Why there's a positive side to those negative moments

I'm in the US for a few weeks, hosting a conference or two and visiting family. Family often makes me think back fondly to my wonderful grandpa. He's gone, but his influence, like many of our passed family members, remains strong. In this essay, taken from my column, "The Communicator", this week in the Sunday Independent, I turn a bit of his advice upside down. Let's explore the upside of feeling down. Click the link for the newspaper online - or just read on! Hugs - G

Long before I heard about team motivation, employee engagement or growth mindset, I learned about the power of positivity. From my granddad. Robert Raven had a high school education. He worked his whole life in a Modine Manufacturing factory in Indiana. And although the farthest he ever travelled was to Mexico, he was a voracious reader of National Geographic magazine and through that, he taught me to be curious and to appreciate the wonder of nature and other cultures.

He was the kind of person who never met a stranger - always eager to greet someone new and make a friend.

[That's my grandpa to the right - with my equally wonderful mom and grannie - way back in 1983]

Grandpa's philosophy was illustrated through the lyrics of many of the old-timey songs he loved. This week I am back home again in Indiana visiting family and, although he is no longer with us, a certain song Grandpa taught me is echoing today in my ear.

The chorus goes, "You've got to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the positive, Eliminate the negative. Latch on to the affirmative. Don't mess with Mister In-Between."

It was first made famous in 1944 by Bing Crosby and The Andrew Sisters. Just a few years after that, Norman Vincent Peale penned the seminal book, The Power of Positive Thinking.

I write a lot about being positive. With yourself and with others. I just received a few emails from readers telling me that my words encouraged them. Thank you, Bennie, Helen and Mark.

Your words, in turn, encouraged me. The virtuous cycle at work, folks.

Okay. So I'm a firm believer in training yourself to be positive - especially when times get tough. And they will get tough.

You may get fired or laid-off one day. You might not get that promotion you think you deserve. A business partner may desert you. Fellow board members may try to undermine you.

These sorts of things do happen to many of us. When they do, positive determination is part of the solution.

But too much of anything is not a good thing. Remember back in 2006, when a dubious book, The Secret, sold a zillion copies by essentially claiming you could get rich, skinny and cure your cancer just by sending positive thoughts or vibrations out to the universe? Yikes.

For today, then, since it's summer and we're all on the beach and need to flip over anyway, let's look at the other side of the issue. When might it positive to be negative?

1) Allow yourself to 'Be Real'

When you encounter a colleague whose disposition is gloriously sunny no matter what is going on in their lives, you might be inspired by that person - or you might not believe their insistence. I remember coming into the newsroom at CNN one day. My producer took a quick look at me and immediately asked, "What's the matter?" As I recall, I wasn't experiencing anything difficult at the time.

"Why are you asking?" I asked in surprise. "Because you're normally such a Tigger that when you come in with your head hanging like Eeyore, I can instantly tell something's up."

Ah. Perhaps because my demeanour had been extra bouncy up until then, my producer took special notice. It's a reminder that we expect people to be a mixture of emotions - not continually upbeat.

Don't come down hard on yourself when you feel down about something. It's natural to have ups and downs on occasion.

In fact, Harvard psychologist Susan Davis cautions us not to blindly embrace "false positivity".

She stresses that "we need to develop skills to deal with the world as it is and not simply how we wish it to be."

2) Don't suppress

There's a classic social psychology experiment from Harvard's Daniel Wegner in which a group of participants was told not to think of a white bear and over five minutes to ring a bell every time they did. Another group could think of the bear and anything else - and was also told to ring the bell whenever the bear popped in their head. You can guess which group rang the bell more.

If something is making you feel negative, don't suppress it. Examine it. Consider it. Don't push the bear aside. It only makes him stronger.

3) Limit labelling

One way to redirect our thoughts is to stop labelling things as either positive or negative in the first place.

Maybe some things just are. For example, if you get laid-off from your job, there are several things you will likely need to do: Update your CV, leverage your network and target new companies. But what you don't need to do is immediately layer on emotions like insecurity, sadness and failure. "Why did this happen to me?"

Oliver Burkeman, a positive psychology critic and Guardian writer, claims that it's our "relentless effort to feel happy that is precisely what makes us miserable and sabotages our plans".

In contrast to what my granddad's song urged us, perhaps a quest to "eliminate the negative" is causing us to feel insecure or depressed.

Instead of eliminating the negative, next time something happens to us, we can try to observe the moment more logically without reaching for overly simplistic negative labels and strive to learn from what might be otherwise categorised as "failure" or "setback".

Remember, Nelson Mandela once said, "I never lose. I only win or learn."

from my column, "The Communicator" in Ireland's Sunday Indo Business