Non-Toxic Positivity
…or, my personal war with positivity.
“Try to stay positive.” It may be the single most loathsome piece of advice someone could give me. I know a positive outlook is great and all, but staying positive is something I’ve always struggled with.
Positivity is not the problem. Fake positivity is.
And I think that’s where I start to lose my mind a little. Because somewhere along the way, “try to stay positive” turned into this weird mandate that nothing can ever be bad, no one can ever admit something failed, and every disappointment has to be rebranded as a secret win.
And sometimes, maybe positivity isn’t happiness and smiles.
Positivity can be hard to find
My senior year in college, I had an internship at a small marketing agency just outside Boston. I think my title was something along the lines of “junior account strategist” or something like that. But while marketing strategy was the core focus, I ended up getting a chance to do a bit of everything at that internship.
One of the tasks I particularly enjoyed was writing for the company’s blog. It turns out that even back then, all those years ago now, I had quite a gift for seeing bad practices in marketing and warning folks not to fall into such nefarious traps.
But after a pile of such prophetic blog posts warning against the perils of bad marketing, my boss gave me a challenge.
“Joe, you’re really good at catching people making bad choices and doing things poorly. But here’s what I want you to do: for every four things you see people doing wrong, I want you to find one person doing something well and praise them for it.”
I was… not thrilled with this assignment. I found it far more difficult to point to people doing great things in marketing than I found it to come across examples of bad marketing. And that one positive tended to consume a disproportionate amount of my time for each blog post.
Over 16 years later and I still remember that lesson… and if I’m being totally honest, I haven’t always done well following it. It can be really tough to find the positives, and apparently especially tough to find them in a field like marketing.
Don’t get me wrong: a good, positive story is a tremendous communication tool… it just feels like there aren’t always a lot of good, positive stories these days…
The problem is that “find the positive” can pretty quickly get twisted into “make it sound positive,” and those are not the same assignment.
Insincere, Dishonest, Deluded
You knew this was coming: the warning against our lesser demons.
All too often, I see organizations try to spin bad news or poor performance as anything but. Whether through opaque wording, incredibly selective statistical reporting, or just straight up BS-ing, it ends up feeling like a young professional trying to answer an interviewer who has posed the age-old question, “What would you say are some of your weaknesses?”
They respond with a word soup intended to spin whatever they say into a positive for them, and everyone knows it’s an attempt to avoid giving an honest answer.
This tendency to try to spin the facts in our favor is a hallmark of toxic positivity.
Maybe don’t ‘Protect the brand’
“Always put your best foot forward” seems like pretty rational, solid advice.
Until it turns into…
“Protect the brand.” This one was Marketing 101 for ages, but a little too often, it turns into the brand over everything else, and that’s when problems occur.
Just watch the news on any given week and you will see a story of some company in hot water for covering up negative information about itself.
In a more logical world, this shouldn’t happen. It can take courage to be honest and own up to mistakes or misperformance, but self-interest alone should be enough reason not to lie. Because what happens when the cover-up is discovered? Everything gets worse. The cover-up often becomes a bigger offense than the original mistake. And even when it isn’t, it adds one more offense to the list.
Am I really writing a post about why we shouldn’t lie? Apparently I am…
Even seemingly innocuous instances of applying generous spin to your communications can tarnish your credibility and come across as insincere, dishonest, or deluded.
Overcoming our delusions of grandeur
If toxic positivity leads to delusion, then calm, grounded honesty is the way back out.
The desire to make a huge impact can lead us to tell those exaggerated, twisted, maybe-not-so-honest stories that create a disconnect with our audience.
The antidote for all of this is to balance honesty and transparency in the face of disappointment with celebrations of little wins.
Sometimes in life we will experience complete, abject failure. But we all hope that is rare, and certainly rarer than even a cynic like me would expect.
Be honest about what didn’t go well. Celebrate what did go well, even if you have to look outside the project at hand.
Celebrate meaningful wins in the everyday, mundane things of life.
Expanding our understanding of positivity
Here’s apparently the part where I throw that all out the window and try to spin my own understanding of the definition of the word “positivity.”
Maybe, for the sake of argument, positivity isn’t just about the happy-feel-goods. Maybe it isn’t all congratulatory pats on the back and beaming smiles.
Maybe in this particular season for you, or in this season for some collective “us,” positivity looks a bit different.
Having worked with a few artists over the years, I’ve often had a chance to see works of art inspired by tremendous pain or loss. Or perhaps a piece of art driven by anger and protest against the injustices of our world.
The experience of what we call “heartbreaking beauty.”
Sometimes it’s a song that leaves you in tears but you still appreciate it and still listen to it again and again.
Or maybe it’s a painting that gives voice to a marginalized people and your soul aches for justice and compassion.
Sometimes it’s a film that opens your eyes, explodes your mind and leaves you thinking about it for days after.
Maybe in this season, positivity doesn’t look like trying to make everything seem fine, but rather like finding appreciation and connection in the moments of exquisite, heartbreaking beauty in the world around us.
Don’t give in to toxic positivity
I’m trying to be more positive in my life. I really am. But I’m also trying not to give in to the external push toward toxic positivity where everything must have been a success and nothing bad ever happened.
I keep saying this, but one consequence of the explosive growth of AI in our culture and our society has been a flood of fake hitting the market. Fake news, fake products, fake stories, fake pictures. Audiences are experiencing fakeness fatigue, and as a result, the backlash against real humans lying only seems to get worse and worse. Which means the honest version, even when it’s messier, may be the only version people still have any patience for.
Don’t give in to toxic positivity. Be honest when things don’t go according to plan. Celebrate the boring small stuff when there’s no exciting big stuff. And make room for the beautiful things that break your heart and keep you up at night.
P.S.
OK, I’ll give it one more shot… here are some people doing awesome things.
A bunch of unofficial National Parks advocates are running a master class on TikTok comedy, but be warned, it is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
I’m still learning about it, but Mastodon is delivering on the promise of social media’s past, back when platforms showed you what you wanted to see, not just what made them money.
Shoutout to longtime client Splitrock Studios, which is nearing completion as an absolutely incredible multifunctional art haven stitched into beautiful natural surroundings.
As the father of a 3-year-old, I watch a lot of kids programming, but right alongside the GOAT Bluey, nothing is better than Ms. Rachel, who has helped millions of kids develop language skills in an accessible manner. She has also used her tremendous reach and platform to advocate for human compassion and peace.
Alright, that’s enough positivity for me tonight.