THE POSITIVE RESULTS OF BEING NEGATIVE
BEING
A CURMUDGEON COULD BE GOOD FOR YOUR CAREER.
We’ve
been sold on the idea of the power of positive thinking. From
affirmations to optimism, if you want to succeed you must always look
on the bright side.
But
happy talk hasn’t always been so mainstream. When Norman
Vincent Pealereleased
his iconic book The
Power of Positive Thinking in
1952, it was considered controversial. Several mental health experts
came out against Peale’s work, calling him a con man and a fraud
because of his frequent use of unnamed experts and testimonials.
Over
the years, many of the naysayers went away or even joined his
campaign (search Amazon for books on "positive thinking"
and more than 37,000 titles pop up.) But the pendulum may be swinging
the other way; books and studies are surfacing that question our
relentless pursuit of happiness.
Here
are five examples that suggest "bad" thoughts can have good
results:
NEGATIVE THINKING HELPS YOU AVOID FAILURE
In
her book Rethinking
Positive Thinking,
Gabriele
Oettingen
reveals
that “a cheery disposition and good attitude can zap the motivation
needed to mobilize and strategize… dreaming isn't doing.”
“The
current literature has pushed us to embrace this idea of positive
thinking so much that we shun anything negative, and obstacles by
nature are a negative thing,” she told The
Atlantic in
an article called “Optimism
Is the
Enemy of Action.”
“So, we tend not to consider negative concepts or ideas and instead
focus only on the positive, which our research shows isn’t actually
very helpful at all.”
Oettingen
says predicting obstacles is an important part of getting things
done, but the key is not to dwell on them. “You want to integrate
the obstacles into images of the desired future and then develop a
plan that will help you circumvent or address the anticipated
hurdles,” she said.
NEGATIVE RESULTS CAN STRENGTHEN YOUR FOCUS
In
their book The
Upside of Your Dark Side,
authors Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener provide an argument
that negativity manifests itself in a range of characteristics beyond
things like aggression, hostility, and being a jerk. It also
encompasses things like critical thinking and caution, which heighten
your senses and have the potential to improve your results.
“Negative
emotions can help you focus on the situation at hand,” they write
in their book. “When you are about to drill a hole in the wall,
chances are that you pay close attention to the measurements involved
as well as to the position of your hand. The anxiety associated with
the downside risk encourages you to drill in exactly the right spot.”
NEGATIVE MOODS CAN PRODUCE BETTER TEAMWORK
One
team member’s bad mood might improve a group’s results, according
to Rebecca Mitchell, behavior expert and associate professor at the
Newcastle
Business School.
In
a recent study,
Mitchell
found that dispositions such as distress, irritation, upset, and
hostility make other team members pay closer attention to their work.
“The
most successful and innovative teams are the ones that have a
leadership that creates a healthy balance between negative and
positive emotions,” she said. “If you have a team that focuses
only on the positive then they just agree with each other and look
for points that they share and not points of difference.”
Mitchell
says tension sparks better decisions because team members look for
problems in their reasoning and then find evidence to support or
reject their ideas.
NEGATIVE THOUGHTS PROVIDE A HEALTHY BALANCE
In
a study called “States
of Mind Model,”
University
of Pittsburgh
researchers
Robert Schwartz and Gregory Garamoni explored positive and negative
thinking as it relates to anxiety, depression, and stress. While too
much negative inner dialogue can bring about depression and panic,
the pair found that a “golden section”—two-thirds positive and
one-third negative—is the healthiest state of mind.
“Although
increased positivity may be immediately reinforcing, in the long run
threatening events may go unnoticed leaving the individual vulnerable
to danger,” they write.
NEGATIVE REMINDERS CAN KEEP YOU GRATEFUL
Thinking
about death could be considered the most negative of thoughts, but in
a study
published in the
Journal
of Positive Psychology,
researchers from Eastern
Washington University
and
Hofstra
University
found
that when participants visualized their own death using real-life
scenarios, such as dying in an apartment fire, they better recognized
their own mortality and increased their feelings of gratitude.
“Death
reflection—focusing in a specific and vivid way on one’s
death—significantly enhanced state gratitude compared to subjects
that did not think about their own mortality,” the report says.
“When one is fully confronted with the reality that life ‘might
not be’, life itself is seen as a limited resource that one is not
entitled to, and thus appreciation for life increases.”
BY
STEPHANIE
VOZZ
Ahttp://www.fastcompany.com/3038199/the-positive-results-of-being-negative?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=11102014
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