The Starting Point is Hope
Posted on July 23, 2014 by Delphine du Toit, One of Thousands of Relationship Coaches on Noomii.
The counterpoint to feeling stuck is to experience hope. It is hope that drives one to seeking help in getting unstuck, but hope isn't all you need.
Although people who turn to coaches and coaching often find their initial impetus from ‘being stuck’, I’m inviting you to look at ‘stuckness’ in a different way.
One of the wonderful things that I learnt through my readings in positive psychology, coaching, appreciative inquiry and conflict resolution is the power and value of reframing: By reframing how we describe things and situations; and reframing how we think about them we can break the inertia that keeps us in ‘stuck’ mode.
It strikes me that the feeling of being stuck has an inherent quality; something not quite like despair, but something on the way to it. And then, it becomes screamingly obvious to me that the other side of ‘despair’ is ‘hope’.
I like to work on finding out what the hope is that brings a client to coaching. There is something there that says ‘I don’t have to stay stuck’. ‘I am hopeful that there is something on the other side and that my coach will help me find it’. By nature of the art of coaching though, is that I do not ask ‘what is it you hope for’. Rather, I circle around it a bit: I ask what not-being-stuck would look and feel like to my client. As we talk the language shifts. What started out being negative, as in ’I’ve had enough of being pushed around at work’; ‘help me find another job’; ‘I want revenge’; becomes ‘I need recognition at work’; ‘I have creative potential that isn’t being used’; and progresses to imagining an alternate future to what is in the present. Before we know where we are, the conversation is about hope. It becomes aspirational.
We can’t leave it at ‘aspiring’ and ‘hoping’ though. To use an analogy I recently rediscovered and continue to love: Hope and aspiration is the water we swim in, towards our destination. It keeps us from sinking to rock bottom, it keeps us afloat, it envelops us, and it allows us to move forward. There still has to be a destination – a goal. There is a symbiotic relationship between the goal and the hope. They coexist. I think hope comes first. It is the sense that there is potential for something better; more; beautiful; great; sustaining; fulfilling. S.J. Lopez says “Hope taps into a human desire to be part of something bigger” in his book Making Hope Happen.
One of the reasons I’m a performance coach is because I believe in doing tangible and creative things to make other, bigger, things happen. I have a fairly low tolerance for dreams that keep being retold and where no action is taken to realise them; or to recognise that now isn’t the time; or this isn’t the right dream anymore and moving on from it. That, to me, is the epitome of being stuck. Sometimes it is hard work to help a client let go of an impossible dream.
It is easier if we pay attention to the quality of hope that first made the dream attractive. By having hope as a starting point, we are able to imagine new things. I’ve certainly had it happen that what I at first thought was an impossible dream became more and more vivid as a possibility. I became convinced: my practical questions were answered. The hope was grounded in reality, practicality. It had elements of emotion to it, and also vivid quality standards and measurements.
My first experience of this was a long time ago. I was working for a beer company in South Africa. They were the biggest player in the market, but it was a local market. Then the Managing Director called us all together and announced his dream. It was so extreme that many of us just shook our heads. “Bah! Another change initiative: been there; done that,” some said. But, some of us were enticed to full commitment because there was a great element of hope behind the audacious dream and the man who was talking was a straight-talking engineer. He had zero tolerance for the fanciful.
His dream was to take a blue chip company from its severely limited small market, constrained by international sanctions during the time of apartheid, to becoming “among the top five in the world, by any measure”. His hopes included things like (a) a peaceful political transition in South Africa; (b) a shift in the international attitude to South African products and people; (c ) that investors would trust his judgement and his organisation; (d) that his company would have an international portfolio of flagship brands; (e) that the employees and the trade unions would believe that he was sincere. There probably were others.
He didn’t stop at his hopes. His starting point was hope. He took great risks and he remained focused on the destination, which included things like being listed on the NYSE and the London Stock Exchange. Over a period of five years strategies, systems, processes and people were put in place and pushed. And why did that matter to me? Because, although the product was beer, and although I do drink it, I’m not passionate about it, the entire initiative fed into my own personal hopes: Hopes for social reconstruction and social justice in South Africa. And, the job they gave me allowed me to contribute to exactly that. I felt that I had made a solid contribution to social justice in the country of my birth; and the shareholders of The South African Breweries were satisfied that they’d invested in a company that would become among the top three, globally, operating in 40 countries.
When the job is done is the time to ask ‘what did you hope for’? If the hope was grounded in practical action and supported by true resources, chances are that the answer will be ‘exactly what I got’. Often times though, the answer is ‘what I got is way beyond what I hoped for’. I don’t know if that means we’re too conservative in our hopes or whether it means that our focused actions have the capacity to exceed our dreams.
As I pull this article to its conclusion, this is my hope for you: that my words provoked a new thought in your mind that will propel you towards exploring your hopes: It isn’t good enough just to struggle for one’s day-to-day existence. Hope keeps us afloat.
© Delphine du Toit (2014)
