10 Ways Being More Positive Improves Your Career

As a trained marriage and family therapist and career coach, I’ve researched for over 10 years what makes some people highly successful in their relationships and in business, and others doomed to fail.

I’ve observed this: Being more positive in your behaviors and language paves the way for far more success, satisfaction and reward in your career (and this goes for your marriage and family life too).

In Marriage as In Life and Work

During my therapy training, I read a fascinating book called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. In it, the author, leading relationship expert Dr. John Gottman, explains that there are particular types of negative interactions that, if allowed to run rampant, are so lethal to a relationship that he calls them the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." These four horsemen “clip-clop into the heart of a marriage in the following order: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.”

I’ve seen these exact same harbingers of professional disaster in the workplace as well. Allowed to run unfettered, these Four Horsemen will certainly clip-clop into the heart of your career and professional life with a deadly thud.

Gottman discovered a formula he asserts is provable and reliable – that to make your marriage successful, you must ensure that there are five times more positive, loving interactions than negative, painful interactions between you and your spouse. If you don’t adhere to this formula, serious unhappiness ensues. And if you dip toward the 1:1 ratio consistently, he says you’re likely to end in divorce. He can watch a couple discuss a problem or conflict for only a few minutes, and predict with uncanny accuracy if they’ll eventually end in divorce.

I’ve seen the relevance of this positive-to-negative interaction formula in people’s careers and professional endeavors as well. Those who are consistently more negative than positive in their communications and interactions suffer from an untimely demise of their career potential.

Why is negativity so destructive?

Negativity limits, crushes, and tears down. Negativity also tends to breed more pain, misery and negativity, and as it does, it strips away future opportunities for success, trust, confidence, and growth.

What does positivity do instead?

Speaking and behaving in positive ways has the opposite effect – it builds, repairs, and protects. Focusing on positive language and behaviors builds up support structures and creates new roads to resilience, solutions and success. It paves the way for a deeper level of human connection and empathy.

In fact, I’ve found that concentrating your focus on being more positive and happy as you engage in your professional endeavors achieves the following 10 powerful outcomes:

Being more positive:

1. Helps you engage with others more effectively and gain support more easily for your ideas and initiatives

2. Develops you as a role model and someone to “watch,” admire and learn from

3. Gives you greater positive impact and influence on your culture, your environment and your colleagues (positive language and emotion are magnets)

4. Boosts your “immunity” to negative outside occurrences – you become more resilient and bounce back quicker

5. Inspires others around you to find the courage to seek — and move toward — the positive

6. Strengthens your ability to advocate effectively for yourself and others, which in turn attracts more opportunity for all involved

7. Paves the way for more collaborative success rather than crushing competition

8. Builds your reputation as someone worthy of trust and loyalty

9. Helps you see possibility where others see only hopelessness

10. Brings to light your achievements and accomplishments in compelling ways rather than highlighting your failures

In the end, positivity paves the way for growth, and growth breeds success.

You might be thinking, “Sure, I know being positive is important, but I can’t seem to shift myself out of my negative thinking, especially with all these challenges around me every day.”

If this sounds familiar, I’d ask you to think again. We can change and modify – it’s called evolving, and that's what humans do so well. If you commit to this with intention and focus, you will be able to shift yourself away from negative, toxic, and damaging patterns to more positive ones – in your relationships and in your work. I know, because I’ve worked extremely hard to bring more happiness and positivity into my life (and build the necessary boundaries to protect myself from negative people and influences). And I've seen countless others do the same, to great success.

If you commit today to engaging in more positive behaviors and thoughts in your life and work, I know you won’t regret it.

Here's how to begin: Simply start by gaining more awareness of how you operate in the world. This week, take a very close look at your communications and interactions at work. Monitor yourself and answer this one question: "What is the ratio of my positive communications to negative ones?"

If the ratio is at least 5 (positive) to 1 (negative), kudos to you! If not, there’s some important work to be done.

(To build a happier, more successful career, take my 6-day Amazing Career Challenge.)