How malicious positivity protects your mindset.

This month at Nice Work, we’re talking about mindset. How to not see everyone as competition. How to foster creativity. How to be brave (and how to be courageous and confident, too). 

Our goal: To help you show up with less fear. While temporarily motivational, fear isn’t great for our productivity or our personal stability. Fear permeates the walls (and the emails). It is best kept to small doses, so it can be balanced out by much larger servings of open-mindedness, creativity, and confidence.  

There’s another obstacle to having a more open mindset - but be warned, it is a big “meta.”

It is whether you can trust, and then take, another path besides the one in front of you. 

More concretely: To go after a blue ocean business opportunity, you have to spot it in the first place. Which is harder if no one else is swimming that way. 

This mental “lock-in” is found in ultra-competitive workplaces, in the throes of a creative block, and even in the deliberations to speak up. Once we start, it becomes harder and harder to stop. That can look like defeatist thinking, such as: There’s no way through except by competing. There’s no way out of this creative block except to force it. There’s no good reason to speak up.

Spotting a blue ocean, or adopting another mindset, is not easy. It is more like a muscle that has to be trained.  Which brings us to today’s topic: Malicious positivity. Or: How to start looking for blue oceans in your everyday life.