Survival of the Kindest: Why Positivity is Crucial for Today's Leaders
What if positivity and kindness were essential survival skills? Particularly in troubled times? Challenges can lead to retreat, solitude and separation, or to coalition, cooperation and even kindness. Which do you choose? Here are a few things worth knowing about positivity and why it is more important than ever to lead with kindness.
I’m often caught dumb in everyday banter because I rarely listen to the news, and sometimes I see eyes roll when I start talking about a silver lining. I’ve honed my skills in veering negative conversations towards something positive and taken to fully owning my sizable pair of rose-colored glasses, because I know that positive thoughts are more ephemeral than negative ones, but their impact hugely significant.
Survival benefits of a positive outlook
This is about survival. Negative thoughts and feelings carve their way into long-term memory more easily than positive ones because they can provide immediate survival benefits. I don’t need to remember enjoying the purr of a house cat, but I definitely need(ed) to recall fear at the rustle of a tiger in the high grass. Just thinking about it narrows my focus via my body’s stress response.
In fact, just seeing the word “no” triggers a torrent of stress-related hormones and neurotransmitters. Worse, if you say the dreaded word, god forbid with a frown on your face, the same exact thing happens to the listener who, according to Psychology Today, “will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others.”
Yikes!
Of course, sometimes it’s useful to say no. Such as when you want to be productive. It’s more about how you say it. Reframing a “no” into a “yes to something else” ranks among a leader’s top skills.
Why is Being Positive Important?
Research by Barbara Fredrickson postulates that you need to generate at least three positive thoughts to balance a negative thought and feeling. Good feelings come and go, so the idea is to seed more of them into your life. They accrue over time.
And here’s the good news: when you catch yourself thinking or feeling something negative, just thinking about three positive things will interrupt the formation of negative memories.
Positive psychologists push for a ratio of 5:1 or 7:1 for deeply satisfying relationships (John Gottman's research), less likelihood of divorce, more likelihood of making money, and soaring business productivity.
Positivity does more:
It shifts your chemistry, reducing stress hormones and raising bonding- and growth-related hormones, bumping up opioids and dopamine, enhancing immune functioning and lowering inflammation.
It literally expands your field of vision (unlike stress, which contracts it). As your awareness expands, so does your access to insight, ideas and creative solutions.
It builds strengths such as optimism, openness, resilience, acceptance, and drive through purpose.
It changes how you connect with people. “We” becomes more prevalent than “me.” This broaden effect, as Fredrickson calls it, makes you more creative, open-minded, kind, and an overall better person.
The Gate to Our Superpower
This connection part might just be the most important. According to Jamil Zaki, from the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, and author of The War for Kindness, “Our ability to work together is what allows us to succeed. Kindness is our superpower. Friendship or being part of something greater than ourselves is no a luxury, a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to survival.”
Ultimately, we are wired to be kind. Giving to others activates the same pleasure zones in your brain as does eating chocolate. Biologically, we enjoy kindness. It feels good. Just like with positive thoughts, stress hormones subside.
Inner Conflict
In the end, rose-tinted glasses aside, we all manage a balancing act between a visceral need to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and a biological need for the herd. Faced with challenges and disaster, we can retreat into a negative vision shrouded in fear that we will lose what we need to survive, and we can end up very lonely (and as a result quite sick—loneliness is a plague in more ways than one).
Yet challenge also leads to cooperation, based on this very basic human need for working together in order to survive.
What Can We Do for Ourselves?
To cultivate positivity, author James Clear states it succinctly, “Seek joy, play often, and pursue adventure. Your brain will do the rest.”
And I would add, do acts of kindness.
What Can We Do for Others?
We can do more than just tip the balance of our words to the positive side of the scale. We can amplify kindness. Jamil Zaki speaks about kind systems, how we as a herd species are deeply affected by others. When people notice how other people are acting kindly, they want to do that themselves. So if we set the example, incentivise, highlight and amplify kind behaviours, “we make them stickier, more likely to ripple outward. Make them loud to make them forceful.”
As leaders, in our businesses and our families, we owe it to our future to change our behavior and help people notice the helpers, the good, the positive.
Hacking Kindness
Sleep, control your blood sugar, and breathe. We can control our emotional states, but when we are sleep deprived, hypoglycemic, and stressed our ability to manage our feelings nose dives.
Be specific, timely, genuine and relevant when providing praise and constructive feedback: it results in a positive emotional response.
Decide to bring one of the following ten specific forms of positivity into the room with you: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, or love. I love going in with awe.
Give yourself permission to smile and enjoy the benefits of positive emotion.
Schedule time for play and adventure so that you can experience contentment and joy.
Make it a habit to do acts of kindness.