Find the Balance Between Negative and Positive
Negativity in the office can drain a team's morale, but toxic positivity is not the way out. Enter selective pessimism.
Throughout my career I’ve consistently received feedback on my optimism (or lack thereof) in the work place. I’m certainly no Debbie downer, but I have a knack for highlighting potential roadblocks for certain initiatives and, if I feel that it will save the team time, pointing out if some of the roadblocks may end up being insurmountable. While the rational side of my brain calls this realism, my managers prefer the term pessimism. Tomato, tomato.
While I’m not ruling out this feedback as an EEOC-violating attack on my very biological makeup (do you know a lot of Irish-American millennials from Boston with an overtly sunny disposition?), I have more recently taken it to heart because it has been rightly pointed out to me that managers can be pessimists, but no one wants their leader to be one. Now that’s a realistic take.
Toxic Positivity
One thing I always make sure to do when revising part of the essence of how I approach work is to research the hell out of it, in part to figure out how to achieve the goal I’m setting for myself (or having set for me by my superiors), but also to make sure my self-improvement pendulum doesn’t swing too far. And while one might think optimism is something we can’t get enough of, one would be wrong.
When I first heard the term “toxic positivity” I instantly thought of the guy who gets in front of a group of people, says “Good morning” into the mic, and then makes everyone repeat it because he didn’t think it was enthusiastic enough.
It turns out it’s a little deeper than that. Toxic positivity takes many forms, but the underlying theme is that it exists primarily as an avoidance technique against negative feelings and emotions. Someone might bring up how they’re upset about something and the toxically positive person will tell them to “Cheer up” or come up with some reason why they shouldn’t be upset about it. These are the “Good vibes only!” all the time people.
At work, this might look like someone bringing up legitimate issues with a project timeline being dismissed by the person on the team who constantly overestimates the team’s ability and underestimates the complexity of a given project. This leads to either missed deadlines or sub-par work product, both of which will erode trust with clients and customers.
It might be minimal at first, but the thing about toxic positivity is that it’s more of a long-term pattern of behavior. You being in a good mood at work and ignoring your coworker complaining about their commute one morning isn’t toxic positivity if you’re not doing it week-in, week-out.
Stop Complaining
Luckily for me, I was never at risk of falling prey to toxic positivity. Even if I entered a workweek determined to be optimistic and mustered all of my emotional energy into being positive no matter what, I wouldn’t make it to lunch on Wednesday.
But one piece of low-hanging fruit I could tackle on day one was to simply stop complaining. It doesn’t mean don’t be upset about something or ignore negative feelings (that’s toxic positivity), but it means processing them in a way that doesn’t suck other members of the team into a vortex of negativity.
Early on in my agency career I was on an extremely difficult client, and often found myself commiserating with my colleagues about them often. Sometimes VPs would hear it, and one day I think they’d heard enough. I was brought into one of their offices and told in no uncertain terms that my negativity was affecting others on the team, with subtle undertones of the fact that my job was desirable and the labor market at the time plentiful. Message received.
Beyond simply shutting the fuck up, there are other techniques to get out of complainer mode. It’s really about taking an extra second to pause before speaking - if you’re a consistent complainer, you might be diving into complaints with friends and coworkers without even realizing it. Take that extra second to switch from system 1 to system 2 with your conversations.
Other techniques like limiting exposure to negativity, approaching things from a solutions-oriented mindset, and simply being nicer to yourself can all decrease your day-to-day complaining and contribute to a more optimistic outlook, both professionally and personally.
Be Selectively Pessimistic
One of the books I picked up recently on a quest to be more optimistic was pretty intuitive title-wise. Learned Optimism Dr. Martin Seligman approaches negativity (and deeper issues like clinical depression) from his groundbreaking studies in the 1960s on learned helplessness in mammals. The thinking was if we can teach ourselves to be helpless, we can teach ourselves out of it as well.
And there’s truth to it, but this newsletter believes Dr. Seligman’s notion that things like depression - which is caused, in part, by chemical imbalances in the brain - can simply be thought positively out of is a stretch. But for smaller goals like improving your approach to your job, it certainly has application.
And while learning new optimistic viewpoints and strategies will be helpful, there are select times when dissenting voices should be heeded.
In a new study coming out of the University of Amsterdam, there are times when a reality-check is more valuable than a romanticized version of a project roadmap (classic Dutch.) The key here is the delivery - don’t simply be the wet blanket (especially if you’re the one consistently speaking up in ways that could be perceived as pessimistic.) Instead try to be as collaborative and constructive as possible. Again, this will require tapping into that system 2 thinking versus the more knee-jerk system 1.
Finally, pick your battles - don’t try to drive efficiency in every piece of minutiae within a project. In fact, doing that will contribute to inefficiency as more arguments pop up around items that, at the end of the day, aren’t mission critical. Save the pessimism/realism for where it adds value and is collaborative, not for every little nut and bolt of an initiative.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF American Flags: I fly an American flag outside of my home. Not in a “MAGA Let’s Go Brandon FJB” kind of way, nor in a “lifted pickup truck compensating for anatomical shortcomings with an oversized flag in the back” kind of way. More of a generic love for the country I find myself in that members of my family have valiantly served. And it’s not necessarily the America of today, but the promise of what it could be. That beautiful notion put forth by Langston Hughes: “O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where every man is free.” That’s why I fly the stars and stripes in my front yard.
Anyway, I have a problem: no one makes a good American flag that can withstand northeast weather. I find myself replacing it a couple of times a year because the stripes begin to fray and it gets caught on my flag pole and bunches up into an unpatriotic mess. Given my passive interest in vexillology, I fly a few flags throughout the year and the American one is the only one with this problem. It’s hard enough to find one not made in China, never mind one that can last a year. So I’m putting the call out to you, dear reader: if you have an American flag plug (that is made in the States!) that you like, please let me know.
Album of the Week: Outside of being one of the best Diddy trolls to do it, 50 Cent is the soundtrack to a lot of older millennials’ high school years, this newsletter’s author being no exception.
50’s first studio album/treatise on American capitalism Get Rich or Die Tryin’ cemented Shady/Aftermath as one of the biggest rap labels of the 2000s, injected a shot in the arm of gangsta rap, and put Dr. Dre on the Mt. Rushmore of hip hop mentors. There really aren’t any skippable tracks and if “Many Men” was audible anywhere, it was a law in 2003 to scream the last line. There was also an increase in attempted inverted sit ups in America in the months following its release.
One thing I find particularly interesting about the success of 50’s album is that on a previous mixtape (that was supposed to be his first album) Power of the Dollar he verbally attacked just about every major East Coast rapper and also made a music video with Ja Rule’s stolen jewelry at a time when Ja was considered the next generation of New York rap (and a fellow Queens resident, to boot.) He essentially went further than what Kendrick Lamar did on “Control” (the fallout from which reverberates a decade later) but without the backing of a major label at the time, given that Columbia dropped 50 after the recording of Power of the Dollar when he was famously shot nine times. 50 had no album sales to point to, having only radio play as anything resembling commercial success. And he still went 6x platinum on his debut studio album.
Quote of the Week: “I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.” - William Golding
See you next week!