Despite its honourable and legitimate origins, positive thinking has become somewhat of a toxic term. What was once a skill for psychological flexibility—emotional agility and emotional intelligence—has, in corporate culture, become a coded expectation of self-regulation and obedience to the machine. To the other extreme, and in efforts to counter this trend, we are encouraged by internet gurus to be vulnerable, to pour our emotional guts out all over the carpet. Instead, there is a middle way, to move from a place of stability, from a place that the development of mental skills provides.
Popularised by Susan David (2016)1, emotional agility originally described the ability to notice, label, and work constructively with one's inner experiences. However, in many workplaces, this concept has arguably been weaponised. As Merve Emre suggests in her 2021 New Yorker article2, emotional intelligence frameworks often serve repressive ends, reframing personal distress as a failure of mindset, and encouraging workers to manage emotions not for self-understanding, but to sustain productivity and harmony in the workplace.
Under this inverted model of self-management, the experience and outward expression of difficult emotions—anger, exhaustion, sadness—is frowned upon, or even pathologised. Employees are taught that the problem is not the structure of the work environment, but their failure to adapt and manage their animal instincts. And so, the workplace becomes a stage where emotional displays are tightly managed in the name of collaboration and professionalism. We adopt the worker persona and cease, if even for eight hours per day, who we genuinely are. We become socialised. What emerges is not self-awareness, but a performance of emotional competence, one that masks dissent and enforces conformity.
In 1959, sociologist Erving Goffman provided an illuminating perspective. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life3, Goffman argued that individuals perform roles in social contexts, managing impressions to align with audience expectations. In the workplace, the “front stage” performance of positivity, resilience, and composure becomes essential. Emotional agility is co-opted as a script—employees rehearse and display the “right” emotions to be seen as team players, emotionally intelligent, socialised and promotable. The backstage—the authentic emotional experience—is hidden or suppressed, particularly when it conflicts with organisational goals.
Such emotional performances are often demanded in the name of “professionalism” but this demand imposes a silent burden. Arlie Hochschild warned in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart: The Commercialisation of Human Feeling4, that emotional labour—the requirement to display socially acceptable emotions as part of one's job—can lead to alienation from one’s own internal experience, which spills over into life outside of work. When emotional agility is co-opted to mean “always adapt to fit the organisation,” it becomes another form of labour, not liberation or positive development of self.
This concern is echoed in Sharon Fineman’s (2006) critique of corporate positivity culture5. She highlights how emotional intelligence programmes, while claiming to foster wellbeing, can suppress authentic dialogue and discomfort—especially when they are blind to power dynamics. Leaders trained in such models may use emotionally intelligent behaviours to deflect criticism, pacify resistance, or manipulate team dynamics—all under the guise of empathy.
What is lost in this transactional model of emotion is the space for psychological authenticity. True emotional agility, as originally envisioned by Susan David, involves acknowledging discomfort and choosing actions aligned with one’s values—not simply repackaging distress into motivational soundbites and toxic positivity. If organisations wish to nurture genuinely adaptive and ethical workplaces, they must confront this uncomfortable truth: emotional agility cannot be reduced to a performance metric. It must be reclaimed as a practice of integrity, not a performance of productivity.
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David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. Penguin.
Emre, M. (2021). The Repressive Politics of Emotional Intelligence. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/the-repressive-politics-of-emotional-intelligence
Goffman, E. (2023). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In Social Theory Rewired (pp. 450-459). Routledge.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. University of California Press.
Fineman, S. (2006). On being positive: Concerns and counterpoints. Academy of Management Review, 31(2), 270-291.
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