Positive emotions have real effects

While negative emotions offer us deep teaching

Positive emotions change the way our minds and our bodies work—change the very nature of who we are, down to our cells—transforming our outlook on life and our ability to confront challenges. - Barbara Fredrickson

Psychologists maintain a (rather problematic) manual known as the DSM that catalogs all sorts of mental illnesses. Shockingly, there is no corresponding manual of positive mental states that are known to support our mental health. Recognizing this imbalanced focus on disorders in the field, renowned psychologist Martin Seligman birthed positive psychology, which explores the qualities of mental health and promotes positive emotional states.

While positive psychology is relatively new (dating back to the ‘90s), its findings are highly relevant to our daily lives. There’s now abundant evidence that elevating ourselves with a conscious focus on positive emotional states — what I call “heartsets,” like “mindsets” but rooted in the heart — has tremendous power to sustain our souls across the journey of our lives and in the workplace.

When it comes to mapping and understanding the human emotional landscape, the models are quite varied. Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research found that humans can experience 34,000 unique emotions, yet he boiled them down to eight core emotions. He developed an emotion wheel that illustrates how emotions exist on a spectrum of intensity (such as anger increasing to rage, or decreasing to annoyance), and that combinations of emotions create new emotions (such as joy and trust combining into love).

Plutchik’s emotion wheel includes eight core human emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation.

Although we’re all unique in our life stories and emotional makeups, we have many feelings in common with each other — and we can all choose to learn valuable emotional lessons from even the most grim experiences.

Lessons Learned from Pain

My personal understanding of positive heartsets was greatly deepened during one of the most difficult times of my life. About six years ago, my father and my husband died in quick succession. My father had been chronically ill for many years and thankfully he lived longer than any physician had projected. My husband received a Stage IV cancer diagnosis out of nowhere and passed away in hospice just eight weeks later.

Just like that, I lost the two most important men in my life, people whom I deeply loved and treasured.

While we might have an envisioned happy path for our lives, as time goes on, none of us can avoid the realities of sickness, death, loss, and grief.

Grief is a painful emotion. Like a stormy ocean, it swamped me and I sometimes felt I was drowning. A piece of wisdom from Maya Angelou came to me: “The only way out is through.” So I chose to face my grief head-on. I probed and embraced this shadowed space. I journaled. I meditated. Sometimes, I turned to numbing myself. I met with healers. Mostly I cried, a lot.

Then one afternoon a few months after losing them, I attended a movement workshop led by a therapist who encouraged us to explore our feelings of grief through ritual and dance. (Ecstatic dance practice has long been one of the most direct ways for me to tap into my emotions and connect to the somatic wisdom of the body.)

As I moved through the activities of that workshop, it dawned on me that my grief was so intense only because my love for my father and my husband was so intense. For what is grief but the shadow of love? All things are impermanent. If we love, we inevitably will lose something or someone that we love, and then we will feel grief. And so, was I not blessed for having known such deep love, that it could inspire such deep grief?

And in that acceptance of tragedy, my grief transmuted into gratitude. How fortunate it was that I had had these loves in my life! Feeling grief is but a small price to pay for the joy of loving. This blazing insight has never left me. Whenever that painful grief spontaneously arises, as it will, I am not afraid of it. It paradoxically provided me with one of the brightest illuminations I’ve known.

Power of the Positive

Clinical research has now shown that cultivating positive emotional states has tremendously powerful effects — on ourselves, on our health, and our relationships. Excitingly, psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada have proven that experiencing three positive emotions for every one negative emotion is the tipping point towards human flourishing.

When we regularly experience a ratio of at least 3:1 positive to negative emotional states, each of us can achieve our optimal levels of well-being and resilience. Unfortunately, however, it seems that more than 80% of American adults fall short of this 3:1 positivity goal.

Amazingly, this positivity ratio also applies to business contexts! Marcial Losada along with Emily Heaphy studied over 60 strategic business units and found that having a ratio of at least 3:1 positive to negative team interactions leads to more creative, engaged, and high-performing teams. (These business interactions were characterized on a spectrum of “low connectivity” actions to “high connectivity” actions.)

Based on anecdotal evidence in my circles, I feel confident speculating that also more than 80% of American business environments are falling short of this 3:1 positivity goal. Many folks are experiencing serious unpleasantness in their workplaces.

Let’s Learn More Together

Some of the burning questions I’m exploring in this professional project are:

• How might we each achieve greater agency over how we function at work?

• How might we begin to shift an unhealthy organization towards more regenerative and sustainable ways of working?

In my course (and future book), I’ll be mining this fascinating and hopeful territory by exploring the intersection of handling core business activities in effective ways AND elevating our heartsets while we’re at it. Practices + science + emotions = a new recipe for sustenance.

We all face challenges in our workplaces, whether large or small. Sorry to say, nobody is likely to come and save us — we need to rescue ourselves. It’s like what we learn from traveling on a plane: be sure to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others! The urgent global movement to sustain our planet’s resources needs to happen for our inner selves, too.

Please consider participating in this course to explore useful business tools for getting things done with others AND inspirational and positive heartsets that allow us to achieve deep and lasting transformation both internally and externally. Learn more and indicate your interest today!

I am grateful for reposts & shares if you’re also intrigued by the potential of better outcomes through positive emotional states. It takes a village!! 🙏