The Positive Work Ways® Library
A body of work exploring how work design, leadership, and culture shape human state, behaviour, and performance.
Positive Work Ways
Building a Brain-Friendly Business
The foundational framework
Practical, science-light positive work book, containing brain-friendly work strategies and solutions focused workplace guides to help you—and your team—think more clearly, lead more calmly, and build a resilient, high-trust culture.
What You’ll Learn
Unlock the untapped power of people’s minds to make work safer, more productive—and more human.
- Master Your Brain State
Learn simple, bite-sized practices (no theory overload!) to notice when stress is creeping in—and flip your internal switch back to calm, creative thinking.
- Lead with Quiet Confidence
Discover questions and conversation starters that help you—and your team—stay present, stay curious, and shift from reactive “survival mode” into intentional problem-solving.
- Build a Culture That Cares
See how small, everyday choices—your words, your tone, your questions—ripple out to create greater trust, collaboration, and well-being across your whole organization.
- Spark Change Beyond Your Desk
Turn your new skills into a movement: healthier brains fuel healthier workplaces, which in turn build stronger, more resilient communities.
Why This Book Matters
Because real change starts inside our heads—and spreads far beyond our walls.
- We’re living in a stress epidemic. Chronic pressure is burning people out and sapping joy—at work and at home.
- Science meets empathy. No dense neuroscience jargon—just a down-to-earth guide to how our “internal pharmacist” works, why it matters, and what to do about it.
- Tools you can use today. From a 60-second breathing reset to a three-question mindset check-in, every practice is field-tested in real organizations.
- A bigger ripple effect. When teams become more resilient, happier, and safer, that positivity extends into neighborhoods, families, and society at large.
Positive Work Ways isn’t just another leadership manual—it’s a toolkit for anyone who wants to turn insight into impact, one small shift at a time.
What's Your Pharmacist Doing?
A brain-friendly solutions-focused guide to understanding your internal brain team, and using it we
An accessible introduction to the model
What’s Your Pharmacist Doing?™ introduces a simple but powerful way to understand what’s really driving behaviour, stress, and decision-making at work.
Using an accessible internal “brain team” analogy – the Radar, the Filing Cabinet, and the Pharmacist™ – this book helps readers make sense of why people react the way they do under pressure, and how small shifts in awareness can dramatically change outcomes.
This is not a neuroscience textbook.
And it’s not a wellbeing manual.
It’s a practical, story-led guide to noticing what’s happening inside us – and learning how to work with it rather than against it.
Designed for leaders, managers, and anyone curious about human behaviour, this book bridges everyday experience with science-informed insight, without jargon or overload.
What You’ll Learn
In What’s Your Pharmacist Doing?™, you’ll learn how to:
- Understand Your Internal Brain Team
Make sense of the Radar (threat detection), Filing Cabinet (memory and pattern), and Pharmacist™ (internal chemistry) – and how they work together to shape behaviour.
- Recognise State Before Behaviour
Learn why behaviour is often a downstream outcome of internal state – and why addressing state first leads to better conversations, decisions, and outcomes.
- Spot the Early Signs of Threat
Identify subtle cues that indicate when stress, pressure, or uncertainty are quietly shifting people into survival mode.
- Use Simple, Everyday Resets
Apply practical noticing and language shifts that help move yourself and others back into clearer, calmer thinking.
- Apply the Model to Real Situations
Explore relatable workplace scenarios that show how this internal system plays out in meetings, conversations, leadership moments, and daily work.
Why This Book Matters
Because most problems at work are not skill problems. They’re state problems.
People are not “difficult”, “resistant”, or “unmotivated” by default. They are responding to what their internal system is detecting as safe or threatening.
When we don’t understand this, we:
- mislabel behaviour
- escalate conflict
- apply pressure where clarity is needed
- and unintentionally make situations worse
What’s Your Pharmacist Doing?™ gives people a shared language for what’s happening beneath the surface – creating awareness without blame, and insight without diagnosis.
This book lays the foundation for healthier conversations, stronger leadership, and more human ways of working – one moment at a time.
It’s the starting point.
Why the Way We Work Isn’t Working
Leadership, Culture, and Psychosocial Risk Through a Brain-State Lens
A system-level critique through a brain-state lens
Most organisations are trying to do the right thing.
They invest in leadership development.
They talk about culture, wellbeing, resilience, and engagement.
They introduce new frameworks, communication strategies, and change programmes.
And yet, pressure continues to rise.
Decision quality drops under stress.
Conflict escalates.
Good people disengage or leave.
Psychosocial risk increases.
Why the Way We Work Isn’t Working starts from an uncomfortable but necessary premise:
Work isn’t failing because people are weak, resistant, or unmotivated.
It’s failing because the way work is designed and led repeatedly pushes human systems into survival mode.
This book introduces a brain-state lens to leadership, culture, and risk — making visible how everyday conditions shape behaviour, decision-making, and safety long before problems surface.
It is not a wellbeing book.
It is not a mindset guide.
It is a systemic examination of modern work.
What You’ll Explore
In Why the Way We Work Isn't Working you'll explore
- Why capability collapses under pressure
Why intelligent, experienced people make poorer decisions when demand, uncertainty, and threat accumulate — and why this is a state issue, not a skills issue.
- How culture actually forms
Why culture is not values or behaviours, but the collective state an environment repeatedly creates — especially under pressure.
- Why change fatigue isn’t resistance
How organisational memory, unfinished change, and cumulative pressure drive protection rather than engagement.
- How leadership shapes psychosocial risk
Why leadership behaviour is one of the most powerful risk controls — influencing clarity, safety, decision quality, and recovery every day.
- Why resilience can’t compensate for unsafe conditions
How resilience becomes extractive when organisations ask people to cope better instead of changing the conditions creating harm.
- Why communication fails even in expert organisations
How communication breaks down when understanding is assumed rather than created — and why this is a state problem, not a messaging one.
- What state-aware leadership actually looks like
How leaders can remain empathic, decisive, and human without absorbing emotional load or burning out.
- How Positive Work Ways® functions as modern risk management
Why psychosocial safety, performance, leadership, and risk can no longer be treated as separate domains.
Why This Book Matters
Psychosocial harm is no longer theoretical. It is increasingly recognised as a workplace safety issu
Regulatory expectations are evolving.
Frameworks like ISO 45003 already exist.
The evidence is clear.
But even without legislation, organisations are already paying the price:
- decision errors and rework
- conflict and grievances
- absence and presenteeism
- leadership burnout
- cultural drift under pressure
What has been missing is not intent or effort — but a shared understanding of how humans actually function at work.
This book matters because it shifts responsibility away from blaming individuals and toward how work is designed, led, and experienced.
It reframes leadership as state management.
Culture as collective brain state.
Resilience as an outcome of conditions.
Safety as something shaped daily, not documented annually.
It offers leaders and organisations a way to see work differently — and once you see it, you can’t unknow it.
About the Author
Louise Thomas
With a background in occupational health and safety and a long-standing interest in psychology, Louise has spent her career exploring how organisations can work better — not just in terms of productivity, but in how people think, feel, and relate to one another.
Alongside her full-time work, she also qualified as a solutions-focused therapist — but chose not to practice clinically. Supporting people one-to-one, after the crisis had already hit, didn’t feel enough. She became increasingly focused on prevention, and on the potential to create wider impact through the workplace, recognising that organisations are simply the sum of their people, and culture reflects collective brain state.
It was during her therapy training that she first came across a simple brain analogy designed to help people make sense of their own reactions. It proved a powerful tool — not just for awareness, but for action. That same analogy would later form the foundation for Positive Work Ways: a workplace-focused model that helps individuals and organisations shift behaviour, influence culture, and improve outcomes by working with the brain, not against it.
Louise went on to complete a Master’s degree in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health, which deepened her interest further, particularly in how positive psychology and solutions-focused approaches can be combined to support more proactive and practical change in the workplace.
Today, she works with businesses to help them build healthier, safer, more productive cultures — using practical, evidence-informed tools that influence brain state and shape behaviour across teams, systems, and leadership.
Not quite ready for the full dive?
FREE RESOURCES
I believe so passionately in the power of Positive Work Ways that I’ve created a handful of free resources to help you get started—even if you’re not ready to buy the book today.
- Download the Quick Start Guide from my book providing an overview of Positive Work Ways.
- Download the Positive Workways Introductory Toolkit for a sample of a selection of activities.
- Try the What Does Good Look Like? Worksheet to shift your focus toward solutions.
- Grab the Pharmacist check-in for a quick pause and reset when pressure mounts.
These mini-guides and activities bring the core ideas to life in just a few clicks—no cost, no strings attached. My hope is that they spark new insights, build your confidence to influence your own (and your team’s) pharmacist, and show you first-hand how small shifts can unlock big, positive ripples at work and beyond.