Do people think you are negative?
I’ve been called this more than a few times in my life. It has to do with my analytical brain. I always see myself as a realist. If something is ‘good’, I don’t address it because it’s working fine. It doesn’t need my attention. Instead, I am focused on the ‘bad’, something that is not working. Why? I want to fix it so it starts working well again. If I am playing golf and my drives are good and my putting is bad, do I practice my drives (so I feel good) or work on my putting (which makes me feel bad because I’m not good at it)? To me, it is not a good or a bad thing, merely a fact I am addressing. To get something done. Facts should have no emotion attached to them. In theory.
In practice, everything you say or do needs to be followed immediately with a positive or some kind of affirmation. “Hey, this thing is broken but don’t worry, we can fix it!” Sound familiar? It is the standard playbook for every corporate or leadership handbook. Never sound negative. Never be construed as negative. Never say anything without immediately following with a positive. Speaking negatively ensures that the negative will happen. Everyone needs positive all the time. Negativity is infectious and drives down morale. Work to immediately remove anyone construed as negative from your team. They are a cancer.
Really? A cancer? What if they are negative 50% of the time and positive 50% of the time? Are they still a cancer? 25%? What if the person is just going through something hard in their life? What if they are right or just want to be prepared for the future? Why are we so afraid of people who are perceived as negative and so susceptible to their energy? Well, the first thing is all humans have a negative bias whereby they take things negative more seriously than things neutral or positive. They arbitrarily become more important to us. Negativity taps into our survival instincts from an earlier time. Probably for a reason I would think. So, there is that. Second, negative perception taps into the very powerful emotion of fear. Fear of the unknown or failure or being an outcast. Fear is the #1 thing holding most people back from becoming their best selves. One person expressing fear makes other people fearful. That is the infectious component they are worried about. I guess negative people really are a cancer.
No, we are not a cancer. But boy, the general consensus is not kind or very forgiving. Basically, being negative (or perceived as such) is unacceptable public behavior. Hard stop. You must be positive to be a leader or a good team member. Your other contributions amount to nothing. The emotional contribution is the most important thing. Everything else is secondary.
Well, I want to push back on that. I want to push back for every person who has been called negative or who speaks their mind and is not in lockstep with “the appropriate way”. What this absolutist message tells me is everyone (and I mean everyone) has very little control over their emotional selves. Everyone is highly susceptible to any kind of ‘negative’ energy such that its introduction completely overwhelms them. It seems everyone is completely lacking in both control and conviction of their own thoughts and feelings. One person bringing up problems, even continuously, is enough to bring down everyone. Nobody is strong enough to resist or simply hear the information and choose to do with it as they see fit. Nope. The cancer is going to kill everyone.
At the heart of this debate is simply two different approaches to life. The first, and current choice, is to eliminate all negative from people’s lives. Excise the bad. Just focus on the good stuff. This makes people generally happy because they rarely deal with the negative. Smooth everything out and that will make everybody better and more productive. The second is more old school. Prepare people by telling them about the bad. Let them deal with it at a young age so they can toughen themselves for when it happens. Anyone older reading this, it is the premise behind the song “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash. Looking at yourself, which approach do you employ?
You might also think of the two approaches as walking around barefoot after a long time in shoes. Initially, it hurts to walk on anything even remotely coarse. Slowly the skin toughens and soon even walking on sharp rocks doesn’t hurt that much. The first approach would have you eliminate all coarse materials, and essentially remove all rocks from a person’s path to prevent pain. The second approach is that pain is inevitable, so keep going and eventually, your feet will toughen. The first approach requires little emotional maturity. You never feel bad or deal with it because you rarely experience it. Very little work need be done by the individual. The second requires extensive emotional maturity, the kind that could, if taken too far, restrict your ability to experience other emotions completely. This requires practice, pain, and hard work. So, which one is correct?
Now I am not going to say that negative people don’t take it too far sometimes. Life can be cruel and they want to be cruel back. It happens. Very human. And yes, you should work on seeing both the positive and the negative. Compliment your partner in a relationship as much as you bring up any faults. That is essential. Remember too that often the criticism is because they want to help you be better, to help you see something they don’t think you see. It is not coming from a ‘bad’ place. Far from it. They care enough to tell you something that might upset you because they actually care. Risking upsetting someone takes courage. And ridicule from others who don’t like the truth. Going around and giving empty compliments all the time requires no actual care behind it. It’s often fake and empty. Is that what you want, to be propped up by empty thoughts just because they are positive? Something you should ask yourself.
In conclusion, every fact you encounter and every messenger of that fact is not inherently positive or negative. It is up to you, the individual, to determine how you are going to feel about it and what kind of reaction it will elicit in you. You control you. Problems are not inherently negative. They are just something that needs fixing. Therefore, I am not a fan of policing everyone else’s thoughts and behaviors for fear that they might ruffle someone’s feathers. Mental strength, a lost skill nowadays, requires friction just like physical strength does. Going around in life with no negativity does not make you mentally strong. Going around trying to silence dissenting opinions or thoughts is not creating diversity. It is creating homogeneity of thought. And homogeneity of thought does not make it inherently positive nor does negativity equate to cancer. Remember that.
