The Perilous Path of Positive Thinking
When difficult things happen, one common approach is to stay overly positive and force yourself to look on the bright side. You might hear yourself say, “Everything happens for a reason. My job is to stay positive.”The…
When difficult things happen, one common approach is to stay overly positive and force yourself to look on the bright side. You might hear yourself say, “Everything happens for a reason. My job is to stay positive.”The opposite approach to constant positivity is to give up, allowing gloom and anxiety to take you over. In that case you might hear yourself say: “Why try to improve myself or the situation—it all seems hopeless anyway.”The second approach succumbs to the Victim mindset and is rarely effective, but always being positive can also be ineffective.
One of the disciplines involved in being a Creator, the central role in TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)®, is to accept your full range of emotions as a way to tell yourself the truth about your current reality. Fully inhabiting your emotions, even painful ones, helps you adjust and become more familiar with them.
To be overly positive when, in fact, you are experiencing unpleasant feelings can put you on a perilous path. Denying or rejecting appropriate emotions in response to difficult situations can diminish your resilience and capacity to work with life’s challenges.
The more you practice staying with your emotions, rather than forcing positive thinking, the more you will trust your ability to fully inhabit all your emotions. This is a feedback loop that expands your capacity to live with both difficult and joyful experiences.
Contrived positivity often minimizes and even invalidates your feelings. Even worse, you can also suppress the feelings of others if you tell them they should just be grateful for what they have. If you live in a state of always being overly positive, it can eventually trigger shame and serve as an avoidance mechanism to your true feelings.
You may be engaged in what popular author Brene Brown calls “toxic positivity” if you are feeling guilty for being sad, disappointed, or any other heavy feeling that you’ve told yourself to “just get over it.” The reality is that if you are facing a difficult situation, it is important to acknowledge your emotions and allow yourself to feel and speak truthfully about them.
A big part of nurturing your best self as a Creator is noticing when you get triggered by difficult circumstances and interrupting old reactive habits. Instead of engaging in toxic positivity, we encourage you to develop the capacity for authentic optimism.
When authentically optimistic, you embrace your basic goodness and the goodness of others. You remind yourself of your true essence as a Creator, as are others.
You can tap into authentic optimism to learn and grow, even in the darkest of times. It is helpful and healthy to say to yourself, “Right now, I am feeling (fill in the blank) by the situation. I know I will eventually work through it, but right now it is difficult.”Albert Einstein is famously quoted as saying: “I think the most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’”We know deep in our bones that the universe is a friendly place, and humanity is imbued with goodness. Authentic optimism rests with this premise, while acknowledging the obvious suffering and horrible things that are happening. It also means you can choose to be kind, respectful, and grateful, while not denying the truth of a difficult reality.
How you choose to meet your life is up to you. One does not need to deny or ignore the broken parts of our world with sugar-coated positivity. You have the capacity to cultivate authentic optimism by courageously seeing reality for what it is, while choosing to see the basic goodness that is forever part of you and every human being.