Hello Reader,
I hope everyone's been enjoying their season (depending on where you live) as it will soon transition into another one. My summer's been pretty good, but Southern California has definitely been hot!
For this issue, I was inspired by a 2025 report I just read from the Center for Creative Leadership.
In it, one quote stood out to me, from an engineering and architecture C-level leader: “We’re not in survival mode—we’re in strategy mode."
This made me think about how emotional intelligence can shape the strategic responsibilities of leadership—in particular, the Self-Management competency of Positive Outlook.
I then remembered something neuroanatomist and author Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote, “Most of us think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, but we are actually feeling creatures that think.”
The common advice to “set aside your emotions" soon came to mind—something so many leaders I've coached have been told to do at work.
I've always said that it’s better to recognize and manage emotions without suppressing the difficult ones, and tap into the other emotions you also have that will best serve the situation.
The key is to become situationally aware, exercise agency, and regulate your emotions so you can apply them intentionally rather than be led by them reactively.
Now, on to Positive Outlook.
The Throughline
Anchor Competency: Positive Outlook
Positive Outlook serves strategy.
Strategy is part of everyday leadership, no matter what level you’re at. It shows up in your actions, communication choices, and allocation of resources. It’s how you set boundaries to protect focus for you and your team and make the tough trade-offs, but also how you respond to failure and demonstrate what matters most.
Last quarter’s strategic bet didn’t pay off. But now, you’ve got to set the next one, and everyone is watching you to see if you’re going to propose something bold or something safe enough to avoid getting blamed.
Being strategic is more about what you say no to than what you say yes to. Your choices are what shape business strategy. If you belong to a marginalized group, you know the choices you make will be scrutinized more.
Positive Outlook is the ability to see the good in situations and people. In my Forbes article, I wrote that it allows for the recognition of possibility and opportunity, as well as hope and optimism, while still acknowledging and accepting difficult emotions.
On the other hand, toxic positivity is the misuse of positivity to avoid, suppress, or reject negative experiences or emotions. That’s played a part in invalidating the experiences of members of marginalized groups.
A client once told me how toxic positivity was at the heart of his organization and how projects that weren’t working kept going anyway without being course-corrected. A lot of time and money was wasted, and the projects were eventually abandoned. By contrast, Positive Outlook would have acknowledged and accepted the reality of what wasn’t working and allowed the space to explore different possibilities.
Positive Outlook is choosing a healthier perspective to foster well-being without denying stark realities or the depth of lived experiences. It shapes strategic foresight, thinking, and planning.
During times of disruption, Positive Outlook can serve as a cognitive input to strategy. Paralysis and denial are common reactions. Positive Outlook acknowledges the risks instead, which is what makes scenario generation and contingency planning not only possible, but effective.
One way to strengthen Positive Outlook is placing hope in your own capacity to respond well, whatever outcome you get. Another is to demonstrate the good you can see in people by recognizing them for what they do and appreciating them for who they are, while still accepting their challenges. The same applies for situations: recognizing what’s working well while acknowledging what isn’t.
EI competencies are building blocks. Here are four examples, one per domain, that go with Positive Outlook:
Emotional Self-Awareness (Self-Awareness) can guard against hope becoming denial, or premature certainty, before it shapes your next move. Be sure you’re clear on your own values well enough to tell when it’s worth the risk to openly show hopefulness and when it’s not yet time.
Achievement Orientation (Self-Management) helps you stay focused on accomplishing a goal, even when there are setbacks, and the plan has to change.
Empathy (Social Awareness) lets you recognize who’s more affected by the consequences of decisions made, especially since the same level of optimism won’t always be practical for everyone.
Influence (Relationship Management) helps you get the buy-in and resources for a strategy you can’t guarantee.
Along with the other building blocks, Positive Outlook is the throughline to maintaining a strategic edge when it’s tempting to go into survival mode.
Psychological safety is created through the genuine use of emotional intelligence in small, consistent ways.
For marginalized leaders, Positive Outlook means not letting anyone else decide the credibility of the hope you hold. Don’t perform certainty just because it’s expected and rewarded. Trust your own read of a situation, which can be different than someone else’s. It may often feel safer and necessary to conform to the status quo, but leading well has never been about conforming to traditional norms.
What matters most is staying true to yourself and modulating your authenticity to be what you need to be, for yourself and others, as a leader. Authenticity has boundaries. Honoring your own needs by not choosing full transparency is an act of integrity and values alignment.
For accomplices, Positive Outlook means believing change is possible enough so you can keep doing the work, even when you’re not the one paying the cost of business as usual.
Voice of the Month
adrienne maree brown, Movement Facilitator & Author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
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Visionary fiction is neither utopian nor dystopian, indeed it is like real life: Hard, realistic...Hopeful as a strategy.
CliftonStrengths Spotlight
Ideation
Someone with Ideation as a strength is bursting with ideas and can spot patterns and connections others typically miss. Because Ideation has an abundance of ideas that often appear unrelated to a given context, the ideas may seem impractical and create more work for others who don’t see the connection immediately.
What people tend to see with Ideation is someone whose thinking outpaces their doing. For a traditional leader, the same expansive thinking of Ideation would be hailed as “visionary” or “innovative,” but for a marginalized one, it would be “impractical” or “lacking focus.” When it’s time to shape strategy, Ideation can more quickly surface ideas that could succeed when there’s the freedom to explore possibilities.
From the Red Team Thinking Toolkit
Pre-Mortem Analysis
What it is: Each team member imagines a plan’s catastrophic failure and works backwards to the sequence of events that led there. Scenarios are then compared by the group to find recurring failure points, going beyond a list of different ways the plan could fail.
Used when: This tool comes in after the formulation of a plan, but before final approval or execution.
Why it matters for leaders: It’s important to cultivate a mindset of not taking success for granted and of fostering resilience. This tool does that by uncovering unforeseen challenges each person on the team sees differently, then building more optionality into the plan. Positive Outlook facilitates the psychological safety necessary for team members to name their own failure scenarios out loud to the group.
A Resource Worth Your Time
How Toxic Positivity Wrecks Lives & Relationships (and What to Cultivate Instead), Dr. Deepika Chopra, Good Life Project Podcast
Time: 1 hr, 9 min. (that includes ads and commercials)
Dr. Deepika Chopra spent years researching optimism as a clinical health psychologist. This episode explains the difference between real optimism (essentially Positive Outlook) and what we may have learned growing up about what’s now called toxic positivity. She pictures hope as sitting in a dark room and noticing a crack of light under a door, without pretending the dark around you isn’t there.
The conversation gets specific about how to handle a setback instead of judging yourself for how you’re feeling, how to cultivate joy (the joy list) in small ways, and how to build your capacity for real optimism by setting aside a daily container for worry. Here’s the link to the episode online where you can also find the transcript if you prefer to read it instead. To listen, find it on your favorite podcast platform.
Monthly Reflection Prompt
Think of a time someone questioned whether your optimism was realistic. What made that hope credible to you, even if it wasn’t to them? Hit reply and tell me what you’d say now.