Why We Remember the Bad Gigs: How Negativity Bias Shapes (and Sharpens) Leadership

I read a line in The Guardian this morning that summed up my leadership condition perfectly. Comedian Tom Rosenthal said, “I quickly forget nice gigs but will take the bad ones to the grave.”

I feel that.

Because leadership, like comedy, is full of gigs. Some soar, some sink. You can lead a flawless strategy session, get unanimous board approval, and still find your mind circling the one thing that didn’t land. The question you mishandled. The comment that jarred. The silence that stretched.

A hundred things went right, but one went wrong. And that’s the one that lingers.

That’s not insecurity. It’s neuroscience.

Bias that bites

Our brains are designed to prioritise threats over rewards. Evolution decided long ago that it was more useful to remember the snake that bit you than the fruit that tasted nice. Psychologists call this negativity bias, i.e., the tendency to notice, remember, and be influenced more by unpleasant experiences than positive ones.

For leaders, this is both inconvenient and instructive; and it explains why we replay the disastrous board meeting, not the 20 successful ones before it. Why we obsess over the one staff member who left unhappily, not the many who stayed and thrived.

This bias colours our perception of competence. It can make us doubt our judgement or shrink our appetite for risk. But it also holds clues to what matters most to us. The bad gigs sting because they touched something important, our pride, credibility, fairness, and purpose.

Leadership as exposure

Leadership, like comedy, is a public act. There’s nowhere to hide. Every decision, every comment, every facial expression is open to interpretation.

That visibility can magnify negativity bias and a single bad moment can feel amplified by a watching audience, whether that’s a boardroom, a conference, or a staff team. Leaders often describe feeling “haunted” by specific episodes such as a meeting that went off-script, a conversation that soured, a strategy that fizzled. The memory lingers because leadership is bound up with identity and when things go wrong, it feels personal.

But that same exposure is what sharpens you. Every tough gig, every uncomfortable moment, builds scar tissue. And scar tissue, inconvenient as it is, makes you stronger.

The seduction of the negative

Negativity bias doesn’t just affect how we remember; it shapes how we interpret the present. Leaders can walk into a room of mostly engaged, motivated colleagues and focus instantly on the one sceptical face; and in performance terms, it’s the equivalent of noticing only the person not laughing.

That selective attention can distort reality. It can lead to overcorrection, defensiveness, or misreading of what’s actually happening. The danger isn’t the bias itself but believing the story it tells you.

We rarely stop to ask whether the bad gig was really that bad and we treat memory as evidence rather than interpretation.

The learning hidden in discomfort

Yet the power of negativity bias is that it points directly at the fault lines we need to examine. If something still makes you wince months or maybe even years later, there’s usually a reason. Maybe you ignored your instincts. Maybe you overruled someone who turned out to be right. Maybe you were simply tired.

The bad gigs carry data. They show us where we’re stretched, distracted, or off-balance. They highlight mismatches between intent and impact.

The trick is not to chase away the discomfort too quickly and to recognise that reflection works best in that narrow space between self-criticism and denial, where you can look at the moment honestly, without trying to rewrite it.

Good gigs fade faster

By contrast, the good gigs evaporate. They pass through the mind like background noise. Success is treated as the baseline, not the highlight.

Partly it’s humility; partly it’s the leadership condition. You’re already onto the next challenge before you’ve processed the last one. The good gigs don’t demand attention because they don’t threaten your identity. They affirm it.

But there’s a cost to that. When you forget the wins, you lose evidence of progress. You start believing that leadership is an endless series of recoveries from mistakes.

I’ve seen this pattern in many coaching conversations with senior leaders. Ask them to recall recent successes and they hesitate. Ask them about failures and they light up with detail, colour, emotion! Negativity bias gives the past its texture.

The discipline of balance

So what’s the antidote? Not forced positivity. Not the corporate theatre of “lessons learned” slides. It’s balance. Holding both sides of the ledger in view.

A leader I worked with recently keeps two journals: one called Errors, one called Evidence. The first captures what went wrong, succinctly and without self-judgement. The second records what went well. When they feel like they're failing, they read the Evidence file. When they feel invincible, they reads Errors. This is emotional calibration in action; and whilst negativity bias can’t be switched off, it can be contextualised. It’s information, not prophecy. It can guide reflection without defining self-worth.

The leadership parallel with comedy

Tom Rosenthal’s line about taking bad gigs to the grave works because comedians and leaders live in the same paradox: public success, private vulnerability.

Both professions rely on connection, i.e., reading the room, adjusting tone, timing the moment. Both endure scrutiny and occasional humiliation; and both depend on resilience built from repeated exposure to risk.

Every comic bombs at some point. Every leader does too. The audience might change, the stakes might differ, but the feeling is the same: you were supposed to deliver, but you didn’t.

What separates the amateurs from the pros is what happens next. The comic goes back on stage. The leader goes back to the boardroom. Both use the memory of failure as rehearsal, not punishment.

A more useful memory

Negativity bias keeps us human. It reminds us that leadership isn’t about perfection but about iteration and the ability to face the mirror after the bad gig and still turn up for the next one.

It’s also a quiet safeguard against arrogance. Leaders who remember their bad gigs stay grounded. They know how easily things can unravel. That awareness builds empathy, humility, and patience, which are qualities that make the next “good gig” more likely.

So perhaps the goal isn’t to forget the bad ones at all but to remember them accurately, without exaggeration and without melodrama. To see them as data points, not defining moments.

The trick is to let the lessons harden, but not the heart. We often talk about resilience as if it’s an attitude. In truth, it’s a memory function, the ability to file experiences in the right place.

Negativity bias will always try to keep the bad gigs on the top shelf but leadership maturity is about learning when to move them to the archive. So yes, remember the ones that hurt. Just don’t live there with the memories.

And when you next catch yourself replaying a bad gig on repeat, pause long enough to ask What did it teach me? And which of the good gigs have I forgotten to celebrate?

Because in the end, the balance of those two memories and not the bias toward one is what shapes the leader you become.