The story behind The Working Optimist.

Iwas a stylist for 25 years, starting in the mid-to-late '90s at prominent New York City fashion brands and later working as a commercial advertising stylist in Los Angeles with major global clients, before returning to school to earn a certificate in positive psychology and become a certified individual and group coach. A quarter-century inside fast-moving, high-performance teams taught me how people actually show up at work, and how often the systems around them don't. My own life made the lesson personal: severe depression in my late teens and twenties, a 12-step program, and years of learning to quiet an inner critic that surfaced under pressure. During COVID I completed the condensed master's in positive psychology at Penn's flourishing centers, where I finally understood metacognition, the ability to observe, reflect, and regulate emotions, and knew I wanted to help other people find that same key.

I had an aha moment as a life and group coach: the conversations I was having weren't really about personal life anymore, they were about work and how unhappy it was making people. I went back to the research: Gallup and McKinsey both showed engagement flat or declining, burnout and AI anxiety rising, and most companies pouring budget into tools instead of into the humans expected to use them. Short-term fixes create short-term results. What organizations actually need is an operating system, a living, human-led layer running beneath the surface, updating mindsets, strengthening teams, and compounding results over time. That's the Working Optimist Mindset Method: grounded in neuroscience, positive psychology, and the PERMA-W framework, delivered through consistent, facilitated micro-moments that build lasting change in AI-resilient workplaces.

Daria