The hollow smile
What forced positivity costs a team
Many of us have tried to find joy by seeking out “good things”. Gratitude lists. Positive thinking. Morning routines. For a while, things feel better, but it rarely lasts.
We need to consider the possibility that joy does not live where we have been looking.
Marianne Hill, the British Deep Process Psychotherapist and author of Healing the Shadow, puts it this way:
A core belief that I hold when working with the shadow is that true joy comes from knowing, accepting, loving and blessing all parts of ourselves. This means knowing and accepting the parts of us that are in deep grief, or filled with rage, frightened, hesitant, hateful or full of shame or guilt. It means welcoming these parts of ourselves into our sacred realm and tenderly caring for them and listening to their needs and the powerful emotions that they carry. As we come to know and accept more and more of ourselves we find we are more able to sit back, relaxed in our own skin, knowing there is nothing in us that we fear, nothing we need to hide. Sitting in this place colours all our life experiences. It gives us a deep confidence whatever is happening around us and allows joy to arise even in the midst of life’s most difficult challenges. We lead ourselves through life from a foundation of joy. Throughout our life we can find joy bubbling up from this place in us, unforced and unbidden. When it comes there is no reaching, no trying, joy simply flows.
The work is to stop banishing the rest of ourselves. Joy then arrives as a by-product.
Why the reaching doesn’t work
If some part of us is being held outside the door, a small part of us is always holding the door. The effort is continuous and silent. We experience this effort as a low-grade tiredness we cannot quite trace.
Joy cannot settle in a house that is still being defended.
Marianne’s image for this is the hollow smile. The smile is real. So is the work required to keep it there. In her phrase, behind the smile, parts of us are being gagged and silenced. That can be exhausting.
What happens when the holding stops
The Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, writing in Owning Your Own Shadow, puts it clearly:
To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.
When we can sit in our own skin with nothing to fear, and nothing to hide, joy arises unforced and unbidden. It bubbles up from a place in us that no longer has to be guarded. Even in difficulty.
Small children have the capacity for great joy precisely because they have the capacity to feel the full range of their anger, fear, and frustration.
The thing we hid from ourselves and the world carried a kernel of our life force with it.
Hiding our anger buried the capacity to hold a boundary.
Hiding our sadness buried the capacity to feel deeply.
Hiding our sexuality buried our capacity to be fully in our body.
Hiding our confidence buries the capacity to take up space.
Reclaim the part, and the life force comes back with it.
Forced positivity at work
The workplace stages this same dynamic collectively. From the all-hands that opens with the upbeat video to the mission statement that insists we thrive.
Everyone is forced to pretend that everything’s just great around here, thank you very much. And everyone can feel themselves and everybody else pretending too.
Relentless positivity comes from a place of fear. Fear of powerful emotions and the energy they contain. The organisational version is the same fear, scaled up. Fear of what might be said, wanted, or grieved if the room were actually allowed to feel what is in it.
What this asks of leaders
We cannot manufacture joy for a team in the same way we cannot manufacture it for ourselves. However, as a leader, you can be the first person in the room whose full range is allowed to show. A leader who says “I’m worried about this” is a leader whose team stops performing. A leader who can be tired, frustrated, or sad without hiding it changes what everyone else has to carry.
The air changes quickly. The energy that had been going into performance becomes available for the work. Ideas move more easily. People laugh in a way that sounds different.
Joy, which had no surface to land on in the hollow version, finds one.
Joy arrives when the hiding stops.
That is true in our own lives, and it is true at the scale of a team.