Turning negativism into positivism

Today, while I was having a chat with whom used to be my manager, he brought up an idea that resonated a lot in me: try to always turn sources of negativity into opportunities to bring positivism into the team. Let me give you an example.

My team at Shopify builds tools and infrastructure for mobile developers, and as part of our job we have to do some support work and respond requests which sometimes are out our area of the responsibilities. It’s easy to feel annoyed by that and start complaining about your colleagues believing that your team is there to put out the fires and have answers for everything. However, you can take the opportunity, show empathy, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, and think if within your domain, there’s something you could do to make that person’s life easier.

It helps you build trust between you, your team and the other person. Moreover, you are preventing you and your team from entering a negativism spiral that can drain your energy. I think it’s an exercise easy to do, yet with beneficial results for you and for others.

It’s a powerful idea that not only applies to work but life. In a world where there are inevitably negative things happening, it’s a simple exercise that we should do as much as we can.

The next time I start feeling any annoyance and negativism around me, I’ll stop and ask myself: What’s the most positive thing I could take of of this?

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I hope you are all having a wonderful week. I’m spending a couple of weeks in Canada 🇨🇦, catching up and working closely with my colleagues, whom I mostly see on Slack or GitHub most of the time.