Popular culture and business circles alike are abuzz about the power of optimism. Optimism is currently being hailed as the undisputed key to success. But optimism is a very slippery slope when it comes to success and today, we are going to look at why, as well as look at what you can do to avoid falling down that slope, straight into failure.

Optimism is really a mental attitude. It is a mental attitude of focusing on the positive and believing in a positive outcome. It is to expect that good things will happen and that things will work out for the best. Optimists tend to see negative, unwanted things as being an opportunity to learn and get better, leading to even better outcomes. Optimism is undeniably linked to lower stress levels, better physical health, and higher persistence when pursuing goals. So, how can optimism oppose your success?

1. It is very easy to slip into toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is when we use positivity as a coping mechanism to avoid anything that causes us to feel negative emotions. It is when we use positivity to deny, suppress, disown, reject and run away from anything we consider negative. You can think of toxic positivity as a person using positivity like a buoy that they are desperately clinging to, in order to keep themselves out of reality, because subconsciously they think that they cannot handle the negative aspects of reality. It is a form of willful denial and it is an extreme form of avoidant resistance. Toxic positivity can and does doom a person. It guarantees a negative outcome that we will not see ourselves approaching until it is too late. To learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Toxic Positivity.

2. Optimism can make it so that you do not look at negative realities and therefore do not respond appropriately to them. To be successful, you need to believe that something can work. You need to be able to face many challenges and persevere, even when other people think it is impossible. But success is not about covering your eyes and ears and tuning everything negative out in the unresponsive pursuit of what you are trying to accomplish. To succeed, you need to be able to look the devil in the face so to speak. You need to be able to look at and accept all kinds of negative realities you encounter on the path to success and be very responsive to them. You need to be able to course correct and quickly. In fact, your success or failure depends on this. If you simply keep blinders on to the negative, only focus on the positive and keep taking actions according to your belief that good will happen, you will not make the changes necessary to succeed.

3. Optimism can make it so you jump to the solution without fully understanding the problem or without listening and sympathizing. Many optimists are averse to emotional discomfort. This makes it so they don’t want to spend time really diving into and dissecting and understanding the problem. They would rather jump to the solution. The problem is, when you don’t take the time to really fully perceive and understand the full scope of the problem, any solution you come up with, will not be the right one. It certainly won’t be adequate. And the solutions you put forth will simply prove that you don’t understand, which reflects poorly on you. This means, your solutions won’t work. That is a recipe for failure. Obviously, your solutions wont work if you aren’t providing a solution that speaks to the actual problem.

4. Optimism can put you in the illusion of invulnerability. When it comes to success, you need to be in reality about your strengths and weaknesses. Believing ourselves to be invulnerable causes us to make poor decisions and not account for our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Just ask any business owner who didn’t account for war time rationing to cause their only supply to dry up. To succeed, you must recognize and account for your vulnerabilities.

5. When optimism makes it so that you dismiss negative emotions, negative experiences, negative feedback and negative realities, you lose trust in yourself and lose the trust of others. And a big part of this is that you will give false reassurances both to yourself and to others. Losing trust and giving false reassurance is a very, very big problem. Why? Firstly, when it comes to success, it is necessary to trust yourself. But you cannot trust yourself if you are so focused on the positive that you are not in reality; and because of it, you lead yourself and others in the wrong direction and do the wrong things. You also can’t trust yourself when you are denying, suppressing disowning and negating the parts of yourself that contain what you judge as negative thoughts, emotions and personal truths.
   Second, you cannot succeed alone. If you act in a way that causes you to lose people’s trust (which you will if your optimism leads to problems) and if you falsely reassure them, you will end up alone. Not only alone, often being opposed rather than supported. Anyone who succeeds, succeeds in part because of the other people that join forces with them. Business partners, coaches, employees, independent contractors, volunteers, teammates, co-workers, managers, friends, family members etc. And trust is the holy grail of relationships. When people lose trust for you, they start to look out for their own best interests against you. They start to play zero sum games and not want to be in it with you anymore. Without this critical support, your success will be limited.

6. If optimism blinds you, it prevents improvement, growth and personal expansion. Both, are necessary for success. It is in the acknowledging of the negatives, as well as the exploration of them, that we are able to gain the awareness and insights necessary to understand the problem, define what we want, brainstorm the right solution, make the right decision, course correct and by doing so, level up. Every great story of success is about what was decided and done when things got tough. Success is defined by what happened when someone was face to face with something seriously negative and rather than succumbing to blind optimism, met that negative situation head on and used the ways they had to change things to become better and to grow.

7. Optimism can impair your critical thinking ability. Critical thinking is about analyzing information to make a sound judgement or decision. Critical thinking requires you to be able to question, evaluate, and interpret information in a rational and unbiased way. It allows you to identify and understand issues, including hidden ones. It enables you to make sound judgements, challenge assumptions, discern, seek feedback, adjust to new information and change your mind and actions in a way to brings about positive results. You cannot do this if you are wearing rosy colored sunglasses and have a positive bias. Positivity bias prevents critical thinking and clouds sound judgement and thus undermines your success.

8. Optimism can cause you to assess risks poorly. When people are too optimistic, they become blind to and minimize the potential risks involved in decisions and actions. They underestimate the likelihood that something bad will happen and overestimate the likelihood that something good will happen. Because of this, they don’t take the steps to mitigate the risks. They also tend to be impulsive. And this increases the likelihood that they will end up with huge problems on their hands, if not fail completely. If you need any proof, look no further than the 2008 market crash.

So that you can understand this better, here is an example. Sergey was a little boy with a very successful father. He knew early on that he had big shoes to fill. His father was also an alcoholic, who would sometimes get very violent when he was drinking. His mother coped with her husband’s dictatorial and dysfunctional behavior with denial. She would make excuses for her husband to make things seem different and better than they were. And when bad things were happening, she would focus on something else that made her feel good. Sergey’s mother had no tolerance for negativity of any kind. Whenever Sergey was upset, she would invalidate his reasons for being upset and counter his upset with positives. She loved to say things like “Sergey, don’t be a cup half empty person.” And “When someone is able to take away your happiness, it means you’ve given them your power.” And “keep your face to the sunshine and you can’t see a shadow.” And “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” After struggling with this as a young boy, Sergey eventually internalized and adopted his mother’s coping mechanism.

Fast forward many years later, Sergey is now a business partner in a budding bagel company. As a self-defined, undeterred optimist, Sergey promised his business partner that as of two years ago, they would be making enough net income to double his salary. He also promised that because he knew so many people in the café and coffee shop industry that within the first year, they would have a minimum of 50 contracts. He also reassured his business partner that his absolute expertise is hiring and managing teams. Unofficially, Sergey has taken over the role of COO. Fast forward to today, all of Sergey’s optimistic predictions and promises have not come to fruition (in fact, things have been getting steadily worse) because his optimism has blinded him and has set him on a course for failure.

In his first year with the company, he found another company that operates refrigerated trucks. He interviewed the business owner and really liked his charismatic, go-getter nature. He got into a trial contract with the trucking company to bring his bagels to shops. During that trial, coffee shops were calling left and right saying that the product was molding. It was a huge financial loss for the company. A few employees started expressing concern about the shipping process being the cause of the issue. They had heard from shop owners that the bagels were arriving warm, meaning that they had not been shipped properly. Sergey felt instantly overwhelmed by the negative emotion he felt. Wanting to feel better immediately, he called the owner of the trucking business and was reassured that the shipping process was the best in the country. Sergey immediately swallowed the reassurance, wanting to avoid the discomfort of both conflict and a potential negative reality he didn’t feel up to facing. So, he simply turned around and fed the rest of the company that reassurance and offered the shop owners free product to compensate for their losses. He believed everything would turn out well. After all, he considers himself lucky. Because of this, Sergey not only continued to use the refrigerated truck company, he signed a yearlong contract with them and the product continued to mold and 3/4ths of the shop owners cancelled their contracts. Sergey had to take out a huge business loan. So now, both he and his business partner are in massive debt.

Sergey has also created a toxic work environment. Because Sergey has no tolerance for negativity, he sees it as an unsuccessful mindset, no one in the company feels they can be honest with him. Nor do they trust him to do the right thing any more. They are expected to be up-beat and excited no matter the circumstances, this includes when things go badly in the business and when tragedies are happening in their personal lives. Because of this, employees have been losing morale and burning out. Their concerns are dismissed to the point where employees don’t have what is necessary in order to succeed. And so, they quit. Because Sergey believes in them, people are promoted to positions they absolutely can’t handle, creating a companywide shortage of people in managerial positions. Conflicts are happening all the time and now, employees feel they must escalate by banding together to confront Sergey as a united force. When this happens, rather than addressing the concerns, Sergey points to the positive things he feels he has done for the business, such as better company communications platforms and re-structuring and introducing the idea of commission for product contracts.

Sergey has a dream of their bagels being in every supermarket across America. What Sergey doesn’t know, is that his business partner is fed up with the damage his blind optimism and toxic positivity is doing. And has lost faith in Sergey’s ability to succeed with his dangerous optimism. So much so that he is looking into options for either buying Sergey out or selling his share of the company. He has attended many business conferences and watched speakers talk about the importance of optimism and even point to studies proving it. But here he is, and instead of becoming more successful due to Sergey’s optimism, the company is sinking because of Sergey’s optimism.

Some questions to really explore in order to make sure that your optimism is helpful rather than hurtful is: “If there was anything I was trying to avoid with my positivity, what would it be?” And “If I knew that I shouldn’t be optimistic in this situation, what would I be doing differently than I am doing now?” And “If I were missing or dismissing information based on my optimism, what information might I be missing or dismissing?” And “Is there anything negative that anyone around me is saying, that I am not taking seriously?” And “If I couldn’t be optimistic, what would I be so afraid of?”

The most successful people are realists. Because reality is your axis of power. Realists see possibilities, even extraordinarily lofty ones, as one part of reality. They see both the positive and the negative aspects of reality. They are able to hold an optimistic and realistic perspective simultaneously. They value the pessimistic viewpoint because the pessimistic view point exposes the downsides, challenges and setbacks that must be confronted. Aiming high causes you to go the furthest possible on the path to success. But being rooted in reality, enables you to navigate that path to success. Use optimism as a tool and in the right way. If you want to succeed, metaphorically speaking, you need to look at both the bright side and the dark side and decide what to do with the information contained in both.