When the Positive Becomes the Negative: Three Misuses of Positive Thinking
The appeal of positive psychology continues to grow and strengthen. It’s not difficult to see why. A positive attitude reduces stress, increases energy, sharpens focus, and improves physical health. Many people claim to experience these benefits in their daily lives and researchers have documented them.
What’s not to like about a positive attitude?
Properly practiced, positive thinking can improve the quality of one’s life enormously. Like all good things, however, it can be misused. In my coaching practice, I’ve seen people misuse positive thinking in ways that impede personal growth and professional success. Here’s three ways this can happen:
(1) Positive thinking can be used to sidestep “negative” emotions, like sadness, anger or fear. These emotions are unsettling. However, directly acknowledging them is a necessary step towards deeper self-awareness and, ultimately, self-acceptance. Hiding behind positive thinking makes this step difficult to take. Here, the voice of positive thinking seems to say: “These feelings are negative and I’m not that kind of person. Let’s move on.” An opportunity for personal growth slips by.
(2) Positive thinking can also be twisted into a defense against self-criticism. Let’s say your business plan isn’t working and you need to return to the drawing board. Because this isn’t easy, “positive thinking” may step in to prevent it, claiming that criticism is just pessimism in disguise. “What’s needed here is a positive attitude. We’re can-doers, not critics.” Self-reflection, and with it the possibility of improvement, is shown the door. The business may suffer the consequences.
(3) Positive thinking can make it hard to empathize with others who are struggling. The “positive thinker” sometimes includes others in her hardened attitude towards herself. When hearing about another’s fear or depression, she may say: “That person needs to stop moaning and start turning lemons into lemonade. It’s important to move forward in life!” If a manager adopts this “positive attitude,” it may limit her capacity to support a direct report who is struggling or who feels anxious.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell if people have a positive mindset or if they are using the language of positive thinking to avoid something. In my experience, one sign of avoidance is the use of “ought” (or “have to”) in a depersonalizing statement directed to “you.” For example, when discussing his challenge implementing a time-management system, a client of mine said: “When you’re unable to organize your time, of course you shouldn’t give up; you just have to keep trying, keep pushing. Things will eventually fall into place.” He repeated this a couple of times in different ways. On the surface, he was simply reaffirming the value of managing his time and his optimism about doing it. As I began to suspect, however, he was using a depersonalizing, upbeat slogan to shift attention away from himself and what was impeding him.
Negative thinking is counterproductive when it stifles creative responses to problems, narrowing the range of options. Positive thinking opens up new possibilities. Occasionally, however, positive thinking is a way of skirting unpleasant truths. These truths usually need to be confronted if one is to make real progress in life and work. This confrontation takes courage and it may be tempting at times to dismiss it as “negative thinking.” However, it is a requirement of self-awareness and thus fulfills the deeper purpose of genuinely positive thinking – as Norman Vincent Peale put it, a life of “self-realization and successful achievement.”