Reconnecting with a sense of hopefulness

If you pay attention to the news, it might feel like we are being engulfed by a raging tornado that is picking up speed and getting wider and wider with every turn. The level of warring is intense. The devastating invasion of the Ukraine by Russia feels surreal. The loss of lives, separation of families, destruction of property, history, freedom, and liberty seems so senseless that it’s easy to feel like you want to lose hope. I remember that I also felt this way back in May 2020 when George Floyd was killed. And of course, most of us have felt frustrated and lost during this pandemic.

I’m going to be honest with you, I had secretly thought that I would be one of the lucky ones and that I would not have to live through a global pandemic or a world war in my lifetime. And I’m guessing for many of you, you may have believed the same.

The lesson in this is of course that we don’t control outside forces. We don’t know what life will bring us. The only thing we can choose is how we respond. The issue is not the issue. How we respond to the issue is the real issue.

As a coach, a big part of my job, is to instill hopefulness and inspiration in my clients. My job is to help them see a different perspective so that they feel empowered to move forward in a difficult situation. I can’t solve my client’s problems for them, but they can navigate their problems with grace, if they feel like they have a choice. And you always have a choice, even if you are not seeing it right now in this moment.

So, given that I am the custodian of hope for my clients, how do I stay hopeful during times of chaos and frustration? I want to respond to this question from two angles.

You always have a choice

First, I want to share that I’m in a very different place in my life than I was a few years ago. If you had asked me this question three or more years ago, I would have struggled to answer, because I often felt hopeless, powerless, angry, and out of control.

In fact, when I revealed my personality type to people, it immediately also gave away my stance on the world. As an Ennea 6, I lived in fear and believed that the world was an unsafe place. I worried constantly and I had cultivated the skill of worst-case scenario-ing to a master level. I would anticipate and “predict” everything I thought would transpire and then I would live my life as if all the things I feared would come true. I hated being unprepared for any situation, so I would overprepare. I prided myself on my planning and organising skills. And it fuelled my intensity, because I then convinced myself that I could reach perfection some day.

So, you can imagine how much fun it must have been to be around me. I was always stressed, worried, frustrated, in a hurry, busy planning and executing, and flabbergasted at what I perceived as people’s lackadaisical attitudes toward life. I was intense. And people felt their blood pressure rising when they spent enough time with me.

Of course, at the time, I did not realise that I was having this impact on people, and I didn’t realise how much pressure I was putting on myself to reach something that was ultimately impossible. I would never reach a point where I was perfectly safe, always in control, and where reality aligned perfectly with my expectations. That is simply not how the world works.

What shifted for me was that I discovered the distinction between Victimhood and Ownership. I saw how often I was being a victim, even though if you had asked me at the time, I would have told you that I absolutely take full ownership of my life.

But that wasn’t really true, since I did not believe in my own authority and choice. I did not experience any inner peace. Even though everything was organised and ordered on the outside, I still felt like I was drowning in fear and chaos on the inside. When I started taking real ownership of my life, things started shifting and I discovered that I could be calm, joyful, and hopeful. The capacity for those things were always there, I just didn’t allow myself to access them.

Active hope vs. Passive hope

The second thing I want to share is a distinction between passive hope and active hope, because I think it’s important. Passive hope is when we say, “Well let’s hope it gets better”, or “Let’s hope they sort it out”, or “I suppose all we can do is hope”.

See, these statements all allude to a sense of powerlessness or a lack of choice. It says that the only choice I have, is to hope/trust/believe/wait for things to get better and that there is nothing I can do in the situation. And that is how we surrender our own personal authority in the situation, because we then choose to be passive bystanders, instead of active creators of our world.

This is not hopefulness, it’s hopelessness. So, when a client tells me that they hope things will get better, or that they just have to hope that things work out, I pause and I go deeper, because I want to know what makes them think that they have no power. I want to uncover the story that they are holding as true that prevents them from seeing that they ALWAYS have a choice, and that not making a choice is also a choice.

Active hope is different. Active hope cultivates hopefulness and personal action. And I’ve seen what is possible when people derive their hope from this place.

Active hope starts with gratitude. It acknowledges the duality of life where there can be both heartache, pain, frustration, even destruction AND love, joy, belonging, celebration, and laughter. And we can hold space for both. It is possible to feel sad, lost, frustrated, heartbroken AND to feel deep love, gratitude, joy, peace, and pride at the same time.

When we focus on what we have and who we have in our lives that bring us joy, we notice how there is always something beautiful, and something to love and appreciate about our lives.

At the same time, active hope does not ignore real pain and suffering. It honours the pain and suffering that is there too. It acknowledges that duality, but we choose to see it from a place of love, not from a place of fear. We choose to look at the things that are causing us pain and we allow ourselves to feel the feelings that are bubbling up inside of us, without letting it derail our sense of personal authority.

In no way am I advocating for ignoring your real feelings in any situation. In fact, my invitation is that you lean into what you are really feeling and that you are honest with yourself. Pretending that we are not feeling scared, overwhelmed, deflated, confused, disappointed, etc., means we are denying our own reality. And insisting that we should simply be grateful, keep our heads high, and keep going, is toxic positivity. Toxic positivity causes more harm than good in the long run.

Instead, emotional agility asks us to lean into the discomfort of our own emotions and to stay curious about what messages our emotions are trying to send us. I love how Susan David phrases it. She says, “feelings are data, not directives”. What this means is that feelings give us information about what is going on for us. And yet, we still get to choose how we want to respond to the situation. We don’t have to blindly react to our feelings. We can share how we feel AND choose a path that aligns with what’s most important to us.

A custodian of hopefulness

On a practical level, as a custodian of hopefulness, I make a conscious effort to lean into the discomfort of my own feelings and to pay attention to what is there. I appreciate the messages my emotions are sending, and I work at understanding how these messages fit into the broader context of my life and what I’m trying to create.

Additionally, I consciously engage in activities that fill my cup and feed my soul, so that I can keep showing up to this work. I go for walks out in nature. I often take my clients with me on my walks. They are in my heart and mind as I spend time out in nature. I think about them and about how best to serve them.

I spend time reading things that inspire me and I have two journals – one for quotes that make me think or inspire me, and an idea journal where I write down my big ideas. This way, I clear my mental clutter and I have a record of ideas so I can return to them and consider the timeliness of when they will serve the people in my world.

And I work with a coach to do the healing and reflection I need to show up as my best self. Coaching is the gift I give myself, because it helps me show up more powerfully and with more intention and focus in my life. When I feel hopeless, I ask my coach to be a custodian of hopefulness for me.

Something that feeds my soul deeply, is spending time with loved ones – my family and my close friends. So, I consciously carve out time to be with them. I remove all distractions and focus on being fully present and engaged. When I do this, I feel a deep sense of gratitude, love, and belonging. I’m reminded of what’s most important to me, which is sharing this life with those I love and care about. Building memories with loved ones outranks anything else I could be busy with.

On the days when it feels hard to get unstuck from my own sense of horror, overwhelm, grief, anger, frustration, or disappointment, I slow down, and I allow myself those feelings. Then I choose who I want to be in navigating whatever life is presenting me with.

Find the gift

Once we have acknowledged our fears and concerns, we can ask ourselves what we are learning or what the gift is in the situation. Every situation always offers one of three possible gifts if we are willing to slow down and see them.

There is the gift of learning. What I’m I learning about myself or from this experience? What do I need to learn to feel more empowered next time I find myself in a similar situation?

There is the gift of growth. Who will I become as I move through this experience? Who do I want to become? How will I grow? Every experience provides the opportunity for personal growth and transformation if I appreciate that life isn’t happening to me, it’s happening FOR me.

There is the gift of inspiration. What part of this experience is tugging at my inner core? What values of mine are being brought forward here? What do I feel called to by life to change here? Or another way of saying this is, what is inspiring from this place?

And then of course, once I have an answer to one of these questions, it’s important that I take action. That I commit to taking action in 24 hours after having my insight. Why is this important? Because an idea without an action, remains just that, an idea, a thought, an insight. For an idea to transform my life and my world, I need to be in action, inspired by that idea, so that it can transform my life and who I’m choosing to be in the world. So, I want to choose the smallest unit of action I can think of and take that step, because that first step will inspire my next step.

You cannot control what is happening in the world. You cannot control other people’s reactions, but you ALWAYS get to choose your reaction to every situation. This is what Stephen Covey would have called living in your circle of influence, where you choose to focus on the things you can control, instead of living in your circle of concern, where you just feel overwhelmed by all the things you cannot control.

Those who live from this place of full personal choice cannot be ignored, because they evoke in us all the sense of what is possible when we choose to take ownership instead of staying in victim mode. They become our beacons of hope in a world that sometimes might feel like a dark and turbulent ocean.

References:

1. Breytenbach, C. (2021). Fierce loving and Emotional agility. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/fierce_loving_and_emotional_agility/
2. Covey, S. R. (2004). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful lessons in personal change.
3. David, S. (2016). Emotional Agility: Get unstuck, embrace change, and thrive in work and life. New York: Penguin Random House.