Every design leader I know values precision, strategy, and creative excellence. Yet the single most underrated business skill isn’t technical acumen or aesthetic judgment—it’s empathy.

Empathy isn’t about being “soft” or merely polite. It’s the ability to genuinely understand another person’s thoughts, feelings, and perspective—and to respond in a way that fosters trust, clarity, and connection.

Most design leaders wear high standards like a badge of honor. Standards are essential — they shape quality, create signature work, and fuel reputations. But when high becomes perfect, something subtle and costly starts to happen.

In this conversation, host Igor Rafalovich explores how self-sabotage, overwhelm, and survival-brain responses silently hinder even the most talented designers and architects. Janine breaks down the mindset patterns that drain performance, the neuroscience behind the negativity bias, and the Positive Intelligence framework she uses to help creative professionals operate with clarity, confidence, and emotional resilience.

When people ask me what separates firms that survive from the ones that thrive, they expect me to talk about systems, sales, or beautiful work. Those matter. But frankly, the single biggest lever I see is inside the individuals: mindset, self-mastery, and the soft skills that actually make the rest of the firm run well.

Change is good. You’ve probably heard that before. Sometimes it’s what we tell ourselves when we don’t believe it. Change is difficult for the human brain—it wants certainty, routine, predictability. Our “survival brain” would keep us stuck. Lying to us that change is bad, making us fearful  and grasping onto what is at any cost. That fear makes us slip into our
old sabotaging patterns.