3. What you see (and what you're choosing not to)

It is surprisingly easy to go an entire retro without mentioning a single thing that went well. Forty-five minutes of blockers, risks, and venting — and then someone says "right, shall we wrap up?" as if the purpose of reflection is catharsis.

I've sat in those meetings. Heck I've sometimes run those meetings (sorry). And the thing that strikes me, looking back, is that nobody thought it was odd. Retros are for figuring out what to do better, what risks to manage - and for raising issues. It’s what serious, rigorous professionals do. Talking about what worked well, celebrating it - that feels too fluffy.

That instinct — to focus on problems and skip past progress — isn't a character flaw. It's how human brains are wired (and really common, especially among Type A folks, perfectionists, people with imposter syndrome…). But it's costing you more than you think.

And it goes deeper than just what you pay attention to. It's about the meaning you make from what you observe — the stories you construct, the interpretations you default to, the narratives you repeat. Two people can sit in the same meeting and walk out with entirely different accounts of what just happened.

Your brain has a negativity bias

Eye-tracking research by Isaacowitz (2005, 2006) found that pessimists literally spend more time looking at unpleasant cues than optimists do. Not metaphorically. Their eyes physically linger longer on negative images and information.

This makes evolutionary sense. Our ancestors survived by paying close attention to threats. The ones who relaxed and admired the sunset while a predator crept up behind them didn't tend to pass on their genes. So we're all carrying cognitive hardware that's tuned to notice what's wrong, what's dangerous, what might go badly.

But in the modern workplace, this hardware isn't protecting you from lions. It's making you read every ambiguous email as hostile, dwell on the one critical comment in a sea of positive feedback, and remember the project that failed while forgetting the three that succeeded. It's the mental equivalent of doomscrolling — except you're doing it with your own experience.

And it's not just your decisions that suffer. The chronic stress that comes from sustained negative attention patterns is associated with worse physical health outcomes — higher rates of heart disease, weakened immune response, more anxiety. Where you point your attention isn't just a leadership question. It's a health question.

Realistic optimists notice differently

This is where realistic optimism splits from both toxic positivity and pessimism. A toxic optimist ignores the bad stuff. A pessimist dwells on it. A realistic optimist notices it, reckons with it, and then chooses not to stew on it.

That word "chooses" is doing a lot of work, I know. But I’m using to flag that this isn't about temperament — it's about attention, and attention can be directed. What you focus on shapes what you believe about your situation, which shapes what you do about it.

Think about the language you use. "Yes, but..." automatically negates everything before it. "Yes, and..." holds both things at once. That tiny shift — from "but" to "and" — is the difference between dismissing progress and building on it. Words create worlds, as the appreciative inquiry folks say. And I think they're right.

This applies to how you see other people, too. When a stakeholder pushes back on your proposal, your brain is already constructing a story about why. "They don't get it." "They're protecting their turf." "They'll never support this." But those are interpretations, not facts. The realistic optimist chooses a different starting point: this person is also trying to do the right thing, with constraints and information I might not have. That's not naiveté — it's a deliberate choice about which story to tell yourself, and it opens up conversations that the cynical version closes down.

The stories organisations tell

This gets really interesting at the organisational level. Every organisation has a set of stories it tells about itself — in onboarding, in all-hands meetings, in the pub after work. And those stories shape what people expect, how they behave, and what they think is possible.

Some organisations run on cautionary tales. "Remember the last time someone tried that?" "That'll never work here." "Nothing ever changes." These are the organisational equivalent of doomscrolling — a constant loop of evidence that things are bad and will stay bad. They might feel realistic but they're selective. "Nothing ever changes" shouldn't actually be that hard to disprove if you have a proper look.

Other organisations — the ones that feel genuinely different to work in — deliberately cultivate stories of what people overcame, what was learned, what got better. Not instead of honest accounts of difficulty, but alongside them. They measure what matters and then actually talk about it. They praise effort and progress, not just polished outcomes. They capture and share the stories of impact that would otherwise go unnoticed.

The ratio matters here. People respond much more strongly to negative information than positive. So if your internal communications are 50% good news and 50% bad, it won't land as balanced — it'll feel predominantly negative. You need to consciously tip the scales, not because honesty doesn't matter but because you're correcting for a bias that's already baked in.

Reframing is not spin

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want this to sound like I’m saying "just put a positive spin on everything." I’m not.

Reframing is looking at the same set of facts and asking: what's the most realistically optimistic way of understanding this? Not the delusional way. Not the wishful thinking way. Not the dismissive way. The version that's honest about what happened and honest about what's still possible.

The negative stories running through your mind are no more objectively true or false than the positive ones. Except they don't help you. Choosing the more hopeful and empowering interpretation of a situation isn't fooling yourself — it's choosing the story that keeps you (and your team, and your organisation) moving forward.

Actively changing language is part of this. One example I come back to often: there's a meaningful difference between describing a medical condition as "terminal" (which focuses on the destination and conjures up death) versus "incurable" (which is more of a process and makes it feel like something you can learn to live with). They describe the same clinical reality. But they create entirely different emotional consequences for the person hearing them.

Something to try this week

Pay attention to what gets airtime in your next three meetings. Not the agenda — the actual conversation. What proportion of the discussion is about problems, blockers and risks? What proportion is about progress, learning and possibility?

Write down the ratio. Don't try to change anything yet — just notice.

Then, for one of those meetings, try opening with a different question. Instead of "what's blocking us?" try "what's moved forward since we last met?" See what shifts — not just in the answers, but in the energy in the room.

And at a personal level: at the end of each day this week, write down three things that went well. This doesn’t have to be three things you're grateful for or want to celebrate (though if you can do that, have at it - gratitude is powerful) — it’s simply three things that actually worked. You'll be surprised how hard it is at first, and how much easier it gets by day five.