The power of optimism in work and life

A dream client. Everyone in agency land will have uttered this phrase at least once in their lives. But what does it really mean? I’d wager it’s different depending on who you talk to. Is it a client with sophisticated creative style or a high-profile brand? A client with unlimited budgets? A super-engaged client? Or indeed a very hands-off client? With a hundred ways to slice it, I’ve often thought about what my own dream client looks like. And after working with one of our biggest clients, Cielo, for the last couple of years, I think I’ve finally figured it out.

There are many things that can make a working partnership great – from clear briefs to luxurious timelines, from highly-skilled teams to water-tight planning. But it’s the spirit of optimism, I’ve realised, that makes all the difference. Positivity is the attribute that can weather all storms: a client could have miniscule budgets, an incredibly challenging group of internal stakeholders, a project they needed delivered yesterday or actually no idea what the brief actually is. But if they are filled with positivity and inject that into the relationship and the day to day, the possibilities are endless.

Optimism fuels better thinking, even in the face of the biggest challenges. Branding can be a tricky business: it’s sometimes hard to define, often unfamiliar territory for clients, and highly subjective. Everyone loves to have an opinion about creative things – and they won’t all be favourable. Negativity can be a quick deflator of confidence and directly impact quality of work. Positivity, however, has an opposite and even more powerful effect. I’ve witnessed it dramatically improve quality of work. ‘Positive reinforcement’ is a buzzword for a reason: it works.

Positivity also finds opportunity, and opportunity is what every business needs now more than ever. We’re operating in a wholly changed world and an edge-of-a-knife global economy. Many might feel the challenges of today are bigger than ever before (largely not true but as I tell my kids, if that’s how you feel then it’s valid!). But as Churchill famously said, a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, and an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. Positive thinking takes you through different doors, for different perspectives, and leads to those next-level ideas we’re all craving. You’d be amazed the kind of creativity that can spring from relentless optimism in the face of challenges.

And quite simply, positivity just makes work more enjoyable. For most of us, our job is still sometimes ‘just a job’, and there are parts that are kind of a drag. But when positivity reverberates between you and your client, even those difficult conversations, tough problems and mundane reporting tasks are somehow more easily shouldered. Positivity begets positivity, and that feedback cycle impacts the will and skill of the team: to do more, to trust more, to think bigger and to take risks. A true feeling of positivity makes everyone want to try that little extra bit harder, and with pleasure.

When we pitched for the Cielo project, we called it a ‘match made in Heavenly’ and it turns out we were right. It’s clear that optimism is ingrained in who Cielo is as an organisation and as individuals, and it shows itself in the quality of work, strength of partnership and dedication of everyone involved to each other first and foremost. We can take a hint from this insight and apply it to the rest of our lives as well. Positivity matters not just in the agency-client setting, but in most settings in life: employee-manager, colleague-colleague, partner-partner, parent-child, friend-friend. Like many things, what works for work is likely to work for life, because we’re all human at the end of the day. And hopefully increasingly more positive ones.