Making Time to Reflect on the Positives

As leaders and practitioners in education, health, and social care settings, most of us are operating within a culture of external scrutiny and accountability in our professional lives. We all have ambitious targets to meet and stringent processes to follow. As a result, our to-do lists are never-ending as we strive to do more, to do better, for all of our service users.

External moderation aside, we all share a desire to provide the highest quality support and service to the individuals in our care. Our vocation requires us to be committed, focused, and conscientious in every aspect of our roles.

It is little wonder that we often feel under continuous pressure to improve. And we can be disproportionately critical of ourselves when things do not go as well as we would like.

Negativity bias

However, while it is important to acknowledge that improvement is always possible, if we are not careful, we could end up over-focusing on the negatives – the mistakes, the problems, the obstacles, the ‘even better ifs’ – over the positives. This is a natural, cognitive phenomenon – the negativity bias – and one that is innate in all of us.

As human beings, we have a deep-rooted tendency to focus and dwell on perceived negative events and experiences rather than positive ones. Thousands of years ago, this function helped to keep our ancestors safe from harm: by identifying and anticipating threats, it allowed them to take steps to avoid danger.

Nowadays, this psychological predisposition still plays a central role in our cognitive and social development from an early age, even though the immediate threats we face are far fewer.

Negativity bias in practice

Even when things are going well in our settings and there is much to be celebrated, our brains tend to seek out the negatives over the positives. We might ruminate over a challenging situation that we could have handled better; we may fixate on an interaction with an individual or staff member that did not go well; or we might spend hours mulling over a mistake we made with our processes and procedures.

Left unchecked, this hyper-fixation on the negative aspects of our professional lives can cloud our ability to see the ‘wins’, big or small:

• What about the meeting with a parent where they showered you with praise and gratitude?
• How about the difficult situation that you managed to seamlessly defuse with minimal intervention?
• Or what about the service user who, for the first time, managed to attend an appointment without feel anxious?

Because of our ingrained negativity bias, we can begin to think that these positive events are few and far between, when in fact they make up the majority of our day.

Impact in the workplace

Because there is greater neural processing in the brain in response to negative stimuli, this evolutionary function can heavily influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. This, in turn, can affect many aspects of our working life, from decision-making to relationship-building with the individuals we work with and care for.

While reflecting on experiences through the negativity bias lens can undoubtedly help us to learn, grow and adapt, we also need to take the time to focus on, and pay attention to, the many positive events that occur daily.