Leaders: Stop being so negative and focus on what's right

(aka The Hidden Dynamics of Positive Thinking)

Last week I was facilitating a leadership development programme. At one point Tom, one of the participants, began talking about the difficulties he was facing at work. Tom described a hectic day job with constant pressure for his team to achieve certain outputs and measurables, no time to do anything other than firefight, a lack of support from senior managers - more precisely a lack of contact with senior managers and repeated failure of his manager to follow through on commitments for development and support. Listening to him describe it the other course participants and I could all feel the burden of it. The atmosphere in the room had suddenly become heavy. Frankly, it sucked.

Before I could respond, another group member, John, jumped in and said "Tom, I think you're being really negative, you need to start looking at the positives here, at least focus on what's right about your job". Others agreed with what, on the face of it, seemed like some helpful personal feedback and suggestion to deal with the situation. 

Monty Python fans will remember well the instruction to 'Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life' no matter how bad things get. In his hugely popular book, The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale described several ways to deal with adversity - expecting the best and standing up to our obstacles.

“When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.” 

“Stand up to an obstacle. Just stand up to it, that's all, and don't give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it. Something has to break, and it won't be you, it will be the obstacle.” ― Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

So, that's it. Tom needs to be positive, stand up strong to these obstacles and expect the best.

Implicit in this feedback to Tom that he should be more positive was the suggestion that he was somehow at fault, that his outlook was flawed and that it was HIS thinking that was ACTUALLY contributing to the problem. Forget his manager's lack of support and repeated lack of follow through, forget the senior management team and their drive for more and more output, forget the directors and their cost-cutting efficiency strategy, this was mainly Tom's fault and he needed to address it. It was subtle, of course. No-one would say explicitly that it was Tom's fault but the implication was there, a hidden sub-text that said 'your feelings should be ignored, plaster a smile on your face and keep going". 

My own experience in life is that 'being positive' can often perpetuate a difficult situation and even exacerbate things. A key facet of positive thinking is the reframing of a situation to find something good, an altering of the meaning of something from what it is. Yet, very often this is a actually a covert denial of reality, an unspoken rejection of things as they are or a refusal to accept our feelings and thoughts or the feelings and thoughts of others. Positive thinking leads us away from acknowledgement of 'what is'. Paradoxically, acknowledgement of what is happening is the very thing required in order to begin a process of change. It's very difficult to successfully implement change things if we don't begin this from the current reality. So it seems our positive thinking may lead us further from a solution not closer.

So, what is the answer?

One of the issues with positive thinking is that it excludes. It excludes our experience without giving us space and permission for acknowledgement. It is this exclusion and lack of acknowledgement that I believe holds the way forward. If we begin to make our experience more inclusive, to acknowledge all that is there, that which is problematic, that which we might feel grateful for, that which we are unsure of, that which we don't know then we might begin to build a more solid platform to work from. This involves being open and willing to engage with enquiry rather than judgement, with seeking to understand rather than seeking to reframe.