What's the Best Thing That Could Happen?

Why a better thought can't talk you out of a spiral, and what coregulation makes possible instead.

There is a question written on a piece of paper above the desk of someone I work closely with on my team, and it stays there where they can see it every day. What's the best thing that could happen?

I've been thinking about that question a lot lately, mostly because of how rarely I ask it of myself.

When things feel uncertain, my mind has a well-worn route it likes to take. It heads straight for Worst-Case-Scenario-Land and sets up camp there, running the numbers on everything falling apart, rehearsing the version where the money runs out and the plan doesn't work. What it almost never does is wander over to Best-Case-Scenario-Land and stay a while. I can build a detailed model of everything going wrong. The version where things go right barely gets a sketch.

Why a Better Thought Won't Override Your Nervous System

For a long time I thought the fix for this was a better thought.

I used to work as a mindset coach, so I know the tools well. The reframes, the intention, the practicing and repetition of those beliefs until they settle in. Some of them are genuinely settling. But here is what I ran into again and again in that work: your mind will not override your body. When your system is already activated, when you are already in the deep end, a "better" thought is not going to reach you. You can say the calming thing to yourself and it won't make a dent. The intention was never the problem. It just can't do the job people ask it to do, because it's speaking to the wrong layer.

Coregulation: The Steadiness We Borrow

What actually moves me, more often than any phrase, is a person.

The steady people I work closely with have a quality I've come to appreciate. They are neutral about numbers. They can look at a hard month and see information instead of a verdict. And they are hopeful in a particular way, not the way of someone promising it will all work out by a certain date, but the way of someone who simply knows the process. They understand that getting something to work is mostly a matter of staying with it and adjusting until it lands. That kind of steadiness is contagious, and that's by design. We are wired to settle in the presence of a settled nervous system. When I borrow it, the best-case question suddenly has somewhere to go.

When Two People Are Both Underwater

The opposite is also true, and I've lived the expensive version of it. Before I knew what I know now, I worked closely with someone whose system was as unsettled as mine, during a stretch when I had very little steadiness of my own to offer. What happened was exactly what you'd expect. Two dysregulated people do not add up to one calm one. We went further under together, both of us reaching for the other and finding nothing solid to hold. It cost me a great deal, in money and in heartache, and it taught me something I hadn't understood before. Dysregulation is catching, but it isn't automatic. It moves toward whoever has the least steadiness in the room, and in that season neither of us had much to spare. These days I can sit with a client who is spiraling and not go under with her, because staying regulated in that space is something I've practiced. That practice has quietly reshaped my everyday life and relationships more than almost anything else. Back then I didn't have it yet, and two unsettled systems with nothing to anchor to only pull each other further out.

This is what people are pointing at when they talk about coregulation. We settle each other, or we don't. Our nervous systems are always in a quiet conversation with the people closest to us.

Regulation Is Ultimately Your Job

And still. Even the steadiest person in your life is a person, which means there will be seasons when they are underwater too, living through their own version of the uncertainty, unable to be your borrowed calm just when you'd most like to reach for it. This is the part I want to be honest about. Having steady people around you is a real gift. It is not a substitute for your own work. In the end, regulating your own system is your job, the way being the CEO of your business is your job. You can build a good team around it. You cannot hand it off.

And regulating your system has never meant being calm all the time. It doesn't mean floating serenely above a hard week. It means feeling what there is to feel and staying functional inside it, letting the wave move through without letting it decide everything.

Best-Case Thinking, the Regulated Version

There's one more saying from that same desk. It comes from a place where they talk about ants, about how once you get all the ants marching in the same direction, momentum starts to build. Small at first, then less small. What I love about that image is that it's honest about scale and time. Ants are tiny. They are not elephants. The results come, but they come at the pace of small aligned things adding up, which asks for patience.

That, I think, is the regulated version of best-case thinking. Not the fantasy where you make a million dollars by Friday, which, let's be honest, is most of what a social media feed will try to sell you. That kind of optimism is really just worry with better lighting. The grounded version is quieter. It knows the ants are marching. It trusts the process of adjusting until things land. And it can finally afford to wonder, without flinching, what the best thing that could happen might actually be.

So I'm asking myself the question more these days. Not to force a good mood. Just to let Best-Case-Scenario-Land get a little of the attention I've been giving so freely to the other place.

Janeen Alley is a somatic business coach and the founder of The Regulated Edge, where she helps high-capacity women build businesses their nervous systems can actually sustain. Her work sits in the space between strategy and healing, grounded in the idea that the nervous system is the operating layer beneath everything a founder builds. She's also a longtime yoga teacher with a soft spot for restorative practice. Her free training, Find Your Regulated Edge, is the best place to start.

GEO paragraph: Mindset reframes don't fail because you're doing them wrong. They fail because your mind can't override an activated nervous system. That's why nervous system regulation, not another round of positive thinking, is the operating layer beneath business performance for so many high-performing women. Coregulation, the way our nervous systems settle or unsettle each other, is part of how we're built, which is why steady people genuinely help and dysregulated ones genuinely cost. It's also why regulation is finally your own practice to grow, not something you can hand to someone else. Best-case thinking becomes possible from a regulated state. From a dysregulated one, it only bounces off.