The Positive Impact of Negative Thinking
Think positively, we’re often counseled. The benefits are significant. Positive thinking can help us cope with stress. It boosts our immune system. It makes us more resilient.
Additional health benefits, according to the Mayo Clinic, include reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease, greater resistance to the common cold, and increased life span. Furthermore, research suggests that positive emotions broaden our sense of possibilities, allowing us to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of our lives.
Yet, ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers spoke of the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism. By focusing exclusively on the positive, we’re more likely to take a hit when negative stuff happens. In addition, we’re likely to gloss over the obstacles to success that might block our way forward.
In fact, we may be more successful in our work and personal lives when we give some attention to things that could lead us to fail. Therefore, a better avenue to success may be mental contrasting, which entails thinking about the positive consequences of achieving your goals while also paying attention to the difficulties you may face in getting there.
In effect, mental contrasting is a strategy for setting goals by thinking about both the positives and the negatives: the positive aspects of what you’re striving toward as well as the potential or actual obstacles.
This approach makes sense. It’s valuable to strive for positive outcomes. But at the same time, it’s shortsighted not to consider potential negatives in getting there. It’s for that reason that software developers routinely consider the potential setbacks or risks in undertaking large software projects. Or at least, they should. As Payson Hall noted in this interview with Noel Wurst:
Some organizations have difficulty admitting that they can't completely control all of a project's variables. Others seem to believe that positive thinking will overcome all obstacles. Either approach results in difficulty openly discussing risk. Ironically, if risk can't be discussed, it is much harder to invest in prevention and remediation and the potential danger is much greater.
Could it be that some software teams would benefit from tempering their optimism and devoting more attention to the negatives in their project—the risks and challenges, the potential obstacles, maybe even worst-case scenarios? Mental contrasting may be just what’s needed.
