Laura Thomson-StaveleyHere we are in 2026, and if you spend even a minute consuming the news, it’s enough to make you want to retreat into your home office. If we’re looking to external sources to set our focus, it can feel dark and gloomy, impacting our mindset and energy.
I’ve been interested in optimism versus pessimism for years. I’ve always received feedback that I’m optimistic, and as the older you get, the more you realise how much you have to work at that sunny outlook.
There’s a wealth of evidence from the pharmaceutical industry around the placebo effect. If you believe that pink sugar pill is going to take away your headache, it does. Often more quickly than it can even pass the blood-brain barrier. Your body makes it so because you believe it. If we apply that to your working year ahead, if you think it’s going to be full of opportunity and interesting challenges, your body is geared to make it so.
The ripple effect
But there’s also the lesser-known evil twin of placebo, which is nocebo. If you think something is going to be harmful, your body will make it so. If you’ve just eaten chicken and think it wasn’t cooked properly, you might start to feel queasy because your brain believes it so strongly. If you believe the year ahead is going to be difficult, that nocebo effect is potentially gearing up your body to make it so.
Think about it from a day-to-day point of view. If you’ve got a team meeting coming up and your body is expecting stress, you’re going to have hunched posture, holding tension and maybe not make eye contact. So even if, when you smile at someone, they’ll still pick up on your negative body language, and they’ll take that negativity into their next meeting etc. With our mirror neurons, and especially in a team environment, it can be incredibly easy for us to influence each other positively or negatively.
Capability over positivity
I’ve been talking for years about optimism and pessimism, but being optimistic can feel like pressure itself. You might be surrounded by difficult challenges personally or professionally. Maybe you’re out of work or just been given notice of redundancy. Thinking optimistically might feel too hard.
So, let’s think about a capability mindset instead. Whatever the world throws at you, how can you equip yourself with resourcefulness? From a coaching perspective, if someone comes to you with problems, you’d ask, “what’s one thing that might help?” or “what could be one step forward?” That coaching mindset shifts people into a capability mindset.
One practical thing that helps is diluting your negative experiences each day. Imagine a glass of cordial. If you have one bad conversation to start the day and nothing else dilutes it, when you’re reflecting that night, that’s 100% of your social interaction determined by that negative conversation. But if you have four other conversations that day, when you’re reviewing the day, the bad one is only 20% of your overall day. That 80-20 enables you to keep things in perspective. So, make sure you’re diluting your day accordingly!
For remote teams, this is even more important. Do what you can to create balance. Mix up the soundtrack of your day. Have a quick chat with someone else, put on music to switch your mood, take that commute time to decompress or go for a quick walk.
Building resilience for tomorrow
From a bigger picture perspective, think about what’s going to drive you and keep your momentum moving forward. What do you want less of because it’s causing pain? What do you want more of because it moves you towards joy? If you’ve considered these, you’re less vulnerable to the negative noise each day.
Whatever life throws at you, keep moving forward. Seek challenges, because the advantage of adversity sets you up with competence for what comes next. The more challenge your brain deals with now, the more resilient and confident you become. View adversity as a ‘neuro-aerobic’ workout. Just because you can’t do something now doesn’t mean you won’t be able to. That’s the capability mindset, and it’s exactly what we need in the workplace.
Remember that no feeling is final, and you never know how the story is going to end, but you can handle whatever it is and make it through the challenge. We’re not aiming for relentless positivity or pretending challenges don’t exist, but we do want to make a shift from helplessness to feeling capable. It makes all the difference. And the brilliant thing about having a capability mindset? Every time you exercise that capability muscle, you’re not only helping yourself, you’re also showing everyone around you real resilience.
Laura Thomson-Staveley is founder and future-skills consultant at Phenomenal Training and co-host of Secrets from A Coach podcast
