Daniel Pink explains Barbara Fredrickson's research showing positive emotions broaden thinking while negative ones narrow it. The key finding: when positive emotions outnumber negative ones by roughly 3 to 1, people flourish and perform better. Pink argues salespeople should ditch the poker face and maintain genuine positivity instead.
Positivity is one of those things that makes my eyes roll, right? I just want to just run from the room when I even hear that word. It seems kind of empty, light, kind of goofy, and you know what? The evidence is there. The evidence is there. There's a woman named Barbara Fredrickson who's at the University of North Carolina who's done some really astonishing research here. We can talk about positive emotions and negative emotions. Let's talk about some positive emotions: amusement, gratitude, awe, hope, passion, interest, contentment, joy. Our lives have positive emotions. Our lives also have negative emotions, right? Negative emotions like anger. Disgust, contempt, embarrassment, fear, guilt, sadness, shame. To me, when I see this list, I always think, God, negative emotions are so much more interesting. So our lives are a mix of this. So what she wanted to find out is, what's the right mix? We all have positive emotions and negative emotions have different functions. We need them both, right? What does positive emotions do? She says positive emotions broaden people's actions, ideas about possible actions, opening our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and making us more receptive and creative, right? Positive emotions open us up. What do negative emotions do? They narrow us. Negative emotions are incredibly important in many different realms. Negative emotions warn us that something's going awry. Get out of that burning building. Get out of that bad relationship. Get out of that crappy job. Negative emotions say, wait a second, there's something wrong here. I need to fix it. So they both serve a very powerful purpose. But what's the right mix? So what she did, she did this incredible piece of research with a guy named Marcelo Losada, who's a Brazilian mathematician, and the math on this is unbelievably complex. She had people record their positive emotions and their negative emotions over the course of a very long time, right? People were cataloging their emotions, their positive and their negative emotions. Now, see if you can guess what happened. How were people doing when their negative emotions were greater than their positive emotions? People feeling good and effective? No, not that surprising. What about when it was 1 to 1? 1 positive emotion for 1 negative emotion? 1 to 1. Not much different from having more negatives than positives. That's pretty interesting, right? It gets a little more interesting. What happens to people's effectiveness, their sense of well-being, when they have 2 positive emotions for every 1 negative emotion? A 2-to-1 ratio of positive to negative. How are people doing? Not any better. Pretty interesting, right? Pretty alarming for certain Brits, right? If you have a 1-to-2 ratio of negative to positive emotions, you're not doing any better than someone who has predominantly negative emotions. It's kind of interesting, right? What she found is that there was a tipping point. There was a tipping point in the ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. That tipping point occurred at 2.9013. That's— I mean, this is very sophisticated math that Losada did in this paper. It's a very interesting paper if you want to Google it. So, because most of us don't need to go to the 4th decimal point, they rounded it up to 3 to 1. And what she found is that effectiveness and flourishing occur when positive emotions Outnumber negative emotions by 3 to 1. That's a lot. That's more positive than a lot of us are comfortable with. That's more positive than I'm used to, all right? This changed my view of things. And the research on this is pretty clear, that when positive emotions outnumber negative emotions by 3 to 1, people are more— people flourish in their sense of subjective well-being. People are able to bounce back from rejection. People are more effective in their encounters at work and at home. 3 to 1. Now, there's a ceiling on this. I'm glad there's a ceiling on it, right? But you know what? It's actually an incredibly high ceiling. It's 11 to 1. I know. Isn't that amazing? If you go beyond 11 to 1 in your ratio of positive to negative emotions, you're in la-la land, right? So, so, and so this gives us some hints about what to do here. We have this notion that in sales, or especially in negotiations, that we want to be very poker-faced. Go and put poker-faced, neutral, right? Maybe a little stern. And you know what? That's the wrong way to do it. You're more likely to get a deal if you're a little bit positive. I know it hurts a little, doesn't it? The first one beforehand sort of overturns a lot of like the conventional wisdom of, you know, from some self-help book. This one actually affirms it. But it's very, very— it's very, very interesting. And there's certain kinds of practices that people can do to raise the salience of their positive emotions. There's some fascinating research now out of Stanford on the importance of awe. Stopping and experiencing feelings of awe can make us feel like we have more time. There's a huge amount of research on gratitude, for instance, that if you stop at the end of the day and write down 3 things that you're grateful for, you're going to have higher level of well-being, higher level of effectiveness.
