We’ve reached the end of our Future Fit Spotlight series.
Twelve leaders. Four questions each. Dozens of insights on the future of leadership from resilience and innovation to diversity, human connection, and bold decision-making.
And it feels fitting to close with someone who believes the future of leadership rests on one deceptively simple, but deeply powerful capability: optimism.
Meet Victor Perton, founder and Chief Optimism Officer at the Center for Optimism. He’s a man who often starts his day walking barefoot through wet grass, looking up at the morning star, and letting his thoughts wander to the conversations ahead.
It’s not just a charming personal ritual. It’s a deliberate practice a daily pause that sets his mind in the right place before the demands of the day begin. These intentional rituals shape mindset. They influence how leaders show up, the tone they set for their teams, and the way they respond under pressure. The leader who begins the day grounded and connected is far more likely to bring clarity, energy, and optimism into every interaction.
Victor doesn’t just talk about optimism. He lives it. And in our conversation, he made it clear optimism is not a “soft skill” or a personality quirk. It’s a leadership strategy. And right now, we’re in danger of losing it.
The Risk We’re Overlooking
When Victor talks about the future, he doesn’t start with AI, climate change, or geopolitical instability. He starts with a risk that almost no leader has on their radar: declining optimism.
Last year, the President of Singapore called it the biggest public policy issue in the world. The World Economic Forum went further listing it as the top global risk for 2025.
Yet, as Victor points out, few leadership teams have optimism on their risk register. And that’s the problem because what we don’t measure, we don’t manage.
The fix isn’t just policy or programs. It’s leaders building daily practices that keep optimism alive in themselves and their teams. Whether that’s starting meetings with a question that sparks hope, or making time to acknowledge progress, these repeated rituals turn optimism from an abstract concept into a living, breathing part of workplace culture.
From Infectious to Magnetic
Victor explains optimism on three levels:
Infectious optimism — the quick spark that can shift a mood in minutes. Imagine a manager walking into a Monday meeting with genuine enthusiasm, recognising a small win from last week, and instantly lifting the energy in the room. It’s not accidental it’s a ritualised habit to look for and name the good.
Contagious optimism — a steady, consistent energy that shapes the tone of a workplace. This is built through repeated acts of connection: greeting people by name, asking about their weekend, celebrating team milestones. Over time, those small practices accumulate into trust and positivity.
Magnetic optimism — the gold standard. This is when a leader’s belief in the future is so tangible, and their vision so compelling, that people are drawn to them. These leaders often have visible rituals for reinforcing that vision regular storytelling in town halls, visual boards that track progress toward big goals, or personal check-ins with staff that link daily work to the bigger picture.
Small Habits, Big Impact
Victor’s advice for building optimism isn’t wrapped up in complex frameworks. It’s rooted in everyday human connection.
Smile. Say hello to everyone. Ask better questions.
These aren’t throwaway gestures they’re intentional rituals that signal to your team, you matter. They reset the emotional climate in micro-moments.
He warns of the alternative leaders who walk into offices with earbuds in, eyes fixed on their phones, barely acknowledging their teams. It’s not intentional harm, but it sends an unspoken message: “You’re not my priority.” Over time, that erodes trust and morale.
Now picture the opposite. A leader pauses in the corridor to greet a team member, asks, “What’s been the best thing in your day?” and listens to the answer. In that short moment, they’ve made the person feel seen, valued, and connected. Multiply that by dozens of interactions each week, and you have a cultural shift — powered by small, repeated acts.
Imagining the Future You’ll Lead
At a Melbourne 2050 conference, Victor posed a challenge to the room:
“Tell me what you’re going to look like in 2050. What will you be doing? Who will you be with? How can you tell the city of Melbourne what to do unless you can imagine yourself in it?”
This too is a ritual one of imagination and future-mapping. It’s a way of anchoring strategy in something tangible and personal.
Victor even suggests making it personal. Pour a glass of wine, whiskey, or kombucha, and sit with the question: Who will I be in that future? What impact will I have made? The more often you revisit that vision, the stronger it becomes and the more naturally your daily actions align with it.
The Leadership We’ll Need
For Victor, the future fit leader is infectiously optimistic and curious. They don’t hide behind closed doors or long email chains they walk the floor, greet people, and show up in ways that make optimism visible.
They understand that optimism isn’t about ignoring challenges. It’s about framing them in a way that invites creativity and collaboration. And they embed optimism into the cadence of their leadership not as a one-off motivational moment, but as a pattern of behaviour their teams come to rely on.
At a public service leadership event, Victor opened with the question, “What’s your optimism superpower?” The room lit up. People shared answers in the chat, in person, and between sessions. The conversation continued long after the event because the ritual of starting with a hopeful, generative question had shifted the whole tone of the gathering.
A Challenge for All of Us
Victor closed our conversation with an invitation — and a challenge:
Become a magnetic optimist.
Choose optimism daily not because it’s easy, but because it’s brave. Create rituals that keep optimism alive in your leadership. Ask questions that spark possibility. Make connection your first priority.
Because in a world heavy with uncertainty, the leaders who carry and share a vision for a better future will be the ones who shape it. And if that vision is compelling enough, people won’t just follow they’ll lean in, contribute, and help bring it to life.
🎧 Listen to my full conversation with Victor Perton and discover why optimism might just be the leadership advantage we all need in the final episode of the Future Fit Spotlight series.