When You’re Being Negative – What If You’re Wrong?

In my early adulthood, I never questioned the truth of my negative feelings. In fact, they often felt like the “real me.”  I made many informal attempts at my own brand of learned optimism, and I was often happy and delighted with life. But when adversity hit, the positive emotional states seemed rather fragile. They were, I believed, “fake”.

As I expanded my knowledge and experience in the field of clinical social work, I learned and experienced the powerful value of challenging solidly-embedded negative thoughts.

Many theories and techniques exist to challenge and replace negative thinking with heartfelt positivity. The Irrepressible Writer will continue to explore and describe those ways, and I hope you’ll continue to share the experiment, and share the impact on your writing lives.

I’ve written here that the ability to journey towards heartfelt positivity rests on the belief that the negative thinking is incorrect or irrational (i.e., not based on factual evidence). We know that it is limiting to us as writers…and in our non-writing lives.

My first introduction to the power of disbelief in limited thinking (not only negative thinking, by the way) was Edward de Bono. De Bono created the concept and tools of Lateral Thinking. He was among the first who believed that creativity could be taught, stimulated by a variety of techniques that gained broad acceptance. If you’re familiar with the concept of “six thinking hats”, that’s de Bono.

Reading about and implementing some of de Bono’s techniques moved me beyond what I felt might be the boundaries of my psychodynamic/psychoanalytic training into the world of cognition, and of creativity “not as a magical gift but as a learnable skill” (de Bono).  It helped me, and it helped clients, to move beyond places where we might feel emotionally or intellectually stuck.

One simple tool, which de Bono calls “provocation”, opened a huge door. You might want to play with it:

Here’s an example of a provocation:

1. STATE A NEGATIVE THOUGHT, for example: “I’m not able to compete in the current writing climate. I’ll never get past the bigger and bigger gates that are getting set up everyday.”

2. GIVE YOURSELF A PROVOCATION: de Bono used the word “po” to signal: “This statement is not true.” (Say it loudly: “Po!”)

3. IF “PO” IS TRUE (so therefore the original statement in #1 is NOT TRUE) THEN WHAT ELSE MIGHT BE TRUE?:

• I might have greater writing ability or capacity than I think;
• I might at least have the ability to work harder than I think;
• I might be more open to looking for and creating opportunities to meet editors and agents at conferences;
• I might re-allocate some priorities if I believed that going to conferences might help my access;
• I might feel more inspired to polish a piece to submit to a conference if I wanted a critique;
• etcetera

“What if…?” It’s a phrase familiar to writers as we plot. It opens doors for our characters and our stories.

But what if you use “what if” on yourself, as well?

What if when you have negative thoughts you aren’t just depressed or depleted…What if you’re wrong?

More from Carol Grannick

• Three Things You Need to Become a More Resilient Writer
• How to Dispute Pessimistic Thinking
• Wherever You Are, That’s Where You’ll Start
• Jealous Much?
• Clean Your Closet – It Might Be Good for Writer’s Block!