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When feeling down means looking up

Review: Not conventional wisdom

When feeling down means looking up


"The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism To Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak"
By Julie K. Norem, Ph.D.
Basic Books, 240 pages, to be released September 4

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- This one will drive the "happy talk" people to babble, send those Hug Club guys out on strangulation missions and upset the Dale Carnegie folks a lot.

Wellesley College psychology professor Julie K. Norem in "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking" has finally said what so many of us have suspected but didn't dare to suggest -- negative thinking can really help you out.

Like all good psych people, of course, she gets right down to the coining of a term: "defensive pessimism." And we'll let the good doctor tell you how she conceptualizes the stuff.

Defensive pessimists expect the worst, and spend lots of time and energy mentally rehearsing, in vivid, daunting detail, exactly how things might go wrong. Before a business presentation, they worry that PowerPoint might fail, that the microphone will go dead, that -- worst of all -- they will stare out at the audience and go blank. Before a dinner party they imagine that the new neighbors will clash with the old, and the sushi will give everyone food poisoning.

The Eeyores of the career world are sitting up a tad straighter in their (undoubtedly unsteady and about-to-break) chairs, you know. What Norem is saying in this book is that careerists who are predisposed to worry about things often do -- and certainly can try to -- use their forethought (or fore-worry) to head off things that really might go haywire.

  QUICKVOTE
graphic Which camp do you feel you naturally fall closer to in your career? -- the "defensive pessimists" or the "strategic optimists?"

The "defensive pessimists." Sounds to me like Julie Norem is making good sense.
On Mondays I'm a pessimist. By Friday I'm an optimist.
I'm a "strategic optimist" -- I use an upbeat outlook to sidestep worry and look on the bright side of things.
View Results
 

And here's Norem on all those "think positively!" people:

"Relax -- it'll all work out" -- simply isn't always true. We have to make things work for ourselves. Trying to adopt a positive outlook when we are anxious -- an outlook that discounts our anxiety -- can backfire. An anxious businessperson who denies or ignores her anxiety before a presentation actually increases the likelihood that she'll stutter, fumble and lose her train of thought before a live audience; an anxious host who doesn't keep in mind the possibility of food poisoning may leave the fish out too long and wind up chauffeuring his guests to the hospital.

This genius Norem -- the new defender of those of us who know she's right and the Pollyanna's are wrong -- goes about organizing "defensive pessimism" so that it is, as she puts it in her second chapter, "a strategy, not a symptom."

If you're one of those infuriating optimists we all encounter daily in work -- you know who you are, and "cockeyed" is too nice a term for you -- you nevertheless will find that Norem isn't declaring your misguided sitcom outlook to be wholly nonsensical, even though it is. Instead, she credits the natural inclination of many to be upbeat.

"Bill," she writes, "engages in what I call 'strategic optimism': He sets high expectations before an important situation or event and then actively avoids dwelling on how things will go. ... Bill distracts himself not from actual anxiety but from potential anxiety. ... It might seem that any responsible author ought to be devoting pages to explaining how to adopt that strategy rather than touting the benefits of negative thinking."

She soldiers on, though, opening up a rare clearing in the forest for her "defensive pessimist" in chapters titled "Taking Cover: The Avoider and the Self-Handicapper," "No Size Fits All" and "Dark Side, Bright Side, My Side: Prospects for Change."

"What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error."
— Raymond Aron, quoted in "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking"

Fine, pithy little quotes -- including Mark Twain's "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt" -- open the chapters. And in one, "What It's All About: The Problem of Anxiety," Norem confronts, head-on, what she sees as the psychological underpinnings of her concept. Despite our kidding here, she's not suggesting that a naturally sunny person go out and get worried in a hurry. Instead, she's proposing that naturally less-than-sunny types learn to appreciate and control their concerns.

Defensive pessimism isn't different from good planning in terms of the ultimate results. It is different because of its role in getting to those results: Defensive pessimism is the process that allows anxious people to do good planning. They can't plan effectively until they control their anxiety. They have to go through their worst-case scenarios and exhaustive mental rehearsal in order to start the process of planning, carry it through effectively and then get from planning to doing.

There are some guidelines here for determining whether you fit the "defensive pessimist" approach. In a series of statements you can rate for how true or false they are for you, Norem has you consider several issues.

"Don't ever become a pessimist ... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun."
— Robert Heinlein, quoted in "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking"

•   "I often start out expecting the worst, even though I will probably do OK."

•   "I try to picture how I could fix things if something went wrong."

•   "In these (business) situations, sometimes I worry more about looking like a fool than really doing well."

•   "Considering what can go wrong helps me to prepare."

Maybe most valuable to natural "defensive pessimists" is Norem's insight into how they may have to deal at times with the smiley crowd. "Defensive pessimists," she writes, "may need to tread lightly lest their negative thinking alienate, discourage or depress those around them."

And finally, Norem makes the point that that good old positive thinking isn't under attack here. "Arguing for negative thinking under certain circumstances," she writes, "is very different from arguing against positive thinking. Defensive pessimists ... do not need to be cured of their defensive pessimism; indeed, defensive pessimism is already the treatment for the anxiety that ails them."

If you're a "defensive pessimist," you'll read with no small amount of envy Norem's description of how her "strategic optimist" Bill misses a plane because he left too late for the airport -- but blames the traffic, not himself. The optimist she's talking about as the main counterpoint to the "defensive pessimist" is a careerist who sees "no reason for him to feel bad about himself."

"Pessimists have only pleasant surprises."
— Nero Wolfe, quoted in "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking"

So here's one for the less confident in life, the dogged, self-questioning, earnest but sometimes faltering colleague you've noticed seemed hard on herself, rarely satisfied with his performance, worried that something could derail things.

"The Positive Power of Negative Thinking" can offer that less jovial soul a chance to feel the innate value in her or his way of approaching and experiencing life and work. While not a heavy book, it does a weighty service for those who need it.

There's a lot to be said for Norem's self-described "contrarian view."

[watercooler]





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