Why Positive Thinking Doesn’t Work for Smart Women | Joanne Grobbelaar

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Why Positive Thinking Doesn’t Work for Smart Women

You’ve already heard the advice probably around a millions times. Something has gone wrong, you say it out loud to someone who means well, and back it comes. Stay positive. Look on the bright side. It’ll all work out. You nod, because what else do you do, while a small clear voice at the back of your head says, no it won’t, not on its own, and now I feel worse for pretending. You are left feeling totally unvalidated and thinking you can’t share what’s happening.

Trust that voice that was challenging the positioning thinking advice. It reads the present moment, and the present moment is the thing you have to work with in the moment.

I want to make a case that most ‘positive thinking’ harms women like you specifically. Women who are sharp enough to see a situation for what it is. The sharper your read on what’s actually happening, the more a cheerful reframe grates against it, and some part of you knows when it’s being asked to believe something it can plainly want to believe is true.

The problem with telling yourself it’s fine

There’s a study by Joanne Wood, a psychologist at the University of Waterloo, that had people repeat the line “I am a lovable person” to themselves. The people who already felt good about themselves got a small lift from it, which is roughly what you’d expect. The people who didn’t feel good about themselves felt worse afterwards. Measurably worse than a group who’d been asked to do nothing of the sort.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s the whole thing. The affirmation didn’t fall flat. It backfired. The researchers think the line acted like a spotlight on the gap. Say “I am lovable” when part of you doubts it, and you don’t close the distance, you illuminate it. The research tells us the mind runs the claim against the evidence, finds a mismatch, and hands you the mismatch.

This is what nobody tells you about the whole reframe-your-thoughts industry. It works beautifully on people who don’t really need it, and can be harmful for the ones who do.

Ten years of watching this happen

I’ve been leading a group coaching community for women in careers and business for a decade now. The Boardroom turns ten this September, and one of the strange privileges of a room like that is the pattern you start to see. The same handful of thoughts, over and over, in the mouths of women who by any external measure are doing brilliantly.

I’m not ready. I don’t have the time. I should be further along by now.

This is the part that took me years to properly understand. Telling those women the opposite never once worked. Tell a woman who feels unready that she’s completely ready and you can watch her file you under “kind, but doesn’t get it.” She has evidence. She can see the bits she hasn’t figured out yet. The problem was never that she was thinking negatively. The problem was that positive thinking gave her nothing to do with the truth she was already holding.

What flipped thinking actually is

When I trained in CBT coaching many years ago, our foundational work was based on stop trying to talk women out of their difficult thoughts, and started teaching them to flip those thoughts instead. Which sounds like the same thing and is nothing like it.

A flip keeps the hard part in. It holds the true, uncomfortable read of the situation, and adds the second thing that’s also true at the same time. This comes out of dialectical thinking, work developed by the psychologist Marsha Linehan, and the idea underneath it is that two apparently opposing truths can sit in the same sentence without either one having to lose. This is hard, and I can move anyway. I’m not where I wanted to be, and the gap is information rather than a verdict. Both halves of the sentence are true.

The reason seeing both sides of your story lands where positive thinking bounces off. There’s nothing in it for your mind to reject. You’re not asking yourself to believe a lie. You’re asking yourself to notice that the difficulty and the possibility are both real, and then to act from the second one while fully admitting the first.

What this looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Take “I’m not ready,” because it’s the one I hear most.

Positive thinking says, of course you’re ready, you’ve absolutely got this. The parts you haven’t worked out yet come and stand front and centre, so the positive thinking approach skids off and you trust yourself a little less. The flip goes somewhere else entirely. I’m not ready, and I was never going to feel ready before I started, because ready is something I become on the way, not a state I arrive at beforehand. Nothing there is false. It clearly points to a door and an opportunity to take a different path.

Another sentence I hear often “I should be further along by now,” which often sits with a particular kind of quiet shame attached. Positive thinking says you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, and it reads like a fridge magnet, so you dismiss it. The flip holds the disappointment where it is. I’m not as far as I hoped. The distance you see and fact check (fact checking is key and vital) is data about what to do next week, not proof of anything about yourself. You get to keep the honest feeling and still find your feet.

That’s the shift. You can feel it happen as you read, which is exactly why it works when the ‘just’ positive thinking pep talk doesn’t.

The point isn’t to feel better. It’s to move.

I’m not handing you a nicer script to recite. Flipped thinking isn’t positive thinking with better manners. The goal was never a warmer feeling in your chest. The goal is that you’re able to act, from a sentence you actually believe, while the situation is still hard.

That distinction matters more the more capable you are. The capable women I work with don’t get stuck for want of a motivational quote. They get stuck in the gap between knowing what to do and doing it. The thing living in that gap is almost always a thought they’ve been trying to argue away instead of flip.

Argue with the thought and you stay in the gap. Flip it and you find you’ve already stepped across.

Where to start

I’ve put the flips for the thoughts I hear most into a free toolkit HERE. The common stuck sentences, and the choice of a flip for each one, the kind you can use on a Tuesday afternoon when the pep talk isn’t going to touch it.

Download Flip The Thinking at joannegrobbelaar.com, and start with whichever thought sounded most like your own voice as you read this.

Joanne Grobbelaar, a Manchester-based resilience architect with a background in technology, argues that positive thinking fails capable women because it asks them to override an accurate read of reality, which the mind resists. She teaches flipped thinking instead, a dialectical style approach, drawing on a hard truth and the possibility of action in the same sentence, so a person can move without pretending the difficulty away.

Frequently asked questions

Why doesn’t positive thinking work?

Positive thinking often fails because it asks you to believe something that contradicts what you can clearly see. Research by psychologist Joanne Wood found that repeating positive self-statements made people with low self-esteem feel worse, not better, because the statement highlighted the gap between the claim and their actual self-view. For anyone with an accurate read on a difficult situation, a cheerful reframe tends to increase distrust rather than confidence.

What is the difference between positive thinking and reframing a thought?

Positive thinking replaces a difficult thought with a pleasant one and asks you to believe it. Flipped thinking, which draws on dialectical approach, keeps the difficult thinking or truth intact and adds a second truth alongside it, so both can be real at once. The first asks you to deny reality. The second asks you to act within it, which is why it holds up under pressure when positive thinking collapses.

Can positive thinking make some people feel worse?

Yes. A study led by Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo found that people with low self-esteem who repeated the phrase “I am a lovable person” felt worse afterwards than those who did not. The affirmation appeared to remind them of the distance between the statement and how they actually felt, making the gap more painful rather than closing it.

What can I do instead of positive thinking when I feel stuck?

Rather than arguing yourself out of a difficult thought, hold it and add what is also true. If the thought is “I’m not ready,” the flip is “I’m not ready, and readiness comes on the way rather than beforehand.” This keeps you honest about the difficulty while giving you a next action you can actually take, which is where positive thinking usually leaves a gap.

RESOURCES AND NEXT STEPS

If you’re looking for more support and guidance, here are some valuable resources:

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