Toxic Positivity
This is a term I heard within the last year or so, and it perfectly describes something that I’ve hated for so long. For years, I couldn’t articulate why I hated it - partially because I didn’t even know what to call it - but I’ve had enough time to think about it to give what I think is a decent explanation for why this is so bad.
This is something that happens everywhere in life, but from my own experience, I’ve seen this much more frequently among musicians. A lot of musicians like to put forward this idea that “Negative thinking/talking is an inherently bad thing.” They’ll say this in different ways, but the general idea is this: “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” This is a bunch of virtue-signalling bull crap, and I think it’s one of the most destructive sentiments out there. I seriously have to question the intelligence of anyone who says they believe in this idea (“question their intelligence” is a very polite way of calling them “stupid”). Just to be clear we’re on the same page, let me give a couple specific examples of this:
Examples
For a private lesson, I told a teacher that I wanted to work on something because I “couldn’t do it”; he proceeded to go on a 10 minute rant about how I shouldn’t say that I “can’t do things” because then I’ll never be able to do them. According to him, being honest about your skills is a bad thing.
When everything was going on between myself and Steve Johnson, several people told me “At least you won’t have to deal with him anymore”, as if that fact isn’t obvious to me and as if that cancels out all the bad stuff that happened.
Many teachers regularly tell others that if they’re going to give advice to someone about their playing, you should give a “compliment sandwich”. You should say something good about someone’s playing, then give them the critique, then say something good again. I’m not saying that this is never an appropriate to do, but this is generally a waste of time. Just give the critique.
If you ever criticize someone who everyone knows is bad when they’re not in the room, some people love to virtue-signal by saying, “You shouldn’t say anything bad about that person when they’re not present”.
I think you get the picture. One of the most annoying things about “toxic positivity” is that the people who push it are some of the most awful people you’ll ever meet. They will get incredibly hostile when talking about how negative of a person you are, and they love to critique people all day long for using the “wrong language”. I firmly believe that much of the people who push this idea forward are what others would call narcissists. Unfortunately, there are good people who push this idea as well, but they’re just parroting what someone else is saying and they’re not giving it much, if any, thought.
I’m a big fan of the old cliche “Honesty is the best policy.” Whenever you’re teaching (or doing anything else), just tell the truth when talking. When critiquing a student, be honest with them about how they sound. If something sounds really bad, just tell them. A lot of people perform this associative fallacy where, because they had a bad experience with a teacher that was overly negative, they’ll mistakenly believe that being negative is a bad thing in and of itself. I had many awful teachers who were unnecessarily negative. Their critiques were bad because they were lying about just how bad I sounded; in other words, they weren’t telling the truth. Yes, you should be incredibly mindful about constantly critiquing a student, but that doesn’t mean you should lie to them about how bad they are at something.
There’s someone I’ve discovered on YouTube who has a great deal of information on narcissists; she’s known as Dr. Ramani, and she has a few videos on this topic of “Toxic Positivity”. Here’s a link to one of those videos in case it piques your interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l19QSxWyaWI&t=64s
