Grey Skies, Sunny Disposition
While sitting in the sauna this week, I found myself discussing London with a woman who was about to fly there. She wasn’t particularly excited – the greyness, the Tube, the people staring into the middle distance. Apparently, the whole place could do with a hug. My response was that this sounded like an opportunity. Be the smiley face. Engage somebody. At best, you improve their day; at worst, you mildly unsettle a commuter who wasn’t expecting a cheerful South African before breakfast.
It was a small conversation, but it captured something that kept coming up this week: how much of our experience starts with the lens we bring to it. London will have exactly the same weather whether you arrive expecting misery or looking for connection. Your experience of London, however, might be quite different.
A school friend and I had a similar conversation about raising children in an age of AI, phones and endless digital distraction. It’s exhausting trying to compete with something engineered to hold their attention. But we also have an advantage: greater awareness. Earlier parents were handed these shiny devices with far less understanding of the challenges they might bring. We have more information to guide our boundaries. The problem remains, but “we’re fortunate to know more” gives me somewhere more useful to stand than “we’re completely stuffed”.
Stephen Covey calls this our paradigm, the lens through which we see the world. His four human endowments, self-awareness, imagination, conscience, and independent will, help us recognise our automatic reactions, imagine alternatives, consider what matters, and choose our response. That freedom needs exercising, particularly when the first response is a colourful word.
I practise this through daily gratitude and intention setting. What am I grateful for, and how do I intend to show up today? It also helps with golf, where my intention to remain gracious is regularly subjected to vigorous independent testing. I cannot always control where the ball goes, but I can work on the person who walks after it.
In my earlier newsletter on disciplined optimism, sport provided a useful warning: wanting our team to win can make us selective about the evidence. The lesson applies here too. A useful mindset must help us see more clearly. If my putting needs work, gratitude for the beautiful fairways won’t do the practising for me.
Adrian Gore’s The Four Principles gives this discipline a practical framework: disciplined optimism, focused urgency, declared goals, and the Pareto tail, which directs our attention towards the few decisions capable of producing disproportionate impact. Optimism becomes useful when it leads to purposeful action.
Negative signals arrive readily, especially through the news. Finding positive signals takes deliberate attention. My dad had that ability, and I recognise it in myself: an instinct to look for possibility in investments, business opportunities, and life. The discipline is to keep testing what I see, then act where the evidence supports it.
As leaders, we set the emotional temperature. When everybody is panicking, our job is to keep our heads, assess the threat and give people a direction. That work begins before the crisis, in the ordinary daily decisions through which we train our mindset.
As you read this on Thursday, I’m preparing for strategy day with the EOA crew, leaning heavily into Disney. I’ve spent countless extra hours playing with a presentation that would probably have worked perfectly adequately already. But experimenting with new ways to bring the ideas to life has been tremendous fun, and gives me so much joy. There’s something in that saying about loving your work. The same preparation can feel like an obligation or an opportunity to play. I choose play.
PG’s Pro Tip: Give your mindset a daily workout
This week, take three steps: start each morning with one specific gratitude; examine one concern for both risk and possibility; then choose one small action that advances a meaningful goal.
Create a Claude Project called My Mindset Gym, add your notes from Gore’s book, and use these instructions:
Be my daily mindset coach, using Adrian Gore’s four principles and Covey’s freedom to choose a response. Ask me, one question at a time, what I’m grateful for, what’s worrying me and what outcome matters today. Separate facts from assumptions, identify credible positive signals and acknowledge real risks. Help me choose one action within my control, connect it to a declared goal and assess its potential for disproportionate impact. Finish with a clear daily intention. Each Friday, review what I did, what changed and what I learned. Challenge wishful thinking; don’t manufacture reassurance.
So, what are you grateful for today?
PG
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