A Negative Outlook - Symptoms & cause

I was deliberating for a good few minutes about the title of this post: "A Negative Outlook" or "A Positive Outlook". The edgy title vs. the uplifting one.  In the end, I decided to go for the edgy one, because as Drake says: "Sometimes working with the negatives can make for better pictures".  However this post is essentially going to look at both perspectives and will argue a case for having a positive mentality using logical rhetoric: because a lot of the time, even though most of us intuitively know that it's good to be positive, I think we forget all the reasons why it just makes logical sense to have a positive outlook. And sometimes by explicitly articulating something logically (or solidifying nebulous ideas), everything just makes more sense.

First, I'd like to delve into why we have a negative outlook in the first place. Let's imagine a time back when humans were just cavemen. There's the caveman that was negative: don't taste those berries, they might be poisonous. He'd be cautious with the other cavemen and reserved: what if they had sinister motives? He lived his life with a sense of careful unease, always wary to try new things. But he ultimately lived a long life and passed on his genes. Then there was the happy, positive caveman who saw the good in everything. He'd try all the tasty berries, he'd make friends with all the other cavemen and find out their interesting stories. He'd pet the furry lion. The lion would rip off his arm and bury his face into the man's warm, juicy stomach.

There's an evolutionary reason why we focus on the negatives. Why we're cautious and sceptical. We do it to survive - there are a lot of things out there that can kill us.

People can often tell how we see the world: how cautious, sceptical and negative we are. There are many different tells the reveal how we see the world to other people. The words we use, our tone, our body language all point towards how we focus on problems and ideas.

But there's a reason why we should be positive as well. Let me ask this question: why would anyone around you want to be persuaded by an idea of yours if you express it while focussing on the negatives? What kind of emotions will you be evoking in someone else if you use language that insinuates that you're conscious of all the ways in which a project or idea might fail? The chances are: you won't be evoking many good emotions. And it's surprising how much of a difference that makes. If people start associating negative emotions with something you're trying to persuade them to help you with, you won't stand a very good chance of influencing them. There are more reasons as well: what kind of emotional state will you generally be in if you continue to focus on the possible ways anything can fail? Chances are, you'll be pretty nervous most of the time. And that's not a comfortable state to be in.

How do we resolve this problem, then? We don't want to be mauled by the lion, but we want to be happy, effective, influential people.

The trick is to do both.

1. Weigh up the positive and negative points for a project/proposition/action. Do this critically with as little bias as possible: the negative people will tend to focus on the negative points, positive people on positive points. Try to remain objective here.
2. Decide on whether you want to continue with your action. You'd want to do this - obviously - if the positives outweighed the negatives.
3. Prepare for the negative outcomes. Plan for the worst case scenario. The second worst case scenario. Mentally prepare and come up with ideas of how you would mitigate what would happen and move on.
4. Once you've prepared for the negative outcomes, stop focussing on them. Start focussing on the positive outcomes. You wouldn't be doing whatever you're doing if you didn't think it would positively impact you life. You're doing this because it will hopefully make your life better. So start focussing on that. How good it'll be when you successfully complete something. And hopefully it'll create a positive feedback loop as well. People will see how positive you're being about it, and you'd be more influential on getting a team together to help you on your journey to success.