At a time when it can seem like everything’s going wrong at once in the world, it can be challenging or even dysfunctional to search for reasons to be cheerful. Pressuring yourself and others to remain upbeat in the face of what would reasonably upset anyone has even earned its own buzzword: toxic positivity. During the pandemic, studies, articles and books emerged denigrating it. Indeed, suppressing unpleasant feelings of sadness, anger or fear with a cloak of conjured-up happy thoughts can only make things worse.

On the other hand, negativity can be exhausting. In the workplace, the show must go on despite disruptions in the business and the world. This is when people leaders need to tap their EQ. Reframing a daunting situation in an authentic, mindful way will not only improve a leader’s personal state of being, it will also help them improve well-being and productivity in the people they manage. 

How to do it? Turns out there’s abundant science for that. Michael E. Frisina, Ph.D., founder and CEO of the Frisina Group, a coaching consortium specializing in performance enhancement as well as organizational development, asserts that a state of healthy positivity can be achieved by thinking with our “upper brain,” or the prefrontal cortex, which sits behind the forehead. “This is where your innovation is, this is where stress management is,” said Frisina, who co-authored Leading With Your Upper Brain: How to Create the Behaviors That Unlock Performance Excellence.

A 2021 study published by the National Library of Medicine, inspired by the impact the pandemic was having on global enterprise, found that positive leadership promotes employee engagement. “The more difficult the situation is, the more leaders need to demonstrate positivity,” the study’s authors wrote. They suggested managers be trained in positive leadership approaches, which “can provide additional return on investment by improving employees’ positive emotional experience.” 

These training programs, the authors wrote, should guide managers in implementing positive leadership, including “such aspects as creating a positive-emotion-oriented team atmosphere, promoting positive relationships among employees, [and] developing positive communication among employees.”

Upstairs, Downstairs in Your Brain 

In everyone’s brain, said Frisina in an interview with From Day One, “resides the capacity to choose one direction over the other.” Upper-brain thinking is characterized by planning, expression, and moderating social behavior. Lower-brain thinking, characterized by fear, loss and doubt, is experienced in the brain’s limbic system, residing beyond the prefrontal cortex.

“This part of the brain–the lower brain–is built for survival,” Frisina writes in his book, which he co-authored with his brother Robert. The lower brain helps human beings manage fear in response to external threats, producing reactions of various kinds, including mental (e.g., confusion), emotional (anger) and physical (fight, flight or freeze). “When your team members spend their productive efforts surviving at work rather than thriving at work, performance suffers.”  

While lower brain thinking serves a function that is useful in particular times and places, Frisina says actively engaging in upper-brain thinking on a longer-term basis is better for mental and emotional fitness, which will in turn improve performance. Leaders can do this and set a good example for workers, but they can also intentionally train their employees in upper-brain thinking as well, making it “contagious,” as an article in Harvard Business Review suggested last year.

How Managers Can Inspire Productive Thinking on a Team

To retain upper-brain thinking while acting as a manager, Frisina suggests that leaders start and end every meeting with what’s going well, set clear expectations and reasonable deadlines, and communicate priorities. 

They can also “reframe a stressful project” by asking workers to identify the pain points. Once that has been established, the leaders should ask: “Is what you are thinking about in your control or out of your control?” The effect of the follow-up question is a shift away from “skeptical, confusing, fear-provoking ‘what if’ thinking,” Frisina said, and into “productive, energized thinking.” Instead of focusing on “the negative outcome they want to avoid,” team members can focus on the “positive outcome they will create.”

Frisina also suggests that, when employees ask questions, leaders should lead them to answers by describing the desired outcome and asking questions of their own that facilitate discovery. When people are successful, that needs to be celebrated, too, he says. 

“Get into a flow of recognizing wins and success stories, in conversations, at every meeting, as a part of every process improvement initiative,” said Frisina. “The more we emphasize what’s going well, the more likely people are to stay in their upper brain–and the more likely success is to be repeated.”

A Case Study of Positivity in Practice

Andrew Wade, CEO of OrthoSC, an orthopedic clinic with six locations in South Carolina, says he became a devotee to Frisina’s approach after hiring him as a coach in 2020. “Upper-brain thinking” has spurred transformative change in his organization, he told From Day One.

“The environment that we create really does have a physical, a very real physiological effect on people,” Wade said, referring to leaders in general. In a negative environment, “people will literally have higher blood pressure, they will experience more stress-related illness, [and they will have] a harder time in their marriage and their parenting relationships [and] in their community.”

During the first few months of the pandemic, an unprecedentedly stressful time for healthcare workers, Wade began to prioritize positive thinking and bring it to the workplace. He recognized that, in his organization, leadership requires what he calls an “influential, relationship-driven” approach. If he was going to expect good customer service out of his employees, which requires that they be consistently pleasant, he had to set an example.

“I do not have the authoritative leadership, if you will, to just be that CEO who issues a memo from on high and expects everything to just happen the way I set it,” said Wade. “Sometimes that lends itself to it being harder to get things done because you’re building consensus [and] you’re motivating [employees] to move–you’re not kicking them or shoving them forward.”

Reshaping the company culture into one with more positivity had to begin with his own outlook and disposition. “If something sucks, it starts with the mirror,” he said. “If I’m not showing up at my best, then I’m not going to be able to help my team show up at their best and we’re not going to be able to  collectively function in unison to deliver our best for the people who are entrusting their care to us.”

The Role of Empathy and Listening

If leaders can stay in upper-brain mode, which Frisina further describes as “a state of positivity, openness, engagement and creativity,” he said, they’re less likely to frighten, stress out or even shut down employees. 

Whether you’re a worker or a manager, you might feel yourself dipping into lower-brain thinking, but there are ways to pull yourself out of it. When engaging with a coworker or client and things just aren’t clicking, Frisina suggests taking a walk in the other person’s shoes. Think: What is driving their behavior? What pressures do they face? What do they need to get from this partnership? How might they be perceiving you? It’s often OK to verbalize those types of questions.

“Being inquisitive is powerful,” said Frisina. “Too often we go into situations thinking we already know the answer. But this kind of self-righteousness makes us rigid, which sets us up for conflict and failure. We should really approach conversations with a what-can-I-learn-from-you attitude. But also, asking questions opens minds, hearts, and doors. It shows people you care about them. They are far more likely to settle down, open up, and be more willing to cooperate and collaborate.”

All of this starts with mindfulness, which Frisina writes in his book helps a person “regulate your own thoughts, function as the guardian of your team’s collective thinking, and increase your leadership effectiveness.” Foundationally, mindfulness is a strict focus on the present moment, or in the case of work, what you are thinking right now. 

“It is a technique of calming your mind, reducing stress, increasing focus, reducing distraction, avoiding multitasking, eliminating disruptive behaviors, and being mentally and physically present with people,” Frisina writes. 

Bringing oneself into a state of mindfulness can be accomplished by periodically taking brief pauses throughout the day “to slow your thinking,” Frisina suggests in his book. Mindful breathing exercises can help too. All of this, he writes, “will bring your thoughts under your direct and conscious control.”

Making People Feel Valued

Mindfulness, in fact, is what powers the positive-thinking approaches to people management that leadership coach April Sabral teaches in her book The Positive Effect: A Retail Leader’s Guide to Changing the World.  “You have to become very self-aware as a leader,” said Sabral, who has worked for such brands as Starbucks, Apple, and the Gap. “You have the lever to ignite those positive emotions in people.”

Sabral says a key to being positive with people is through the radical acceptance of who they are, which helps bring a better understanding of how to manage them and insight into the entire kaleidoscope of their capabilities. “People will work with you, but they won’t work for you,” she said. “When I managed people, those who felt supported did the best job, they got the best results. It’s really about how you make people feel valued.”

Achieving radical acceptance of others requires more listening than talking, which could be out of a manager’s comfort zone. “It sounds really basic, but do you know how many people don’t know how to listen?” Sabral said. “A top skill that leaders need to learn is how to ask questions.”

These skills will be valuable when a leader or a worker enters into what Sabral calls “a negative spiral” of thinking, which will affect everyone around them. But there are ways out of it. She observes that it’s not possible to “stay positive, you have to be positive.” So one way to climb back into a positive state is to have a list of things that make you feel good, Sabral suggests. 

“It could be anything, something big or small. It could be walking around the block or listening to your favorite song,” Sabral said. “When you’re in a negative spiral and you’re recognizing that, do something that makes you feel good so you can get back to neutral and then recognize your negative thinking and start working on it.”

Sabral has trained leaders in positive thinking at L’Oréal, Victoria’s Secret, Jimmy Choo, and other companies. Those she has coached have reported back to her saying their personal adoption of positive thinking has had a lasting impact, she said.

“The No. 1 thing that happens to all those team leaders is they recognize that they take ownership of igniting positive emotions in their team,” Sabral said. “They’ve become way more aware of walking into situations with that assumption that people aren’t always going to be honest with them, so their job is to remove the friction, remove the title, and start to build that positive relationship with their team.”

The Benefits for Workers

South Carolina entrepreneur Wade says Michael Frisina’s counseling of upper-brain thinking and the power of positivity has helped him get his workers–and himself–to perform like they’re “in their prime.” They’re in a better place mentally and emotionally, he says, which precisely aligns with the business’s mission of providing health care.

“If we’re going be an organization that takes care of people, that means not just the customer, but the people who are working here in the organization that are just as important,” he said. “If I’m constantly sucking the life out of people by creating an environment that’s harsh and nasty and unkind, and people are constantly worried and scared and afraid to pick their heads up, they’re not going to be able to do their best work.”

There’s nothing toxic about that, and after learning about positive thinking and seeing its benefits play out across the six locations of his company, Wade adds, reflectively: “It’s just one of those foundational things that seems like it should be so obvious, but it’s not.”

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.