Advice for job seekers, whether you’re pivoting careers or navigating unemployment, is often uniformly positive and unhelpfully prescriptive: “stay positive, visualise your dream job, and look on the bright side”.
As a happiness expert, I have spent years advocating for the role of fulfilment and satisfaction in our working lives. But I will also tell you that the modern obsession with positive thinking is sabotaging your career transition and your overall happiness.
Before we look at why, we need to clear up the confusion between genuine wellbeing science and toxic positivity. Fields of study such as positive psychology help us find the silver linings in stormclouds; toxic positivity instructs us to bury our heads in the sand and pretend the clouds aren’t even there. It demands that we deny, fight, or gloss over the genuine challenges life throws our way and hide it all behind a forced smile. When it comes to landing a job, this ‘head in the sand’ optimism is a major liability.
Consider the groundbreaking work of Dr Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University. In a long-term study, Oettingen tracked people transitioning into a competitive job market. The multi-decade data revealed a staggering trend: the more positively graduates fantasised about an easy, seamless transition into a great job, the fewer job offers they received, and the fewer dollars they earned two years later.
This is the opposite of what supporters of positive thinking and manifestation would have you believe. It turns out that positive thinking alone tricks the human brain. When you imagine landing the perfect role, your nervous system acts as if the goal has already been achieved which lowers your motivation to do the work required to make that goal a reality.
Instead of gambling your career and happiness on toxic positivity, here are three happiness skills that make a real difference:
Expand your perspective
Forcing yourself to “not think about what could go wrong” before an interview is a losing battle. The human brain has a negative cognitive bias designed for survival; it is naturally hardwired to scan for threats and anticipate failure. Instead of fighting it, give your brain permission to look at the negative for five minutes (e.g. “I’ll completely freeze on a question and look foolish”).
Once the timer goes off, flip the script. It’s only fair that if you spent five minutes on the worst-case scenario, you give the best-case scenario the same time. (e.g. “They love my portfolio, we click instantly, and they offer me the role”).
Lastly, remind yourself that life rarely happens at the absolute extremes. The reality is almost always somewhere in the middle (E.g. “The interview might have a couple of tough moments, but I will still be able to show my value”).
This prevents you from not only staying in worst-case scenario thinking, but also ensures you don’t hinge everything on blind optimism. It’s better to cultivate a sense of grounded preparedness.
Learn more in the book How to be Happy by Declan Edwards.
Use your character strengths
The personal development industry loves to focus on deficits. However, wellbeing research shows it’s often more advantageous to double down on what you already do exceptionally well. For example, one of my top character strengths is hope — the capacity to see a light at the end of the tunnel during a challenge and communicate that vision to a team.
That isn’t a line item on many recruiter’s checklists, but it is a high-value human skill I can confidently lean on in any interview room. Identify your top five character strengths and focus on weaving them into how you pitch your past achievements and position yourself as a great candidate.
Strengthen your emotional awareness and acceptance
When changing jobs, you’ll quickly realise that there are many unknowns and few guarantees. Anxiety thrives in ambiguity. As such, it’s natural that as you pursue a career change you’ll likely experience some feelings of worry, concern, overwhelm, doubt, and anxiety. Those feelings are completely warranted.
Yet, toxic positivity tells us to avoid those negative feelings. When you use toxic positivity to wrestle with your feelings (e.g. “I shouldn’t feel this nervous; I need to be more confident”), you end up judging your thoughts and feelings until they snowball. You end up feeling stressed about the fact that you’re stressed. What you resist persists. The more you fight your feelings, the louder they get. Instead, try naming the emotion without judgement: “I currently feel anxious about this career move, and that is entirely okay”.
Research from UCLA demonstrates that simply putting feelings into words immediately dampens the activity in the brain’s emotional alarm centre (the amygdala). Naming your emotions takes the sting out of them, allowing them to pass much faster than if you judge them and fight them.
Most people seeking to change their careers make the mistake of gambling their happiness on a future date: “I’ll be happy if and when I land this new job”. But this approach to success and happiness is entirely backward. Success does not cause happiness. Instead, practising the skills of happiness increases your likelihood of success.
By building happiness skills, you don’t just feel better, you show up differently. You’re more likely to showcase your best self. Stepping out of an unfulfilling role or searching for a new one requires genuine bravery. Don’t waste your energy forcing an artificial smile, manifesting or waiting for a new job to give you permission to be happy. Start training your happiness skills now, and use them to land a career you actually want.
