THE BLOG
The B.S. of \"Just Stay Positive” We Hand to People
When optimism helps us face reality, it has value. When it helps us escape reality, it becomes another problem.
I have repeated phrases in my life that I later began questioning. Some came from people I respected, some from books, some from speakers, and some were repeated so frequently in business, personal development and spirituality that they started sounding like truth simply because everybody seemed to know them.
“Everything happens for a reason.” “Stay positive.” “Fake it till you make it.” “Visualise what you want.” “Believe strongly enough and it will come.”
I understand why these ideas attract us. Life can be uncertain, painful and spectacularly unfair. When we are frightened, disappointed or exhausted, a sentence that offers certainty feels comforting. There have been times in my own life when hope has mattered enormously. When things felt dark, the possibility that tomorrow might look different helped me continue.
So this is not an argument against positivity, hope, faith or imagination. That would be equally ridiculous. It is an examination of what happens when something intended to encourage us starts helping us avoid what is actually happening.
Perhaps the problem was never positivity itself. Perhaps the problem begins when positivity is asked to do a job it was never capable of doing.
When a useful idea becomes an absolute truth
There is nothing inherently wrong with imagining a better future. A person preparing for an important presentation may picture themselves speaking confidently. An athlete may mentally rehearse a performance. Someone rebuilding their life may need to imagine a possibility beyond their present circumstances before they can begin moving towards it.
The difficulty appears when possibility quietly becomes causality. “I can imagine this” becomes “therefore this will happen.” Believing something is possible becomes believing the outcome is somehow guaranteed. Staying hopeful becomes a demand to suppress doubt, fear, grief or anger because those feelings have been labelled negative.
That is a very different proposition. At that point we are no longer merely encouraging ourselves. We may be editing reality in order to protect a belief about reality.
Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen examined this territory experimentally. Across four studies, they found that idealised positive fantasies about a desired future were associated with lower energisation towards pursuing that future. Their research is specifically about positive fantasies rather than every form of optimism, visualisation or goal-setting, and that distinction matters. The finding challenges the much broader assumption that imagining a wonderful outcome automatically generates the energy needed to create it.
That makes intuitive sense to me. Imagining yourself delivering a wonderful keynote is very different from preparing the keynote. Imagining a thriving business is very different from speaking to customers, testing whether people value what you offer, hearing rejection and changing what fails. Visualising a repaired relationship is very different from sitting across from another human being and having the conversation both of you have been avoiding.
Imagination may help us see a doorway. Reality still asks us to walk through it.
Manifestation deserves a more careful conversation
Manifestation is where this becomes more complicated because several very different ideas are often pushed together under one word. If manifestation means becoming conscious of what matters to you, imagining a possibility, directing attention towards it and allowing that intention to influence your behaviour, there is plenty there that can be discussed without invoking anything supernatural.
The larger claim is different. That is the belief that thoughts, visualisation, positive self-talk or symbolic actions can somehow attract external events through a form of mental or cosmic causation.
Lucas Dixon, Matthew Hornsey and Nicole Hartley examined manifestation beliefs across three studies involving a combined 1,023 participants. People scoring higher on their manifestation measure tended to perceive themselves as more successful, had stronger aspirations for success and believed future success was more likely. They were also more likely to be attracted to risky investments, to report having experienced bankruptcy and to believe that unlikely levels of success could be achieved more quickly.
The researchers themselves discuss potential positives and negatives, and the findings need to be handled carefully because associations are not proof that manifestation beliefs caused those outcomes.
That nuance matters to me. There is no need to mock somebody because visualisation gives them hope or helps them focus. Equally, there is no need to pretend that wanting, imagining and receiving are the same thing.
The part that troubles me most is what happens when certainty fails. If the desired outcome arrives, the technique receives the credit. If it fails to arrive, the person may conclude that their belief was weak, their energy was wrong or some negative thought somehow blocked the result. An idea that began as encouragement can quietly become another instrument for blaming the person who is already struggling.
Sometimes an idea fails because the idea was weak. Sometimes the market changes. Sometimes somebody else performs better. Sometimes timing matters. Sometimes the other person freely chooses something else. Sometimes illness, economics, politics, chance or a thousand circumstances beyond our control enter the story. Sometimes we give something everything we have and life still says no.
That is not negative thinking. That is the human condition.
The alternative is not to hustle harder
This is where another problem appears. Once we reject the idea that desire alone creates results, we can swing straight towards the opposite extreme: work harder, push more, sleep less, keep grinding and force the outcome into existence.
I have fallen into that trap as well.
The language changes, while the underlying obsession with control remains remarkably similar. One philosophy tells us that our thinking can bend reality towards what we want. The other tells us enough effort can force reality towards what we want. Both can become attempts to make an uncertain world obey us.
There is another way of thinking about action.
In the book, My Creed: To Do The Best I Can, Despite The Odds, the tension between hustle and Taoist thought is explored through Wu Wei. The book describes it as effortless action while making an important distinction: effortless never means laziness or inactivity. The emphasis is on reducing unnecessary force, aligning effort with the conditions that actually exist and working with life rather than constantly fighting against it.
That interpretation is also consistent with serious scholarship on Daoism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains that wuwei is difficult to translate neatly and has been rendered in a number of ways, including nonaction, non-coercive action and effortless action. Crucially, it is not the same as total inactivity.
I prefer that complexity because it prevents us from turning Taoism into another motivational slogan. Wu Wei is much richer than “go with the flow” printed underneath a picture of a waterfall.
Water moves. It responds to terrain. It can be gentle and extraordinarily powerful. It does not need to interpret every rock as evidence that the universe is against it, and it does not need to smash itself repeatedly against the same rock to prove how committed it is.
That image speaks deeply to the work of communication.
What forcing sounds like in a room
In the book, Speak Like a W.I.S.E CEO, the relationship between Taoist thought and communication appears through speech without forcing. The wider work looks at communication as something happening beneath and beyond the sentence itself, including the way pressure, intention, silence and presence shape what another human being receives.
Think about a leader who has explained the strategy several times and still senses resistance. The instinct may be to explain it again, this time with greater force and perhaps another twelve slides. Yet the real issue may not be a lack of information. People may understand the strategy perfectly well and remain worried about what it means for their jobs, workload or customers.
A salesperson can do the same thing. The buyer hesitates, so the salesperson adds features, evidence and another argument. The conversation becomes increasingly persuasive and decreasingly useful because what the buyer actually needs may be space to think, permission to raise a concern or confidence that saying no will still be respected.
Even care can become force. A parent may repeat advice because they genuinely love their child. A coach may push because they genuinely believe in someone’s potential. A leader may insist because the stakes genuinely are high. Good intention never makes us immune from creating pressure.
Wu Wei offers a useful question here: is more force helping the situation, or has the force itself become part of the situation?
“Stay positive” can be a very unhelpful act of kindness
Imagine somebody has just lost their job. They are frightened about money, their family, their identity and what happens next. Someone who cares about them says, “Stay positive. Everything happens for a reason.”
There may be enormous love behind that sentence. There may also be something else happening. Perhaps the speaker is uncomfortable sitting beside another person’s fear and needs to make the fear disappear quickly.
The person who lost the job may need optimism eventually. Right now they may need someone willing to say, “This is frightening. Let us look at what has happened and what is possible from here.”
The same principle applies inside organisations. A salesperson whose pipeline has collapsed may benefit from encouragement, while encouragement never replaces examining the market, proposition, pricing, prospecting activity and quality of the conversations taking place. A project team facing serious problems may benefit from confidence, while confidence cannot substitute for recognising that the timeline is failing.
There is a difference between refusing hopelessness and refusing reality. That difference matters because emotions and concerns rarely disappear merely because the vocabulary around them becomes positive.
What gets suppressed still enters the conversation
Research into expressive suppression gives us another useful lens. Emily Butler and colleagues studied pairs of people discussing upsetting material and found that instructing one person to suppress emotional behaviour disrupted communication, increased blood-pressure responses in their interaction partners and reduced rapport.
The researchers were examining emotional suppression rather than positive thinking, so it would be wrong to present the study as evidence that optimism is harmful. What it does show is that concealing emotional responses can affect the interpersonal space between people.
That immediately makes me think about organisations in which particular emotions have become unacceptable. Fear is interpreted as weakness. Doubt is interpreted as negativity. Disagreement is interpreted as resistance. Someone raises a concern and is told to become more solution-focused before anybody has bothered to understand the concern.
People eventually learn. They may stop bringing the fear, doubt or concern into the formal conversation. The feelings have not necessarily disappeared. The information has.
Now the room looks positive while the corridor conversation tells a very different story.
This is where positivity stops being merely a personal philosophy and begins becoming a commercial issue. When uncomfortable information is cleaned up before it reaches decision-makers, leaders are no longer making decisions from reality. They are making decisions from an edited version of reality.
Psychological safety needs room for bad news
Amy Edmondson and Derrick Bransby’s extensive review of psychological-safety research describes psychological safety as a state of reduced interpersonal risk. Their review identifies major themes around getting work done, learning behaviour, work experience and leadership. It is particularly relevant in complex environments where uncertainty and interdependence make it essential for people to share concerns, questions and mistakes.
This matters because a psychologically safer workplace is not one where everybody feels wonderful all the time. Nor is it a place without accountability, standards or disagreement. It is a place where difficult information has a reasonable chance of reaching the conversation.
Imagine a senior leadership meeting around a major transformation. The timeline is ambitious, teams are stretched and several people privately doubt whether delivery is realistic. Everyone also knows that the most senior person in the room is personally committed to the plan. If the only culturally acceptable answer to “Are we confident?” is yes, the meeting can appear wonderfully aligned while risk is quietly increasing.
This affects financial value because problems discovered late are often more expensive to repair. It affects time because teams continue working around issues that could have been addressed earlier. It affects risk because warning signals remain underground. It affects authority because eventually people notice when leadership language and lived reality no longer resemble each other.
Misunderstanding is not always created by badly chosen words. Sometimes the words are beautifully chosen and reality has been removed from them.
W.I.S.E communication has room for an uncomfortable truth
The answer is not to replace relentless positivity with relentless negativity. That would simply be another extreme.
In the book, Speak Like a W.I.S.E CEO, the W.I.S.E Compass brings together Words with Courage, Intention with Clarity, Silence with Conviction and Energy with Compassion. Those four directions become particularly useful here because none requires a performance of positivity.
Words with Courage asks whether reality has been given language. Sometimes that means saying that a project is failing, confidence has been lost, a mistake has been made or something needs to change. Courage is never an excuse for brutality. It asks us to tell the truth without using truth as a weapon.
Intention with Clarity takes the examination beneath the sentence. Why am I encouraging this person? Is encouragement genuinely useful to them, or am I trying to remove an emotion that makes me uncomfortable? Why am I telling the team to remain positive? Is it helping them find direction, or signalling that difficult information is unwelcome?
Silence with Conviction matters because not every difficult feeling needs to be repaired immediately. Sometimes a person needs a little space in which disappointment, grief or fear is allowed to exist. There is extraordinary pressure in rushing to fill that space with reassurance.
Energy with Compassion allows reality and dignity to remain in the same room. Compassion never means pretending that everything is fine. It may involve challenge, accountability, boundaries and decisions people dislike. The question is whether the human being remains visible while the difficult reality is being dealt with.
That is where positivity becomes more intelligent. It stops being a mask and becomes possibility held alongside truth.
Face reality before attempting to reframe it
Returning to the book, My Creed: To Do The Best I Can, Despite The Odds, another idea becomes particularly relevant here: “Face it. Faith it. Make it.” The phrase is presented as an alternative to “Fake it till you make it”, beginning with owning reality before attempting to move through it. The same discussion then turns towards Wu Wei and the distinction between aligned effort and forcing outcomes.
Facing something may mean looking honestly at the financial numbers, the customer feedback, the fear, the rejection, the exhausted team or the conversation that has been avoided. It may mean accepting that an idea we love is failing, or that our interpretation of events has been wrong. None of this requires us to surrender possibility. It simply means possibility is being built on something firmer than denial.
Faith can then become something more useful than certainty about an outcome. It can become confidence in our capacity to respond even when the outcome remains uncertain. Making it becomes participation: doing what is ours to do without pretending that effort gives us ownership over everything that follows.
This is where Taoist thinking becomes so valuable. It gives us an alternative to both wishful passivity and compulsive force. We observe the terrain, act where action serves, adjust when conditions change and recognise when pushing harder is simply creating more resistance.
Changing your mind is allowed
There is one further aspect of all this that matters to me. We need permission to examine ideas we once believed.
People change. Evidence changes. Experience changes us. Something that sounded profound at twenty-five may look very different after another twenty years of living, working, failing, loving, losing and paying attention.
The pressure to remain consistent can be especially strong when somebody teaches, leads or speaks publicly. Once an opinion becomes associated with our identity, changing it can feel like admitting that the earlier version of us was foolish. I see it differently. If greater experience and better evidence arrive and our thinking is never allowed to move, conviction has quietly become rigidity.
That does not mean changing beliefs whenever the wind changes direction. Conviction matters. So does intellectual humility.
A human being can say, “I believed this. I understand why I believed it. I now see something I did not see before.”
There is courage in that sentence.
Hope that can survive reality
Positivity still has a place. So does hope. So do imagination, ambition, faith and dreams. Life would become painfully small if we removed them in the name of realism.
The wiser question is what relationship those things have with reality.
Hope that requires us to deny pain is fragile. Confidence that cannot tolerate doubt is fragile. Leadership that cannot hear bad news is fragile. A belief system that explains every success as proof of itself and every failure as a deficiency in the believer is very difficult to question, which is exactly why it deserves questioning.
The Tao offers something quieter. It asks less about controlling everything that happens and more about the quality of our relationship with what is happening. There are times to move, times to wait, times to persist, times to change direction and times to recognise that more force is merely more force.
Perhaps that is the form of positivity worth keeping: enough hope to see possibility without losing sight of reality, enough courage to act without pretending we control every outcome, and enough compassion to allow another human being to say, “This hurts,” without immediately telling them how they ought to feel instead.
That is not negative thinking. It is being truthful enough to meet life as it is, and hopeful enough to keep participating in what it might yet become.
Research and Sources
Heather B. Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, “Positive Fantasies About Idealized Futures Sap Energy”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011
Research examining how idealised positive fantasies influence energisation towards desired futures.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210311100031X
Lucas J. Dixon, Matthew J. Hornsey and Nicole Hartley, “‘The Secret’ to Success? The Psychology of Belief in Manifestation”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Three studies examining manifestation beliefs, perceived success, expectations for future success and associations with financial decision-making.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37421301/
Full article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11616226/
Emily A. Butler, Boris Egloff, Frank H. Wilhelm, Nancy C. Smith, Elizabeth A. Erickson and James J. Gross, “The Social Consequences of Expressive Suppression”, Emotion, 2003
Experimental research examining communication, physiological responses and rapport when emotional expression is suppressed during interaction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12899316/
Amy C. Edmondson and Derrick P. Bransby, “Psychological Safety Comes of Age: Observed Themes in an Established Literature”, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2023
Academic review covering psychological safety, interpersonal risk, learning, leadership and work experience.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-055217
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Laozi”
Scholarly discussion of Daoist philosophy and Wu Wei, including the distinction between non-forcing or effortless action and literal inactivity.