Hope

Are you driving your agendas or are you at risk of allowing yourself to rely too much on hope to get you what you need or want?
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Isn’t it amazing how powerful an emotion hope can be?
Hope: a wish or desire accompanied by confident expectation of its fulfillment.

When we are challenged or everything is looking a little dismal, we can easily allow it to get us down, can’t we? And then someone raises a question that holds some hope in it and we are given a “lifeline” that might suggest: “what if that just might work?”  If we are able to practice Managing Your State and convert that hope into action, how well might we be able to “come out back on top of it”?

Put yourself in the situation of a refugee who has been forced to leave your country and your loved ones to avoid persecution or ethnic violence for instance. Visualize the sheer terror experienced in such life or death situations. Imagine the vulnerability to being exploited. Can you feel the courage they need to dig up every day, every hour, just to keep on going?  How great a role would hope play in retaining their sanity amidst such horrific pressure?

A very scary and harsh picture, but it captures our attention, doesn’t it? Maybe a little closer to home and more relatable to our own less dramatic first world situation in Australia, think of a circumstance or situation where you were really “down”. Maybe you suffered a large setback or some significant personal loss? Maybe you were even depressed? Apart from time healing most wounds, can you perhaps try to remember what brought about your change of heart or a more positive view towards that situation and getting yourself out of it? Is it possible that it was hope that played an important part in that transition?

I have heard hope related to a sun ray. When it’s wintry and miserable and gloomy outside (I live in Melbourne, remember) isn’t it remarkable how much of a “lift” a little sun ray across the room can make?

In my blog So when you face a challenge…, I talked about how we can respond and deal with challenges, however without emphasizing the hope aspect.

I have learned that hope as an emotion is often passive, no matter how positive or powerful. For it to really make a difference, it needs to be converted into something active. I liken it to a trigger.  My blog: Pro-active, Positive and Responsible gives some suggestions to what I mean by that here.

We have just finished a fiscal (tax) year in Australia, and most of us in business would have reflected on the financial results of that business, probably compared to a set of goals or budgets or plans. We could also call those expectations.  How did you do against those targets? Did you meet, fall short or perhaps even exceed your and other people’s expectations? If we took the example of having fallen short, isn’t it amazing how much hope we can take from the fact that past period or chapter is now closed and we have in fact started a new fiscal year? And isn’t the hope usually that this New Year is going to be better?

Making hope work

In the above context, hope is a great encouraging emotion, albeit neutral, right? There is little point in setting or expressing an expectation if it isn’t accompanied by the hope that it can be achieved, agreed? And hope on its own won’t “make it better”, will it? It’s like setting a goal isn’t enough to get the goal executed and delivered. It needs to be accompanied by action; a set of plans and strategies and steps that will bring about its realization.

Without wanting to go back into the detail of goal setting, I would like to re-iterate the pertinent aspects of the Law of Attraction here. It suggests that for something worthwhile to come about, we need to:

1. Visualize it as we desire it, in that we clearly define what we want, what it will look like, feel like, sound like, smells like etc when we have achieved it.
2. “Put it out there” that we desire and expect it to manifest.
3. Allow it to manifest.

And then of course we need to do what it takes make it happen. Luck is still spelled W.O.R.K, remember?

As I said in numerous articles before, the challenge lies in the third part, namely allowing it to manifest. It is well documented that negative vibes are much more likely to get in the way of the manifestation of a desire.

We have learned that positive “vibes” towards the desire, allowing ourselves to accept and deserve it, will encourage its manifestation. Hope is one of those positive and necessary vibes.  However, let me quickly add a disclaimer so we understand each other here: LUCK is still spelled W-O-R-K, remember?

So what?

So when next you find yourself in a really challenging situation or you just don’t know how you are going to get out of it, why not:

• take a step back, and create a “gap” for yourself to think
• while in that gap, ask your unconscious mind to give you some additional perspectives , and reframe your situation. Refer: Using “the Gap” to reframe yourself
• ask yourself who else may have already encountered this and how they might have solved it
• talk about it to people you trust
• take some hope from all those new ideas
• use that hope to generate the energy and the wherewithal to act on it: pro-actively, positively and responsibly.

No matter how bleak any situation may appear to us, there can always be hope that it can and will improve.  What if you believed that and it could?

One by-product of every coaching conversation and every coaching program is that clients come out of these buoyed by substantial quantities of hope. Why? Because they invariably have attained a much greater clarity of purpose, have developed a significantly stronger confidence and belief in them selves and have a road-map and a set of plans and activities lined up to assure the successful outcomes they aspired to in the first place. Mission accomplished. So why not you?

Go on, why not contact me, and Let’s Talk Coaching.