Letting go of what no longer serves "opens up all this energy and creativity and joy" you need to navigate these challenging times.gettyOnly 44% of employees say they are thriving at work, down from 66% just two years ago: a lower level than even during the pandemic. That finding, from Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, is a data point that should be pushed to the top of a leadership team’s priorities. And yet, we see primarily inaction, more-of-the-same interventions, and in many cases, budget cuts, when it comes to employee wellbeing. We have been trained to read a depleted workforce as a morale problem to be patched with another program or pizza party, rather than evidence that our very operating model is running people into the ground.Widen the lens and the urgency rises. In an AI and Workplace Humanity Report survey, 63% of workers expect AI to make the workplace feel ‘less human’ this year. Mercer found fear of AI-driven job loss has climbed from 28% to 40% in two years. At the top, Russell Reynolds Associates recorded 234 CEO departures globally in 2025 (a second straight record year), with 86% of new appointments going to first-time CEOs. And zooming out to the most existential scale, the Global Footprint Network marked 2026 as the highest level of ecological overshoot ever: humanity now consumes the equivalent of 1.73 Earths.That is the real-world context every leader now operates in, which executive coach Caroline Stokes and many other thinking leaders call the polycrisis. Two responses come most naturally. According to Stokes, a Thinkers50 Radar honoree for 2026 and former Sony executive, both are traps.MORE FOR YOUThe first is doom: the fatalistic conclusion that the problems are too large across climate, AI, societal challenges, resulting in a downward spiral toward paralysis. The second is more seductive, and more common in the C-suite: the performance of certainty. Stokes, whose book AfterShock to 2030 is a guide for leaders navigating exactly this convergence, puts it bluntly. She says that believing we have certainty right now is a form of gaslighting, "even self-abuse." She is not against a sense of confidence or self-efficacy. She is trying to talk leaders out of the exhausting performance of projecting total command of a situation to a board, a team, or oneself, when no honest person can possibly predict the next 18 months, or even 18 days.The data suggests that this theater of certainty is both widespread and threadbare. Russell Reynolds found CEOs’ own sense of preparedness to handle technological change fell to 40% in late 2025, down from 57% two years earlier. Mercer found 62% of employees believe leaders underestimate AI's emotional impact, while only 19% of HR leaders factor that impact into how they roll the technology out. The distance between the certainty leaders perform and the readiness they actually feel is brutally corrosive of trust.This gap also reveals cause for optimism. Stokes describes the old, performative model of leadership as "dead dead," which she sees as an occasion for both a funeral and optimism. The funeral is real; letting go of a hard-won way of working is a genuine loss, and much of the exhaustion in organizations right now is unprocessed grief. But on the far side of that grief sits a choice available to any leader: to look squarely at what isn’t working and dare to picture, and build, something better. That practice – being clear-eyed about the wreckage, and simultaneously committed to a future worth wanting – is what optimism actually is, and it begins where the data is hardest.The practice of this grounded optimism is subtractive before it is additive. The reflex in a crisis is to add: another initiative, another tool, another quarter of growth stacked on the last. Stokes’s first instruction to overwhelmed leaders is the opposite. Stop. Letting go of what no longer serves, she says, "opens up all this energy and creativity and joy" you need to navigate these challenging times. The economic anthropologist Jason Hickel makes the structural version of the argument in Less Is More: economies built entirely on "more" are not sustainable. It’s a body of work (degrowth, regenerative economics, thinkers like Kohei Saito) that Stokes places at the center of her own thinking, and argues belongs in the boardroom rather than at its fringes. Organizations that can only add and never subtract a bloated process, an extractive growth target, a manager everyone resentfully tolerates, are running the same unpayable deficit as Earth Overshoot, at smaller scale.This is a foundational principle of regenerative leadership, in contrast to the current extractive norm: you build a system’s capacity by removing what depletes it, not by piling on more. Stokes models it literally. She published AfterShock to 2030 as a digital-only book, refusing to print a single copy, because she wouldn't extract from the planet in order to tell leaders to tread more lightly. The subtraction is the message.What makes this approach optimistic rather than grim is that subtraction returns agency. Drop the performance of certainty, and you are free to explore the scenarios actually worth pursuing, then commit to one. Drop the addiction to growth-at-all-costs, and you make room for something viable. There is a physiological layer, too: Stokes’s "stop" draws on the work of Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal research explains why a dysregulated leader does not stay contained at the top. Through co-regulation, a leader's nervous system state transmits across a team. A leader who can genuinely stop (rather than perform composure) steadies the people around them. The thing worth stopping for, Stokes argues, is attention itself, one crucial capacity that technology can’t ever take over. "AI will handle your calendar, your follow-ups, your content cadence," she says, "but it cannot notice the human in front of you." In a workforce where most employees feel their leaders are missing the emotional reality, that undistracted, unhurried attention is not a soft skill. It is a game changer.Disciplined optimism asks a sharper question than how to stay positive. Stokes runs every decision through her own version: “What are you powering?” Given the actual data you have access to – the depletion, the churn, the overshoot – what future is worth building toward, and what would you need to subtract to free the energy to build it? Her TEDx talk and AfterShock to 2030 are good fodder to enrich your answers to that question. But the discipline starts wherever you are: stop long enough to picture the future you actually want, and take one real step toward it. Practiced this way, optimism is the only way to navigate the aftershocks that are sure to continue.