How to Stay Positive When Things Don't Go Your Way

When the stars are aligned and all your plans are coming together, maintaining a positive attitude is easy, but when times get tough – or things don’t quite work out the way you hoped they would – your spirit can take a bashing.

We caught up with motivational speaker and personal development coach Andy Edwards to find out how we can pick ourselves up again when things go wrong and continue moving forward.

Andy is qualified in Behavioural Psychology and is founder of ‘Re£ationomic$’, which focuses on creating tangible value from business relationships. He has worked with clients including the NHS, JP Morgan, Stannah, Co Op, De Vere, Barclays, Simply Health, Sony and British Gas.

According to Andy, we all approach positivity in different ways, dependent on our personality type. Before getting started, you can find out what personality style you have by taking a quick quiz on Andy’s website.

How can people adjust their attitude when negative things happen?

The language we use in these situations is interesting – words like ‘negative’, ‘bad’, ‘failure’. There’s an old adage that I tend to live by, ‘There’s really no such thing as a failure, it’s more a piece of feedback that you didn’t expect or that you didn’t want, but it will lead to your learning.’

Back in the 70’s, there was a popular pegboard game called Mastermind. One of the best moves that you could make early on in the game was to get every single thing wrong so that you knew exactly what not to do.

So, if you can pick up on whatever the feedback you’ve been given is in terms of ‘the failure’ – the thing that hasn’t worked out the way you wanted it to – it can provide you with the best learning. That’s sort of how I think humans learn best.

So, it’s reframing it to see it as a learning experience? Learning by your own mistakes?

Learning from your own mistakes is a cut down version of that. A great example would be, “How do we teach our children to walk?” Well, the answer of course, is we simply encourage them to find out what doesn’t work so that they’re ending up with what does.

They will attempt, many, many times to walk, and what we don’t do as parents, luckily, is that after the third attempt say “Listen, sweetheart. You can’t walk; you’ve tried three times. It’s not working for you. I wouldn’t bother in the future.”

We do the opposite of that, and we encourage every single advance, every single failure, we raise our eyebrows and we go “Woo!” It becomes fun, so that the learning taken into adulthood is “I tried this, it didn’t work. What else could I do?

Do you think that we’re too afraid to fail as adults?

I think there’s a lot of pressure; especially from a corporate point of view, not to fail. I think a component of emotional intelligence is to be able to say “My bad. I’ve got this wrong.” Or “Let’s stop here. I may need help to get out of it.”

The natural reaction to receiving bad feedback is often to become defensive. Is there anything people can do to not take it so personally?

It depends on how much we trust the person that’s come to us with the feedback in terms of their own competence. The Americans have got a word for it, they say “If you get some feedback and you don’t agree with it, consider the source.”

Generally, if I trust somebody’s feedback, then I find myself in an emotionally intensive state. Feedback is all it is; if I decide to take it as criticism, and start defending, quite often that defence is an attack.

A great example of that is a couple sitting there and the wife looks at the husband and says “Why do you always leave the door open?” and he turns to her and he says “Well you always leave the window open.”

Actually, what should happen here is he should say “Let us address that. Let me see if I can get some resources that could help me, remind me to close the door.” Completely separately, and nothing to do with leaving the door open, he can now bring up the window. He shouldn’t use it as a weapon. It’s a fact of issue.

What about when people receive feedback they don’t like via email? What’s the best way to deal with that?

It’s tougher because you’re now entering another realm of communication. Email doesn’t allow us the nuance of face to face, the pauses, the commas that we intone, the looks we give, the body language, all of which is a massively important part of the interaction on a day to day basis. It’s open to misinterpretation.

Again, if it lands with you when you’ve had a bad day, the wife hasn’t been happy with you in the morning, the dog tripped you over, the car didn’t start, it’s been raining, you get to work and you get some feedback in an email, you might decide to take that the wrong way. The words land in a different way than if you were feeling a bit funnier or a bit happier.

A friend of mine once received an email from a client asking “What are you going to speak about at my conference, remind me?” So he emailed back and explained all the bits and so forth. The client then emailed back and said “You have a lot to learn.” That was all it said.

My friend thought “he thinks I’m an idiot. He thinks I’m immature”. Yet, when this guy went and spoke, the very person he was concerned about was clapping away, smiling, cheering, and giving thumbs up. He got off stage and said “I don’t understand. I didn’t think you were completely keen on me or my subject matter because you said I had a lot to learn.” The client replied “Well, you did have a lot to learn. You have an awful lot of material.”

Of course, that’s the sort of stuff that is misinterpreted. It’s all in people’s attitude.

So, how can we help ourselves to have a better outlook?

I don’t think there is a magic bullet. Shit happens. It’s not that other people are happy because nothing bad happens to them.

I get this a lot. I come off stage from speaking to a lot of people and I’m delighted. My personality style is I love the applause at the end. My ego is up. I’m great. Somebody comes up and pats me on the back and goes “That was great. You were talking about positivity, and happiness and all that good stuff. Of course, it’s alright for you isn’t it?” “What do you mean ‘It’s alright for me?” “You’re happy aren’t you? You’re positive so when you talk about positive things… Of course, you can, because you are.”

I say, “Wait a minute. You’ve got this in the wrong order. It’s not because you are, you can, it’s because you can, you are. You didn’t see me 20 years ago when I’d been unemployed for three years. You didn’t see me when my house was repossessed because of the fact that I couldn’t afford to pay the mortgage. You didn’t see me when I was going through a horrible divorce. You didn’t see me back then when I was living on the sofa of somebody else’s room. You didn’t see me eventually get myself a little council house. You didn’t see at all.

“All you see is the jet setting guy who goes around the world speaking for a living and getting well-paid for it. Don’t you think I’ve had to work for that? Don’t you think my attitude has had something to do with learning from all those issues? Many of which were not my specific and ultimate doing.”

I recognise that these challenges are a necessity, here for whatever reason. They’re sent here for me to learn from. There’s a little part of me that says “If I don’t learn from this lesson, I will get it again, and it will be bigger”

Do you have any techniques that help you maintain your positive attitude?

The question I ask myself is “What was my part in this?” It’s very easy to blame, and sometimes it’s right to blame. For example, I’ve arranged a barbeque and it’s raining. I can’t do anything about that but I can certainly do something about my attitude towards that. If I take 100% responsibility towards it, then, and only then, am I in a position to change whatever is prevailing.

If you don’t take responsibility, you adopt the attitude ‘I can’t do anything’. Happiness and contentment will be based on the choices you recognise are available to you, however low level those choices might be. I can go and get a drink of water now and not everybody in this world can. If everything else in my day has gone wrong, but I can still go and do that, that’s something to be thankful for.

Ultimately, positivity is and can be a choice. Part of it is nurturing yourself to notice the positive. One way to do this is by writing down three things you can be happy for – over a period of time that’s what you start to notice.

There’s a part of the brain called the reticular center, which is the bit of the brain that says “what do you want to notice?” and if you programme that through repetition and habit that’s what will happen. So at the end of the day, ask yourself “What was the good part of today?” even if it was only being able to get a glass of water, and focus on the positives.

Andy’s book ‘Re£ationomic$’ will be published this autumn. For further information visit www.andyedwards.biz