When it comes to your business persona, do you have to be happy and positive all the time? The answer – only if you’re one of the five people on the planet who genuinely never has bad days, bad news or a bad mood.

You probably see a lot of advice about how business owners should never say anything negative, ever. JUST KEEP SMILING! This is, of course, total bullshit. If you’re always pretending everything is GREAT, when it’s not, the only thing you’re doing is being inauthentic. This isn’t to say that you should spend all day on your Facebook page whining about how there’s a hole in your sock and the room is too cold and the dog next door is barking – but, used correctly, some well-placed negativity can be a powerful way to communicate.

Why Do We Need Negativity?

As humans, we are hard-wired to respond to the bad stuff in life. Scores of recent studies prove this:

…while a good day has no lasting effect on the following day, a bad day carries over. We process negative data faster and more thoroughly than positive data, and they affect us longer. Socially, we invest more in avoiding a bad reputation than in building a good one. Emotionally, we go to greater lengths to avoid a bad mood than to experience a good one.  —Aeon Magazine

So, as you can see, if you’re just putting out positive positive positive all the time, you’re missing out on communicating via a crucial part of the human experience. Moreover, you’re missing out on showing your prospects and your customers who you really are, on making yourself relatable. And don’t think you don’t want that – even the most successful of entrepreneurs benefit from being relatable.

Playing the Relatability Game (and building your tribe)

Next time something goes wrong in your business, instead of sweeping it under the carpet – go public with it. Imagine you’ve just had to issue a refund to an ex-client who demanded their money back after you held up your end of the service and they didn’t (infuriating, and happens all the time). Your first instinct is probably to hide it, pretend like it didn’t happen.

But what if you could use that story, that loss of money and time, for something positive? Try writing a post about it (never name names, of course!), starting with all the negatives – the full story. But instead of it being an angry rant piece, turn it into a lesson for your tribe. Tell them how genuinely upset you are, but also tell them what you learned, what you’re going to do differently next time. Take responsibility for anything you did wrong. Let people know that if it happens to them, they’re not alone.

That’s being honest, raw and authentic – and there’s little more powerful.

How to Make Negatives a Positive

Even if everything is going great in your business, there are other ways of harnessing the power of negativity.

If you’re trying to get a message out, relating it to a negative experience almost always works better than just trying to push the positives. This is a basic practice in sales copywriting – hit the pain point first, then show them how you can take the pain away. You can see it in basically every sales page ever written!

That’s because negative headlines far outperform positive ones.

You can use the same tactic even if you’re not writing sales pages. You might have an article on your blog that you want to link to on Facebook. The article contains information that helps someone – let’s say you’re a health professional and the article has a great nutrition tip in it that will give people more energy during the day.

Instead of posting the article with a short note that says “great nutrition tip inside!”, think about the problem you’re solving. In this case, it’s a lack of energy during the day. What does it feel like to lack energy? What emotive words can you use? How can you bring up that pain for someone so they will think, ugh, I hate feeling like that – and then click on your link to see your solution?

When you are providing solutions and help for people, when your outcome is a positive one for them, using negativity is a great, smart way to get someone’s attention so you can ultimately help them.

So next time you hear someone talking about how you should never be negative, link them to this article with a really negative note – and see how they react!