The Upside of Your Darkside

Todd Kashdan: The whole notion of this book was we were unsatisfied with the field of research that's basically if we focus on people having more sunny days, then they're going to be more productive, more creative, more loving with their children, less prone to conflict if they get provoked by some obnoxious person that cuts them off on the road.

And what we thought is, it's just like farming: if every single day is sunny, you're going to have a desert, you're not going to have any crops to field, and the only way to really understand how to be fully functional as a human being in the complexities of everyday life, where you don't know how the people are going to treat you, you don't know how you're going to wake up in terms of your hormone levels, you don't know what the weather is going to be like, you don't know if someone is going to try and have a verbal argument with you in front of 50 of your co-workers – in that world you can't just study positive emotions and virtues, you need to understand other parts of your personality that are a little bit less comfortable – negative emotions, some of the darker sides of your personality - to figure what tool can I use that's most effective in the right dosage to best handle a situation. And that's what led us to this book on the upside of your dark side.

Rachel Salaman: Let's talk a bit more about some of these negative emotions, starting with anger. You say it's associated with an optimistic outlook. Could you explain that?

Todd Kashdan: People have a very demonic attitude towards anger, and I never realized how much people have hatred towards this emotion – this natural emotion that 190,000 years of evolutionary history has carved us to create this beautiful, automatic, reflexive repertoire. It's the emotional experience that we have when we feel that there's some obstacle in the way of meaningful goals, there's something frustrating us that's preventing us from getting where we want to be. And so anger is incredibly useful, and how it leads to an optimistic outlook is it's through, "I'll express my feelings openly, such that people will know you can't trample on me and I'd like to be treated differently." It's a negative emotion because it's uncomfortable, but a healthy emotion because it gets you towards the outcomes that are desirable to you.

Rachel Salaman: It's not comfortable seeing someone else get angry, especially in a work environment, so how can we express our anger in a way that doesn't make other people feel uncomfortable but is still useful?

Todd Kashdan: There is no simple solution to this. I'm just going to suggest a couple of ideas, because the one thing that's important and so difficult about being happy – why it's an impossible goal – is because we can't control other people's reactions to us.

Now, in terms of how do you express anger so that the other person can listen to what you have to say and maybe alter the situation or the behavior – one of the things that I suggest is revealing that it's very uncomfortable to talk about your anger in the first place. Now, this is very difficult for men in particular because of how they're socialized, but one thing we know is expressing your anger to someone that you believe is of equal power or of higher status than yourself is difficult – it's uncomfortable – and there's great benefit in revealing this vulnerability before you express your anger.

And I'll just give you an example. When you ask them for permission, their defenses come down because they're like, "Oh, what can I do to help you?" And now you can tell them. You don't have to experience rage, you could just experience annoyance and a pissed-off attitude, which is a variant of anger, and let them know exactly what's bothering you.

But here is the key about this: you've got to focus on what happened that made you angry, not the person that made you angry. As soon as you focus on the person, they're going to get defensive and they're not going to respond to your concerns. And there's another important piece which is what we know from the science – and this is really important for your listeners – is that when you're transitioning from being in a good mood and then shift into that, you get upset about what someone said or what someone did, so there's like a trigger that happened in the room. That is the most effective moment to express your anger, because they know that you're not an angry person, you're actually a happy-go-lucky person that has moments where you are human and you get upset when people disrespect you.

So let's say you're in a business meeting, and basically you're just talking about the rollout of a new product, or you're talking about that the budget has been dropped 20 percent this year, and you're thinking about where should we make cuts and do we have to get to the point of cutting some of our employees, including the people that work under the people in the room. Now that's a very stressful situation, downsizing, and talking about that, and so if at the beginning of this conversation you were talking about how the last weekend went or all the products that are being worked on successfully at the company and then we transition to this conversation, people realize you're part of the team – you have good relationships with everyone – and all of a sudden when someone turns to you and says, "You know what, Todd, you have three people in particular that are performing substantially less than the other people in this room. We're thinking about the first place we should make cuts in terms of human capital might be your group."

Now you're probably going to get a little bit aroused, upset and angry. Because I've been nice and friendly for that conversation up til now, I actually have a nice license to say, "You know what, there's something wrong with that, like I have not seen those numbers, my team hasn't seen those numbers, and this is unfair for you to be bringing that up without them having a fair chance to respond to them." And everyone will take a step back for a second and say, "Whoa – where is that coming from?" because this has been very friendly up till now, and it will get people's attention, and people will more likely to be responsive and say, "You know what? Todd's got a point, because it's not like he walked into the room with a chip on his shoulder."

Rachel Salaman: So it sounds like using anger effectively, or letting yourself be angry in an effective way, is also about making sure you don't misuse your angry feelings. It's like choosing your battles almost so that people do respect it when it comes out.

Todd Kashdan: Yes – I even had one more nuance, which is just think of your emotions and sides of your personality as tools, and so when you think about their tools it's when do you pull out the tool? How much force should you put behind the tool? Is the tool appropriate for the job that you're involved in? And then, do you actually have the skills in the first place to be holding that tool or should you hand it to the person next to you who has much more experience using the hammer, the saw, the hacksaw, whatever we're talking about here? And all of those pieces are quite important.

Rachel Salaman: Another emotion you discuss in depth in the book is guilt, and you distinguish that from shame. So could you tell me how the two are different?

Todd Kashdan: They could not be further apart. Guilt is the uncomfortable feeling we have when we feel as if we acted in a way that was wrong towards other people, and so shame feels the same as guilt right away, but it motivates you to want to retreat and hide from the world, and because of that it's a bad coping strategy: it makes you want to drink excessively; it makes you want to isolate yourself; it makes you want to hide your bad work and your mistakes from your co-workers, which makes the entire business organization less effective, less efficient, and the team dynamics go down when people experience shame.

Now why that's important is when you think of how many leaders – whether you're talking about parents, the leaders of their house, you're talking about teachers in a classroom, or you're talking about managers in an organization – they use shame as a tactic to try to improve behavior; shame people, which is, "I'm going to say in front of everyone in this room what somebody did wrong and why they're not doing their share for the team."

That doesn't induce guilt, it induces shame because it's a public humiliation, and this is built into the fabric of many of the cultures. And what we know is, it does not improve performance, it basically disengages people from other people.

Rachel Salaman: Do we have control over shame and guilt – whether we feel one or the other - so can we avoid shame?

Todd Kashdan: We can, and I should say that it's not as easy thing to do, but just by me explaining the difference between these emotions is actually a little bit of intervention. One of the things that my research lab has been involved in is the importance of if we can label emotions effectively when we're stressed, we're less likely to be overwhelmed by those emotions, and thus we have more energy and attention to think of a way to find creative strategies to get out of the jam that we're in.

So if I say, in that kind of situation where my boss is embarrassing me in front of everyone in the room by saying I'm not carrying my weight, it makes me feel guilty because you know what, I'm smarter than this, I'm more creative than this. Why am I letting this person see the one thing I did wrong out of the ten? If I can label that as embarrassment and guilt, I am more likely to stop that conversation, or I can label that as I'm experiencing anger of why are you humiliating me in public, I'm more likely to say, "Can I just stop you for a second, because this is upsetting me because of the hundreds of things that I've done constructively? And I'm looking at a few people in this room who can vouch for me. You're picking the one time where I screwed up, and I'm wondering if that's an unfair assessment of what my contribution is to the team; and I'm wondering, and rather than me say it myself, if any of my teammates can speak to that."

And so my anger or my embarrassment or my guilt might motivate me to actually put a pause in the situation, and now allow myself to be steamrollered and feel as if I deserve to be steamrollered because I'm a flawed person. And so here's the thing, and this is hard to understand but so fundamentally important, when you label an emotion, it actually leads to the emotion that you're labeling. Now, you can't label anger as peacefulness, but when I'm feeling the disrespect here I could label it as anger, some bit of guilt, or some bit of shame. So there's something about your perception influences reality. Now, I'm not saying that if you think you're going to win the lotto, you're going to win the lotto, but it does have this thing where if I think that the reason that I'm getting the butterflies before giving a talk in front of 150 people is excitement and not anxiety, that will change my perspective, and thus my attitude when my name is announced and I walk in front of the room.

And science has shown this: if you can label your arousal right before giving a public presentation – the number three fear of human beings around the world is public speaking – if you can label it as excitement, you are less likely to be worried to the point that you end up flubbing your lines more often in front of a room full of people.

Rachel Salaman: You talk quite a lot in the book about anxiety, the kind of low-level anxiety that most of us feel from time to time in the workplace. The tip you've just mentioned is one really great piece of advice. What else can you tell us about effectively harnessing anxiety in the workplace so that we still feel enough to be useful but we don't get too distressed or upset other people?

Todd Kashdan: Yes, this is an interesting question, and once again there's no clear-cut answer. One thing is, we have to be careful about thinking of people as being neurotic as opposed to, as you just described, it's someone who is anxious or worried at the moment.

Now, one of the things about anxiety is that every time you're in the workplace and you're on a team, you want somebody who is going to be a little bit more worried and a little bit more anxious in the group. And the reason is, and I'm going to give a term that's going to be helpful for people to think about, defensive pessimism. So everyone hears about optimism and this is the ultimate mindset to have, and it's about expecting good things to happen in the future and that you'll be able to get there, but defensive pessimism is a very interesting thing, which is not a bad thing: it's actually quite useful. A defensive pessimistic state is where we hope for the best but expect the worst.

Now that might sound bad, but let's deconstruct that for a moment. When you have this mindset or someone else does on your team, they're thinking through what are all the possible permutations of how this could go wrong ahead of time so it doesn't actually happen in the real world. And so think of that if you're working in a technology firm and you're rolling out a new product: you're thinking about the implementation, the innovation phase. Well, I want someone to think about "Is the budget suitable in case our first marketing campaign goes awry? Do we actually know who our customer base is? Have we thought about people that are not going to respond immediately but might be, if it goes viral, the next set of people – whether this product will be appropriately targeting their needs."

And what we often find is, the defensive pessimists say people try to change their minds such that they become positive thinkers like everyone else in the room and that's a very bad thing. When you try to make a defensive pessimist in that moment optimistic, that person now holds their thoughts to themselves about what they're worried about, is less likely to reveal their creative solutions, and is less effective in communicating messages that persuade other people. All bad things, you intentionally want people to be dissenters, to be the devil's advocate, and to be the defensive pessimist to think of all the things that could go wrong so that they actually don't happen.

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Rachel Salaman: In the book you also talk about how someone else's mood can impair the performance of team members, and this is particularly useful for leaders to think about, obviously. Could you tell us about that experiment that showed this in action with a so-called team leader? I think it was an actor pretending to be a team leader, giving instructions in a happy manner and then giving the same instructions in a sad manner, and what the outcome was?

Todd Kashdan: Yes, again really important business leadership lessons that I think are undersold because we're in a culture now, because I see them all the time; people that are happiness consultants, people that are coming in to teach people how can we raise the overall vitality and engagement in the room, and what they dismiss is having negative emotions in a stressful working environment, which is any good working environment, is absolutely fundamental. And what this research found was there is a person giving who is exactly as you said. Think of it as almost like a simulacrum of Skype. And they were to give a message to a roomful of people, and half of those people were given a message – the exact same content – but the person displaying it was either enthusiastic, optimistic, kind of like a pep rally before a football game: really excited about the great work we're doing; the great work that's been done on previous projects; we're excited to have you on the team; and explain to them what the instructions were for the task and that you can do it: you're great, you're intelligent, or you wouldn't be part of this workforce in the first place.

And the other group was given the same exact content, but they were told the person was a little bit sadder: not depressed, not downtrodden, just kind of they weren't excited, they weren't happy, they weren't smiling, they were a little bit somber or serious. And they were telling them, "I'm glad you're on this work team, there's some great work ahead of us, it's going to require a lot of work, it's difficult, but we are confident that we bring the right people into this organization." And there was no excitement there, there was no high energy in the room.

And here is what happened. The people that heard the happy message were excited, they were all rallied up; this is like every single movie about ancient Troy, ancient Rome, ancient Greece: every one of those movies where you see someone rallying the troops. There is that peak moment, but you're not going to war: you're about to go to your cubicle and work on a computer, and because you're not going to war, their excitement peaks when the manager gave this speech, and then afterwards they actually weren't as effective and efficient as the leader that was somber, who was just telling them matter of factly, "You guys are good, there's a tough task ahead of you, I think you can do it and I'm looking forward to seeing what the outcome is." They did better, and the reason was that their emotional climate when they heard the leader was not the highlight of the day and actually they realized that being engaged with the task ahead and realizing what they did was actually a more exciting moment than when they heard their leader giving them the instructions.

And here's another thing that we know. When we're in a somber mood as opposed to a happy mood, we're more likely to persist at challenging tasks. We're more likely to stimulate effort in other people when we're in a somber mood, and the reason is very simple: when you're happy, you don't feel like you need to do anything to change anything because you're in the exact emotional state you want to be in and you actually become a little bit lazy. Your thinking is a little bit superficial; you tend to be less analytical, less detailed, because you take shortcuts because you want to keep the mood that you are. And when you're a little bit somber or serious or a tiny bit sad or a tiny bit anxious, you're more likely to think, "I want to use this task to show my strengths, to leverage my abilities, because I am not in the optimum mood right now. I am in the optimal state of mind of I want to do the best work possible."

This goes against the last 15 years of happiness gurus' self-help books and leadership books, which are the best thing that you could do is put people in a happy mood, and we know that the worst thing you could do in this task that involves decision making – that involves analytical thinking or detailed thinking – a bad mood is better than a happy mood. And if the task involves creative thinking, being in a happy mood is better than being in a sad or a somber mood. So it's not that happiness is better than sadness, it's not that sadness is worse than happiness: it depends what the task is. And so the leader that's emotionally agile, that knows that this is a creative task, being in a pleasant mood is effective; this is a detailed, analytic task, being in a somber mood is the most effective – that's the leader that will do the best work.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you talk quite a lot about mindfulness and mindlessness, which is a very interesting discussion, and you call mindless activity the "loamy soil where the best ideas take root." So could you elaborate on that, and tell us what else is good about mindlessness?

Todd Kashdan: We're in a culture right now where mindfulness is the sexiest thing alive right now. You cannot read a newspaper – Time magazine, Newsweek – without some cover over the past six months that didn't have mindfulness on there. This is the hottest science available of "I'm in an open, receptive, present state of mind, I will function optimally, I have the most attentional capacity, and I can absorb the most information," and we're not downplaying any of that. Mindfulness is great – I do think it's overblown – but here's the thing, part of this is about trusting evolution. Again, human beings have been around for about 190,000 years – 190,000 years to carve our brains, these three-pound things atop our necks, such that we can function best in an environment that's constantly changing moment to moment, and we never know what the future is going to bring. And in these moments what we've discovered is that what separates human beings from other social animals is not that we can reach this amazing profound state of consciousness of mindfulness, it's that the sheer amount of cognitive and mental tasks that occur outside of our awareness, on the backburner, on autopilot, and we don't have to pay attention to it.

Both of these mechanisms together is what allows us to function optimally. And when we're in a state where we're daydreaming, or we're reflecting, or we take a moment away from work to go for a walk around the block, and we're not thinking about work, it's one of the most fundamental phases of creativity that we call the incubation phase, which is that I already know what the task involves at work, I've been thinking about it for hours, I'm not sure what I want to do next. And so sometimes, we have to take ourselves away from the task and do something totally different: go for a swim, go for a workout, go for a run and then come back, and when you're not thinking about work and you're not filtering what you're going to say next or what you're thinking about, ideas collide that have never collided before, and that's where creativity often emerges.

Rachel Salaman: In the book you don't shy away from the really dark side of human nature, exploring narcissism and manipulation. Can you tell us what the upside is of those, and also how you see ethics fitting into this discussion?

Todd Kashdan: Let me take us through how we all manipulate people. Now the interesting thing about writing this book is we interviewed CEOs and CFOs of some of the top companies in the world; we interviewed Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, senators, congressmen, defense secretaries, five-star generals. Everybody had something to say about narcissism, psychopathy, selfishness, manipulating other people, but nobody would go on record, because if they went on record it would defeat the purpose of its utility.

So the idea, if you want to persuade and influence people, you can't let people know how much you're trying to persuade and influence people. But let me tell you, there's an amazing body of science that we all manipulate people, and I'll just give you some concrete examples. If you think about if you live with some roommates in terms of strategically putting on the laundry machine or the dishwasher when you know they're coming down the stairs. Or because you know that you're about to leave for three days from your romantic partner, so that week you're very responsive to their needs, massaging their feet before they go to sleep and giving them dinner. Or with your kids in terms of buying them MP3 songs for the long car ride before you leave for an eight-hour trip. Or making sure you use people's first names when you meet them, because we know that, when people hear their names, they get excited, they feel this burst of pride, even though it has nothing to do with whatever you're about to ask them for in terms of a conversation, or trying to get them involved in a business deal.

So we're always manipulating people, and a lot of this book is about taking these concepts back: that it's not a bad thing about manipulating someone. It's a bad thing if it's for an unhealthy or toxic cause, and so if the idea is to try to get as much money out of you to pay for my dinner, well, that's a little bit exploitative, but if the idea is I'm not getting your best effort, I'm not getting your attention, well, manipulation is that not bad a thing, because we're working towards a healthy outcome which is you work at this job, I work at this job, and we're both trying to do the best work possible.

Rachel Salaman: We've covered a lot of ground in this interview. What for you are the key takeaways that will help people be more successful and fulfilled?

Todd Kashdan: There's a few of them. One of them is let's forget about positivity being an objective to strive for. Yes, we all want kindness; yes, we all want compassion; and yes, who wouldn't want their kids to be happy, but to be happy, to reach that higher pinnacle of satisfaction with life, we have to recognize that we have a ton of personality traits, a ton of behaviors that we can engage in. Know that everything that we have at our disposal are tools that are at our disposal, so appreciate what's uncomfortable that has its use in certain situations. So that's one.

Train your children to recognize anger is not something to hide from, especially women in the world, and train people to realize that anxiety is not a bad thing, it's not a sign that you're weak: it's often a sign of strength that you can find the slight changes in a situation. You're so sensitive to them that you're scared about those changes, you're the canary in the coalmine, and that's exactly what you often need in a situation. Recognize that narcissism and selfishness are not things to say that these are horrible traits, but they're often exactly what you need to have healthy relationships and do good work.

The second one is that, instead of trying to think of what we hope human beings are actually like, what we ask is that people think of to get the best possible out of yourself and other people, to get the best relationships and produce the best work, we have to understand what human beings are actually like, and it's the only way that we can truly make a difference in the world. So let's start to try to think that human beings are destined to be optimistic, happy people. It's not our birthright to be happy: our birthright is to be flexibly responsive to all the strange coterie of people, situations, and environments that we get exposed to. To be emotionally and socially flexible is much better than being a positive person all the time, which you couldn't be even if you wanted to.

Then the third final tip that I would give is there is great power in being able to label your emotions very precisely, such that you know exactly how your mind and body are being motivated to act in a situation. And honor your intuition: honor your gut instincts. This is what makes great soldiers, this is what makes great athletes, and this is what can make us great in terms of being better parents, better workers, and just better human beings.

Rachel Salaman: Todd Kashdan, thanks very much for joining us today.

Todd Kashdan: It's my pleasure, you asked fantastic questions.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Todd's book again is "The Upside of Your Dark Side" and it's co-authored with Robert Biswas-Diener.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.