Beware of hope, motivation and positive psychology.

First, what we called motivational speaking is not really motivational speaking. I say so because no one can motivate anyone else. All motivation is self-motivation. Motivational speaking is meant to inspire and to encourage action. Motivation, real motivation is a science which I am not going to talk about any further. Humans already have their own personal international motivation systems and strategies. People need to understand how their own personal internal motivation system works and then manage it; they cannot do this through attending motivational speaking. Most of what is called motivation is simple encouragement.

Now we come to positive psychology. This is a big area where some people confuse motivation and positive psychology. Many people in the motivation movement and motivational speaking fraternity think motivational speaking is about pumping positive messages into people’s heads, especially telling them flattery about themselves and making it appear like they are genius who only need a bit of push to start making amazing things happening. I mean, to many people, motivational speaking is about positive hype and prepping up people including telling people that you are born great, you can move mountains, you can do it, think big, find your purpose, just visualise and you will have it. It is all this stuff in The Secrete. It’s about telling people what they are even when you do not even know them well and when you do not know what is stopping them. Obviously, as humans we all want to hear good things about ourselves and we are very susceptible to flattery and hype and so we complement our motivational speakers for their speaking not because of any meaningful value other than the intrinsic value of the flattery and the positive hope and making us believe we are sleeping giants just waiting to awaken. So you go from one motivational speaker to another getting all the motivation but not going anywhere fast towards that which you are being motivated for. For sure motivation and inspiration are key and important, but they must be mixed with many other ingredients for them to work. This is what motivational speakers miss and never tell you because in some cases they too are not sure how it all works.

Now, here is the thing. Everything positive has its negative and every negative have its own positive. Inspiration, hope, motivation and even failure all have positive a positive and a negative. Let me talk about hope for now.

Productive Positive Hope or Positive Positive Hope

This is kind of hope is productive in the sense that the hope makes senses and have the hope leads to positive desirable outcomes. If you are studying very hard and hope to get excellent good grades that is positive productive hope.

Unproductive Positive Hope or Negative Positive Hope

It is not what is called false hope where the hope is merely a mental exercise with no connection whatsoever to the reality. It is like hoping that a stone will one day fall upwards or hoping that the sun will rise from the west. Some call this hopium. This kind of hope leads to complacency and inaction in the belief that things will come out ok.

Productive Negative Hope or Positive Negative Hope

Negative hope ranges from having no hope at all to being in serious despair. Those who are hooked to the positive psychology will castigate you for exhibiting negative hope or despair, arguing that you must have hope. This is a dangerous proposition in some situations. It is totally unreasonable to hope that a thief will never come to your house. Losing hope is actually the best move in many cases because it liberates you so that you can focus your mind on something more promising or better.

Counter-Productive Negative Hope or Negative Negative Hope

There are many cases, in fact the majority of cases, where people fall into a state of hopelessness or despair. This is because the human brain is wired to be more negative than it is configured to be positive. Some scholars in psychology argue that hopelessness is learned in many cases.

Negative hope or hopelessness or despair happens almost automatically when people fail to think beyond the situation they are facing and lock in into the problem-focussed mode. Sometimes they have made some attempts to deal with the situation without any success so they have given in and given up; surrendered to fate. In many of these cases, the problem is not because there is no solution or way out but it is because of lack of strategy or resourcefulness.

Conclusion

This scenario also happens with motivation. There is positive positive motivation, negative positive motivation, negative negative motivation and positive positive motivation. The most important is managing hope and managing motivation so that you know how to use them appropriately. Positive motivation can be as dangerous as negative motivation.

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?Simon Bere, 2022