PMA: positive mental attitude.
We have all heard about the power of positive thinking, to the point where it may sound like a cliché, perhaps even overrated. Now, however, scientists are studying how positive thinking creates real, tangible value in your life, compared with people who think more negatively.
While an earlier study compared success according to the type of optimism, with the pessimist faring worst and the realistic optimist the clear winner, the research of Barbara Fredrickson brings us closer to why people with a positive mental attitude succeed.
Barbara Fredrickson’s research revealed in 2004 that positive thinking is much more than just being happy or showing an optimistic attitude. Positive thinking is really creating value in your life and helping to develop skills that stay with us long after our happy smile has gone.
This psychologist had already shown how positive emotions undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions, and even how prolonged feelings of anger, fear and sadness could be harmful to health.
Positive thinking applied to business, your career…
To understand how positive thinking benefits us, we first need to understand how and why negative thinking has been affecting us since the beginning of history.
Suppose you are walking through the forest and suddenly find yourself face to face with a lion. At that moment your brain registers a negative emotion, in this case fear. Science already knows that negative emotions program your brain to carry out a specific action.
In this case, the most normal reaction is to run. All our attention is focused on the lion and on that particular situation.
At that moment nobody thinks “I have to buy bread before the shop closes” or “I forgot my partner’s birthday present”. At that moment, the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Your brain thinks only about running and escaping the sharp teeth of that hungry lion. That is: run, run and run… There’s probably a stick lying around that you could use, you could climb a tree, you could even try some strategy to scare the lion away, but right now your brain can’t carry out strategies, because it only orders you to run.
This natural instinct is something our brain has come with as standard since prehistoric times, and it is what saved our ancestors’ lives. The problem is that in our society you will rarely find yourself facing a lion.
(Read: 5 cognitive distortions found in successful entrepreneurs)
What Fredrickson wants to explain with this is that our brain is programmed to respond to negative emotions in the same way: by focusing on the problem situation and shutting out the outside world, limiting the options we have around us.
Problems usually cause us three kinds of emotion: fear, anger and stress. Any one of them can cancel out our ways out if we focus only on the lion (the problem).
The brain can be our worst enemy. Perhaps it has happened to you that you are so stressed by the number of things you have to do that you end up doing nothing. Likewise, when something goes wrong, we don’t get motivated to look for answers and solutions; instead we blame ourselves or look for someone to blame.
Basically, we could say that the survival instinct of the past can become our destroyer today, because with every negative emotion, if we don’t learn to control it, our own brain can close off the alternatives within our reach for solving the problem.
Hence the familiar saying:
“Don’t focus on the problem; focus on the solution.”
So how does positive thinking work?
Barbara Fredrickson’s study showed how emotions of joy and happiness (positive emotions in general) could broaden your sense of possibility, opening the way to more options in the face of life’s circumstances.
(Read: Your mind betrays you, part 2)
Positive thinking gives you a set of skills, along with the ability to develop those skills and the resources to use them in the future.
Some people think that if they achieved success they would be very happy, but most don’t know that the “thing” works the other way round: to achieve success you probably need to be happy. Or, to put it another way:
“Happiness is not the destination, but the way.”
As Fredrickson’s theory shows, happiness is essential for building the skills that will allow you to succeed. And by happiness, we will understand having positive thinking.
A positive mind believes that:
It is capable of anything, and because it believes so, it increases its chances of finding resources and surrounding itself with other positive people, increasing the chances of succeeding at its specific goal, whether we call that success in business, a promotion at work, etc.
A negative mind believes that:
It is capable of nothing, and therefore, because it believes so, it increases its chances of surrounding itself with more people like itself, increasing the chances of founding “Negativeland”, which rarely ends up becoming a profitable holding company.
The good news in all this is that a negative mindset can be changed, but the first thing we need to do is recognise that we have a negative mindset.
Featured image: Gabriella Clare Marino, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
