Why You Remember Every Criticism and Forget Every Win
- Aakanksha Joshi
- Apr 12
- 6 min read
You just led a town hall. Two hundred people. It went well.
Ninety-seven people gave you positive feedback. Two people said something critical. One was mildly snarky in the Q&A.
That night, which ones are you still thinking about?
If you’re honest, it’s not the ninety-seven.
You’re replaying the snarky comment. You’re reconstructing the exact tone. You’re wondering what it means about how people really see you. The wins from the day have already faded. The one moment of friction is still running on a loop.
Most leaders think this is a confidence issue. A sign of insecurity they need to work through.
It’s not. It’s neuroscience. And it’s happening to every leader in every room, every single day.
Your Brain Is Not Wired for Fairness
Here’s what your brain is actually doing.
Your brain evolved over millions of years with one primary job: keep you alive. And for most of human history, the biggest threat to survival wasn’t missing an opportunity. It was missing a danger.
So your brain developed a built-in bias: negative information gets priority processing. It gets noticed faster, encoded more deeply, and recalled more easily than positive information. The threat that kills you matters more than the compliment that makes you feel good.
Neuroscientist Rick Hanson, who spent decades studying this at the University of California, described it simply: the brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.
Positive experiences need to be held in conscious awareness for at least 15-20 seconds before they begin to transfer into long-term memory. Negative experiences? They transfer almost instantly. No effort required. Your brain does it automatically, because for most of evolutionary history, that asymmetry kept us alive.
The problem is that in 2026, your brain is still running this ancient programme. And it is costing you in ways you probably haven’t fully accounted for.
“Your brain wasn’t designed to make you happy. It was designed to keep you alive. In a modern leadership context, those two things are often in direct conflict.”
What This Does to a Leader Over Time
In the short term, negativity bias is merely exhausting. You end good days feeling like they weren’t quite good enough. You replay difficult conversations long after they’re over. You notice what went wrong in a presentation more vividly than what landed brilliantly.
But over years, the consequences become structural.
A leader whose brain is disproportionately encoding negative feedback gradually builds a distorted internal map of themselves and their impact. They start unconsciously over-indexing on risk. They become more hesitant in decisions where boldness is needed. They soften messages that need to be direct. They second-guess instincts that are actually well-calibrated.
This is one of the most common patterns I see in the senior leaders I work with across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Leaders who are objectively excellent — trusted by their boards, loved by their teams — who carry a private internal narrative that is significantly harsher than the reality everyone else sees.
The gap between how good they actually are and how good they feel is not a personality flaw. It is an artefact of how the human brain processes information.
The Leadership Cost Nobody Talks About
Here’s what makes this particularly consequential at the senior level.
A leader’s internal state is not private. Research on emotional contagion — the process by which people unconsciously synchronise their emotional states with those around them — shows that a leader’s mood, confidence, and self-perception spread through a team faster and more powerfully than any formal communication.
When you walk into a room carrying the weight of the two critical comments and the amnesia of the ninety-seven positive ones, your team picks it up. Not consciously. Not explicitly. But it lands in the room before you’ve said a word.
The leader who has learned to genuinely absorb and hold their wins — not as arrogance, not as complacency, but as accurate self-calibration — walks into rooms differently. Decides differently. Leads differently.
“Your team doesn’t just hear your words. They feel your internal state. A leader who can’t hold their own wins cannot fully hold their team’s confidence either.”
The Solution: Teaching Your Brain to Let the Good In
You cannot switch off negativity bias. It is wired into the architecture of the brain. But you can deliberately counteract it — not with affirmations, not with toxic positivity, but with a specific technique that works with your brain’s memory encoding mechanisms.
The technique is called Mental Subtraction, developed from the research of psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues.
Here’s how it works — and it is counterintuitive.
Instead of replaying the good thing that happened, you briefly imagine that it never happened. You subtract it from your reality for a moment.
That town hall that went well? Imagine it never happened. Imagine you never gave it. What would you have missed? What would your team have missed? What relationship, what credibility, what moment of genuine connection would not exist?
Then bring it back. It did happen. You did do it.
Research shows this technique — the momentary absence, then the return — creates a significantly stronger emotional and neural encoding of the positive experience than simply trying to savour it directly. It tricks the brain out of its habituation to good things by creating a brief contrast. The positive experience suddenly feels vivid, real, and significant again.
This is not gratitude journaling. This is a deliberate memory encoding intervention. The mechanism is different. The result is different.
The Daily Practice: The 20-Second Rule and Mental Subtraction
Two practices. Both take under two minutes. Both are grounded in how memory encoding actually works.
Practice 1 — The 20-Second Hold: When something good happens — a meeting that landed, a decision that was well-received, a conversation that built real trust — pause for 20 seconds. Don’t move to the next thing. Stay with it consciously. Feel it in your body, not just your mind. Rick Hanson’s research shows this is the minimum time needed for a positive experience to begin transferring into long-term memory. Without this pause, it slides off like Teflon. With it, it sticks.
Practice 2 — Evening Mental Subtraction: At the end of the day, pick one thing that went well. Then spend 60 seconds imagining it hadn’t happened. What would be missing? What would you have lost? Then bring it back. Let it land properly. This is not a feel-good exercise. It is a neurological correction for the asymmetry your brain has been running all day.
Done consistently, these two practices begin to rebalance the internal map a leader carries of themselves. Not into naive positivity — but into accuracy. And accuracy is what makes decisions cleaner, communication more grounded, and leadership presence more genuine.
Why This Is a Leadership Skill, Not a Wellness Practice
When I work with senior leaders on this, the pushback I hear most often is some version of: “This sounds like something for people who lack confidence. I’m fine.”
And then in the same conversation, they describe lying awake at night replaying the one conversation that didn’t go the way they wanted. They describe walking into board rooms slightly over-prepared because they’re unconsciously compensating for a self-doubt they won’t name. They describe the private exhaustion of a brain that never quite lets them fully land their own success.
The leaders who perform most consistently at the highest levels are not the ones who never feel doubt. They are the ones whose internal calibration is accurate enough that doubt doesn’t distort their decisions.
That calibration is trainable. It starts with understanding that your brain’s negativity bias is not a character trait. It is a feature of human neuroscience that every leader is running — and that very few are actively managing.
Managing it is your edge.
Aakanksha Joshi is a Neuroscience-Based Executive Coach working with C-suite and senior leaders across India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. She holds the CNTC certification from BEabove Leadership USA, is an NLP Practitioner certified by Dr. Richard Bandler, and is a credentialed ICF coach. OLONN is her neuroscience-grounded coaching practice for executives who want to perform at their ceiling — not just their average. If this resonated, explore how OLONN works at olonn.com.
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