Toxic Positivity?

The truth is that stress doesn't come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about these circumstances.

-Andrew J Bernstein

Coming out of a pandemic is providing me with a lot of things to think about. As I wrote about in my previous blog, there is so much reflection and resorting to do in terms of what we choose to take on and how we choose to reframe our lives moving forward based on what we've learned over the last 18 months. The topic I've been rolling over and over in my head this week is the concept of toxic positivity and how we respond to stressful or challenging situations. I started down this road on our SIP day when I popped into the classroom of a teacher who was watching Ron Clark, the keynote speaker for the Paris Virtual Institute. 

For those who have not watched Ron Clark speak, he is very positive and energetic, like super positive and energetic. I did not hear much of what he had to say because I was caught up in what this teacher had to say about what he had to say. She described his message as toxic positivity. What she took away was that no matter what you are feeling, you need to be positive all the time, and if you are not positive, you need to correct yourself. She felt that this was not a realistic message and it invalidated the feelings of negative we sometimes have about the challenges we are facing. Later, I spoke with a couple of other teachers who raved about the message he had delivered, so I have one teacher saying they would never work for the guy, and others saying they would go work for him tomorrow. 

I was stumped. Is Ron Clark toxically positive? Am I toxically positive? When is positivity toxic? How can I lead a team who appear to need very different responses to challenging times? A few days later, I'm cleaning out my inbox of all of the unsolicited emails I get because educator emails are so easy to harvest from school websites and all of the places we share it to get free stuff for our schools and classrooms, and I come across this article specifically addressing toxic positivity. 

While I don't believe the picture it paints of teaching in 2021 is a stroke for stroke replica of what we are facing here, I do know that teaching in 2021 is very different than teaching in 2019 (again, see my last post). I also know that many teachers in this building struggled immensely last year, and while this year is going far better in many regards, the scars of last year are not fully healed, and like all injuries, if you continue to aggravate the injury, healing takes even longer. 

The best that I can tell is that toxic positivity is simply being positive no matter what and never acknowledging the negative. It is a superficial kind of optimism. It makes sense because toxic negativity is being negative no matter what and never acknowledging the positive. We all instinctively understand those two polar opposite concepts, and as long as we are somewhere in the realistic and pragmatic middle, we are fine. We are able to acknowledge both the negative and positive aspects of our lives fairly accurately and engage in constructive conversations about how to make improvements without feeling defensive and we can celebrate positives without feeling like we are sweeping our warts under the rug (mixed metaphor alert). I think the real problem comes when we find ourselves at one of these poles. When someone has reached a level of positivity or negativity that is so deep that they cannot even acknowledge the presence of the other quality, any trace of the other quality will seem toxic to us. If we are so relentlessly positive that we refuse to acknowledge even the smallest amount of negative, anyone who points out a flaw is going to feel toxically negative, even if they are actually being very fair and reasonable. The same is true in reverse.

Because I think almost everything in life has an analog in sports, I will end with this analogy. When I see a coach whose team is doing everything right, hustling and doing their absolute best to execute the game plan, but they are just outmatched by a more talented opponent, I expect the coach to encourage them, to tell them they are doing great because they are. They are doing everything in their power and giving it everything they have in spite of the challenge, and that is an amazing thing for anyone to do in any circumstance. The coach isn't telling them they are doing great because the coach doesn't understand how scoring works. Everyone at the game knows the score. What good comes from rehashing what everyone already knows? The coach isn't ignorant of the challenge they are up against, but focusing the message on the difficulty of the challenge doesn't accomplish anything. Of course, there are some players who will look at the scoreboard and see that the deficit is too great and say to themselves that the coach is full of garbage for telling them they are doing a great job and to keep working hard. They will quit, maybe not literally, but in their mind, they have thrown in the towel. They have reached the point of toxic negativity. Nothing positive the coach has to say is going to have any credibility with them. Other players will take the encouragement for what it is, a validation of their effort against incredible odds, a validation of their determination to never quit no matter how hard the fight. It isn't about the coach's message; it is about the mindset of the player and how they choose to respond to the exact same circumstance. What kind of players do we want to be?