John R. Miles

And I just wanted to make this real for the audience.

So I appreciate you going into that.

Deepika, you call yourself the optimism doctor, but you actually challenged one of the biggest ideas in modern self-help.

And that is optimism means staying positive.

In your work though, optimism is something very different.

What do you think real optimism actually means?

We started this episode out talking about your son.

I'm going to come now to my sister.

So my sister, about five years ago, unfortunately, got the news no one would ever want to hear.

She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And I remember the call she made to me right after she had gone to MD Anderson, just sobbing.

But once

She kind of went through the phases that you do when you get a diagnosis like that.

She was actually extremely optimistic because she always had this growth mindset and she that there were things that she could possibly do, whether it was changing her diet.

changing her mindset, exercising, putting herself in the best possible position to be one of the lucky ones who can get Whipple surgery and survive this for the long term.

It ended up not going that way.

But what was interesting to me, per your definition, was even a person like her in the worst

circumstances you could possibly imagine, was optimistic.

And she actually, after getting the diagnosis, went back to a master's program to get a degree in social work and actually fulfilled her

long term desire to help people because she thought given what she was going through, there were other people suffering and she would be a better therapist dealing with what she was dealing with.