Daria, you describe yourself as a “Working Optimist” and you run The Working Optimist entirely in English with multicultural teams. Can you briefly share your journey from fashion and image consulting to positive psychology and coaching, and how that led you to focus on engaging international collaborators through English‑language workshops?
After 25 years as a commercial stylist mastering the extrinsic, my fascination with the intrinsic drives of values, connection, and purpose led me to get certified in applied positive psychology, individual and group coaching at The Flourishing Center. Coaching individuals and teams lead me to co found the Working Optimist, an outsourced coaching and organizational health company dedicated to equipping individuals and teams with the human centered tools they need to collaborate, lead and live with purpose. My mission is to help leaders and teams move beyond surface level performance where people and businesses genuinely excel.
When you design an English‑language workshop for a global team, what are the concrete levers you use to create psychological safety so that people from different cultures, language levels, and hierarchies actually dare to speak up and participate?
When people lead with empathy, authenticity and transparency the ability to create a container that naturally feels lead with love develops. Organizational health only happens when people across every title, language, and background feel safe enough to speak honestly, grounding in a culture of trust. We design a space where that kidn of openness is celebrated. We teach meta cognition practices that can
You work at the crossroads of applied positive psychology and leadership development. Can you walk us through a specific workshop format or exercise you use to boost engagement in international teams, and explain why it works from a psychological point of view?
Reframing Negativity: AI & Real-Time Resilience is a 45-minute workshop designed to help professionals navigate the psychological friction that often accompanies workplace change, particularly around AI adoption. Rather than a technical deep dive, it meets people where resistance actually lives: in the mind. Through cognitive education, pair exercises, and creative writing, participants explore why negativity bias makes change feel threatening and learn practical tools to shift those responses in real time. The centerpiece is the ABCDE model (Adversity, Belief, Consequence, Disputation, Energization), which gives teams a repeatable framework for reframing anxious or resistant thinking into forward momentum with no worksheet or lengthy journaling session required. Change happens successfully when we allow individuals the space to receive it with mindset shifts and permission to be human. The space allows for richer group debrief conversations, deeper pair work, and more intentional reflection on personal takeaways and optional homework practices. On the leadership side, the workshop reframes the leader's role not as a change manager who simply announces AI initiatives, but as a psychological safety architect who models adaptability and facilitates reframing conversations for their teams. With 45 minutes, there's space to go beyond awareness into genuine behavior shift allowing leaders and their teams the language, the tools, and the practiced confidence to meet change with curiosity rather than resistance.
Many companies think, “We already work in English, so our teams are automatically engaged internationally.” From your experience with clients, what are the most common blind spots or mistakes you see leaders make when trying to engage global teams in English?
Cultural operating systems are different and most people measure engagement based on contribution. Neurologically we are programed for certainty so we celebrate the behavoirs our own brains are naturally wired to receive. Meta cognition teaching can reach these blind spots.
You are listed as an Optimist Instructor on Simon Sinek’s “Optimism at Work” platform. How does that framework influence the way you approach international engagement, and could you share a tangible example where you saw a shift in collaboration or trust after applying these principles in a cross‑border team?
Our first workshop, the Sum of All Our Parts, establishes the essential premise that every person arriving at a global team meeting brings with them a lifetime of experiences, cultural conditioning, family systems, and neurological patterning that shapes how they receive information, process safety, and choose whether or not to contribute. This is not abstract philosophy. It is the neurobiological reality that the PERMA approach builds from. Before we can talk about positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, or accomplishment, we have to honestly reckon with the fact that people's past experiences have already written much of the story about whether they believe those things are available to them in a workplace setting.
Looking ahead, as hybrid work and distributed teams become the norm, how do you see English‑language workshops and coaching evolving to sustain engagement and meaning at work across countries and time zones?
Many hybrid work frameworks start with logistics and end with culture as an afterthought. Our workshops reverse that sequence, starting with the human being, their history, their neurological patterning, their cultural operating system, and their relationship to change and safety, and building outward from there. In a world where teams are increasingly distributed across geography, language, and lived experience, that sequence is not just valuable. It is the difference between a hybrid work strategy that looks good on paper and one that actually produces belonging, resilience, and sustained high performance across the full sum of all its parts.
To close, what one practical habit or micro‑ritual would you invite any manager of an international team to start this week—something simple they can do in English with their team to build more trust, engagement, and a sense of shared purpose?
Rather than opening with agenda items that immediately orient people toward tasks, timelines, and deliverables, the more transformative practice is to open with a single powerful question directed at each human in the room. When we lead with a question that is carefully designed to connect each individual's sense of purpose, perspective, or lived experience to the collective work at hand, we signal to every person present that they are part of the collective and a contributor relevant to the outcome. That signal alone begins to build the psychological safety that high performing teams require.
Learn more: https://workingoptimist.com