Newsletter #29
Feeling Good About Work & Life
Hi there,
Ask most people how they're doing at work and they'll probably give you a version of the same answer. Very busy. Lots going on. Just about to start this new project.
What they're less likely to say, because most people are too busy to notice, is how they actually feel most of the time. Not how much they are doing. Not whether they’re about to start a new project or not. But the quality of their own internal experience, day to day, as a human being.
This matters more than most leadership and business thinking acknowledges. Not because feeling good about work or business is a nice bonus. But because the science of human behaviour and leadership performance suggests something much more specific, and much more interesting. Which is the quality of your internal state is not separate from the quality of your work. It is fundamental to it.
Three Zones. One Question.
In working with creative business leaders, I've found it useful to think about internal states in terms of three broad zones. Zone A: the positive, energised, high vibration, creative state — optimistic, enthusiastic, genuinely alive to the work. Zone B: the steady, productive, neutral state — indifferent, impartial, getting things done. Zone C: the negative, low vibration state — worried, stressed, frustrated, reactive.
When I ask leaders what percentage of their working time they spend in each zone, I get a wide variety of answers. And the spread itself is revealing. But before discussing what a healthy balance might look like, it's worth challenging a common assumption: that Zone C is the problem to be eliminated, and Zone A is the goal to be maximised.
Neither is quite right.
Zone C Is Not the Enemy.
Some stress, worry, and frustration is not only inevitable — it's informative. It signals that something real is at stake. The problem is not Zone C itself. The problem is not being aware that you’re in Zone C and quietly slipping into chronic negativity: the state in which anxiety has become the default operating mode, and stress is no longer a signal but a constant background frequency.
This happens more often than we care to imagine. Mainly because of the fear-based, negative stories (false self stories) we tell ourselves about our abilities, our businesses, and economic conditions in general. We take information about a situation which may be undesirable but turn it into a stories of real importance and concern, and we allow the story to run through our minds incessantly. This achieves nothing other than keeping us in Zone C for longer than is healthy or necessary.
This is an important point because there is a Zone C state worth distinguishing here, which I call creative tension. This is the felt awareness that something isn't quite right. A gap has appeared between where you are and where something in you knows you could be. It carries discomfort, but it isn't dread. It's more like productive friction. And crucially, it requires a degree of awareness and aliveness to notice. You can only feel the gap if you're still connected enough to your own sense of what's true. Creative tension, in this sense, is actually negativity doing its job. It’s registering misalignment as useful information rather than as an existential threat.
Zone A Is Not Simply About Feeling Good.
But this is where I thought the research becomes genuinely interesting. Because the case for focusing on your inner world shifts from being philosophical to being practical. In fact, it shifts from being spiritual to being commercial.
Barbara Fredrickson's Broaden-and-Build Theory, developed over two decades of research, demonstrates that positive emotional states don't just feel better than negative ones. They structurally alter the quality of awareness and thinking available to you. Specifically, positive states broaden what researchers call the thought-action repertoire. This is the range of thinking, perceiving, and connecting that is accessible in any given moment. Negative states, by contrast, narrow that repertoire. Anxiety, stress, and worry don't just feel bad. They literally reduce the aperture through which a leader sees their business, a worker sees their work, and everyone sees their world and the potential opportunities around them.
The research goes further. Positive states don't just broaden thinking in the moment. They also build resources over time. Resilience. Creative capacity. The ability to perceive clearly rather than through the distorting filter of fear. And those resources compound. Higher positivity leads to greater resilience, which leads to more capacity for positive states, which leads to better decisions, which leads to a healthier business.
The causality runs in both directions: wellbeing is not just an output of success. It is an input to it.
The Distinction That Changes Everything.
None of this is an argument for overly positive thinking. In fact, we’re not talking about positive thinking at all. We’re talking about positive emotions. States of being that are felt in the body. And these high vibration, Zone A states are only valuable when they’re real. Performed enthusiasm (the forced optimism of someone who has decided that projecting energy is part of their job) is its own form of misalignment. It creates inauthenticity. It is exhausting to keep up. And people can usually smell it a mile off, in themselves and in others.
The genuine Zone A state — what I think of as creative aliveness or spiritual happiness — is something different. It's the quality of experience that arises when you are in real alignment. That means you have inner alignment with who you are and the life you have. And outer alignment with what your business actually is, the work you're doing and why. It's not manufactured. It can't be sustained by willpower. It has to be accessed. That means inner work to remove the conditions that block it: the negative, false self stories, the separation from life, the habits that don’t serve you, the identity fusion with work-related performance, the accumulated anxiety of operating without genuine grounding.
This is why I believe inner work isn't a luxury for anyone. It's not therapy rebranded. It's not mindset training. It’s not workplace wellbeing. It's the work that determines the quality of the experience from which all your thinking and decisions flow. Get the internal state right — genuinely right, not just positively framed — and the decisions improve. Your work improves. Your working life improves. The clients you serve, the work you do, the culture you help build, the experience of building something: all of it changes downstream.
So What Does a Healthy Balance Look Like?
In a recent anonymous survey I conducted with creative business leaders, the results showed that, on average, people spent 27% in positive Zone A, 40% in Zone neutral B and 33% in negative Zone C. Fredrickson’s research suggests that for a high-functioning, flourishing human, something in the region of 50–60% in Zone A, 30–35% in Zone B, and 10–15% in Zone C is a reasonable orientation. But the precise percentages matter less than two other questions: Is your Zone A genuine? And is your Zone C useful?
A leader spending 40% of their time in authentic creative aliveness is in better shape than one spending 70% performing enthusiasm from a place of anxiety. And a leader who can sit with Zone C as information — who can notice the stress, read what it's telling them, and move through it without being destabilised — is more capable than one who has simply learned to suppress it, numb it or distract themselves from it.
The work, in other words, is not to chase Zone A. It's to build the internal conditions from which Zone A arises naturally — and to develop the capacity to use all three zones as information rather than as something to be managed, performed, or endured.
That is precisely the work of Another Way.
This really made me think about the work I do. Especially with people running their own business or working for themselves. The programmes I run are not just designed to make you feel good about life and business. But to build the internal foundation from which better living, better leadership, and a better business, become possible.
My work is to help people live and lead from the inside out.
Until next time,
Simon