture, if we look in the colonial period and you know that the settlement you know, the choice of people who came here originally were the prisoners and the political prisoners. So, what mindset did they have? Look, if there’s one thing they brought with them it was humour.
Laconic humour, which I often refer to as self-effacing. But there’s a friend of mine runs a company called, John Cole runs Team Leadership in Washington. He says Australian humour is so dry that Americans don’t even understand you’re telling a joke. You know, they think you’re having a go at them or you’re having a go at yourself and “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with you that you can tell this joke against you?” So Australian humour, similar to New Zealand humour, but there’s a uniqueness about it.
We’re also on the verge of doing a project on Aboriginal optimism because when you think, you know, living 30,000, 40,000, however many years it was in this tough land, tasting new foods, adapting to new foods and alike. You know there must have been a lot of optimism in the Aboriginal community as they settled this land.
And so too for the Europeans and the Asians who came here post 1788, a lot of adaption. As my mother describes it, they came here as refugees, and they were ribbed mercilessly. My father’s original surname was Petronitis. Of course, he got ribbed mercilessly about peritonitis. And ultimately, you know, before I was born, changed the name to Perton.
But again, it was an affection, you know, people actually liked it. So, you know, those Australian characteristics of egalitarianism and plain speaking and dry humour, as you call it, is very attractive to people.
I came back [from overseas] and I was a bit bewildered by the negativity of language, much of which is, I think, to be blamed on the news. You know, we just get this 24 by seven assault on our well-being by being told we’re hopeless.
Q: Do you think that maybe we’ve had it too good for the last few decades? Is that why we’re losing that self-effacing humour or that resilience? Or that optimism? Is that perhaps part of it? Life has become too easy.
Yeah, and there’s some really interesting work that’s been done by UNICEF and others and even the Dalai Lama. I was fortunate to be in an audience with him seven weeks ago. This younger generation, these teenagers may be the most resilient generation since World War II, because I’ve actually been locked up. They’ve actually been under threat from a disease that threatened to wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. So, those kids may in fact be the most resilient for a long time.
I had someone talking to me yesterday about this problem that in Australian business and American business that from really 1990 onwards you were in constant growth. You could write a budget and you would always hit it. Actually, not America, because America got hit by the GFC in 2008, but Australia didn’t.
And the extraordinary thing was, you know, the Australian media talking about the GFC as if it was something terrible. But in fact, Australia never stopped growing. So yes, so we’ve had it too easy. And this notion that there’s always something wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being self-critical. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better. But when everything the government does, or everything a corporation does, is analysed for the bad news. The zeitgeist of our contemporary news services is as pessimistic and miserable.
You look at the Australian News services now, you know, if there’s a good news story, it runs once. Remember recently there was a debate about, ‘we’ve stopped flights from India because of the Covid outbreak in India’, and it was just out of control. And they interviewed the head of the Indian community in Melbourne. And they said, what do you think? And she said, “Well, make sense to me! If India is going through an absolute plague of covid, and we can’t work out who’s got it. I’d stop the flights too.”
Well, of course, that interview never got repeated. Well, they managed to find other people who said that the government was stupid, and this was racist and xenophobic, and those are the people that ran. Rather than the logical leader of the Indian community who said, “Makes sense to me as an Indian Australia.”
Q: So, we’ve talked about all the negativity out there and how that is obviously linked to Australia’s decrease in optimism. The answer, it seems, is that we all need to bring a bit more optimism into our lives, and we all need to be asking the question and leading when it comes to optimism. But what do you say to people who are afraid of or fight against toxic positivity?
Every time I see an article on toxic positivity, it’s someone trying to sell the negativity industry. You know, it’s actually a nonsense term. The only person I think who really gets it is David Kessler, and I’ll quote him exactly: “Toxic positivity is positivity, given in the wrong way in the wrong dose at the wrong time.”
“Toxic positivity is positivity, given in the wrong way in the wrong dose at the wrong time.” – David Kessler
What really benefits your health? What really benefits your leadership? What should underpin strategy, innovation and resilience is realistic and infectiously optimistic leadership.
For most of the population, positive thinking does work, and that’s why we have a project on grief and optimism. One of our members, it is a mother whose son was killed in a car crash. Another member at the Centre for Optimism is a woman who has conducted hundreds of funerals as the celebrant. And so, when we do our guide to grief and optimism, we say the optimist, when they’re comforting someone, listens. And if the person says something positive, you help to reinforce it. If they say something negative, you listen to it. And there’s a brilliant book which has inspired lots of other authors in the last couple of years, and I recommend to all of your readers is Hans Rosling’s, Factfulness.
He’s really interesting. So, when he writes about journalists, he says, don’t be angry at journalists for writing negatively or pessimistically. It’s their lens. It’s their world frame, they are sent out to catch a story that’s a gotcha.
If it’s a Prime Minister or if it’s a drug scandal at a football club, you know it’s not the good stuff. And if I summarise his position, he says, “most of us have a worldview that’s based on what our grade four teacher taught us.” So, when we think of world hunger, or we think of Ireland for instance, I think of the land that sent away millions of migrants to America and Australia from the potato famine or British colonial rule. And yet you know that Ireland is now number two on the United Nations Development Index?
It’s this red hot, high tech, egalitarian society, where average lifespans have increased, 30 years and it’s an absolutely fantastic country. But, you know, my stereotype of Ireland is still, you know, the Irish nuns
The other person who really I love on this is Steven Pinker, the head of Psychology at Harvard, and I don’t remember whether it was in his book, Enlightenment Now, or one of his interviews, but he said, “Anyone who remembers a wonderful past has got a really short memory.”
You know, you go back 100 years, and you look at infant mortality rates and, you know, women dying in childbirth and people even in Melbourne and Sydney dying of cholera and waterborne diseases.
We did an event the other day for Central Africa. Even if you look at the advances in Central Africa, all we see on the Australian News is someone being blown up or, you know, girls or boys being kidnapped from a school. But in fact, you know there are great centres of innovation and new tech in Lagos and Nairobi and great things happening.
You know, if there’s something good happening in your workplace or in your neighbourhood, you don’t need to wait for the newspaper to publish it, take a photo or do a two-minute interview of the person. We went out to a town called Kaniva, in the West Wimmera. And it’s a town that’s got so many things running against it, you know, it’s a highway town. They’ve had the shutdowns. They’ve been stuck with South Australian refugees who can’t get across the border, the last bank branch is closing, because there was no highway traffic. The favourite cafe is closing. But I went door knocking in that town, and I asked people, what makes you optimistic? And they ended up getting kids to do little videos, two-minute videos of what makes them optimistic about Kaniva.
And then we were going to have a town dinner and I was to be the guest speaker and, of course, what happened in the soviet socialist state of Victoria. We got locked down. I couldn’t go and be the guest speaker. So, I said, “Well, I trust you guys. You do it.”
And they had 12 locals as the guest speaker, and at the end of the dinner they declared themselves to be the most optimistic town in Australia.
Make this your homework today, so I’ll jump ahead of your last question. So, I’ll give you another hint, Marie, because you’re an expert on this. But what I would love everyone to think about is change your greeting for one day. If it works, change it for a week.
So, in Australia, you say “Hello, how are you?” Or “G’day how are you?” 65 per cent of people will say, “not bad…” or “not too bad.”
And of course, we never say ‘Oh my God, what’s wrong?’
We just ignore it, you know, it’s a wasted question. Wasted answer. So, we’ve done this in prisons. We’ve done this in all sorts of organisations. Today, I’d like you to say, “G’day, what’s been the best thing in your day?” or if it’s Friday, “What’s been the best thing in your week?” or Monday, “What was the best thing on your weekend?”
Put it in your language to get it right. That’s my language, but it works. The other day I was in the supermarket. I have a beautiful orange mask Marie, that says, “what makes you optimistic?” And the lady behind the checkout counter said, what do you do? And I said I run the Centre for Optimism. And I said, why don’t you try this for the day?
Well, she looked a bit doubtful, and I said, well, let’s try it with the people behind us. So, there was a mother and a daughter about 10 or so and I said, “Look, we’re just experimenting, tell us what’s the best thing in your day so far?” And the girl said, “I got 82 for my test.” And the mother lit up and the other two queues lit up and the other check out people lit up. And then the teller I said, well, what was the test?
And in fact, I actually heard the business coach of the All Blacks in a radio interview say, “Well, I’ve been plagiarising Victor Perton for the last year.” And that’s exactly what he’d been plagiarising that every one of his customers knows that when he comes in, he doesn’t want to hear a tale of woe to start with. He wants to hear a story of hope and optimism and opportunity.
Disney has got some great research on this. Disney, Coke, Nike. All of the customer research they’re doing shows that people are yearning for stories of hope and optimism. So, when we come back to who’s the leader and who’s got to change? As Gandhi said, “the only person I can change is myself.”
So, for each and every one of you, just for the rest of today or tomorrow, get rid of ‘how are you?’ and try ‘what’s the best thing in your day?’ Now, the first time you ask it, people will stare at you. Because it’s so out of sync, and it’s like an Australian trying to order at McDonald’s in Louisiana. You know, you look like them, but they don’t understand what you’re saying.
So, you might have to repeat it. You know, ‘what was the best thing in your day’ or modified a little, but 80 per cent of the time people will then share a little story of hope and optimism with you. And it might be ‘I had a beautiful breakfast’, or ‘my daughter made me a cup of tea’ or ‘God isn’t the sunshine beautiful.’ And the interesting thing, coming back to that toxic positivity stuff is, in fact, if something’s wrong, if they say “f-ing nothing.” Then you know there’s a question you need to ask them to help them with their well-being and for you to do the right thing.
I will, if you’ll permit me, ask you one last question. What has made you optimistic this week?
So, this week. Yesterday I was at the University of Melbourne working with the staff of one of the Colleges. And going around the circle and asking each and every one of them, ‘what makes you optimistic?’ As you can imagine, there was one beautiful psychologist there who said, “Oh, this is a very difficult question.”
And we went through this, and it was just beautiful. And then the night before that, the Saint Ives Rotary meeting. And you know, there was one 85-year-old guy and he just lit up and he said, “Oh, Victor. You’ve made me more optimistic with the scientific evidence you’ve given me on the value of optimism. I’m 85, I now know I’ve got another at least seven years of optimistic living.
So, for me, it’s asking that question. What makes you optimistic? And I ask at least one person every day, whether it’s a President or a Prime Minister or women digging ditches in India. And so, if you want to do something that you will find quite interesting is, you know when you’re lying on the pillow tonight next to your partner or you’re at the dinner table, ask them what makes them optimistic, and they may stare at you at first, so you might have to define it for them.
So, optimism is a belief that good things will happen and that things will work out in the end. And, of course, if your relative is a John Lennon fan, you can say John Lennon said, “If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.”
“If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.” – John Lennon
But optimism is not, everything is rosy, everything is fantastic. Optimism is belief that things will work out in the end. And for those of you who are students of history, there’s this wonderful woman who lived through the black plague called Mother Julian of Norwich and she was an English mystic. And her book is said to be the oldest surviving book in English by a woman, called the Revelations. But in it is a famous phrase, ‘All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.’
And that has spawned poetry and music. So, if there’s one thing I want people to remember from this rich conversation, it is: All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.
About Victor Perton
Victor Perton is the Chief Optimism Officer of The Centre for Optimism. The offspring of stateless refugees from the Baltics, Victor’s early working years were spent in the law, politics and public policy culminating in 18 years in the Victorian Parliament.
After politics, Victor worked as Commissioner to the Americas working across North and South America on Foreign Direct Investment and Export Promotion. This was followed by service as Senior Advisor to the Australian G20 Presidency.
Returning to Melbourne, Victor was surprised by the negativity around Australian leadership and increasing levels of anxiety and depression in our community. This led to the founding of The Australian Leadership Project and, after a Eureka moment at the Global Integrity Summit 2017, the founding of its offspring The Centre for Optimism which has grown through COVID with 5000 members in 82 countries.
Today Victor’s work centres on asking people the question “What makes you Optimistic?
