#2 - Monday Musings - Hope
This week’s Monday Musing is focused on hope. Here, I will be exploring how hope can show up for us in our professional, political, and personal worlds.
Professional
Hope can be challenging to find within an organization - this could be a function of the greater macroeconomic environment (hello, layoffs), your experience within a team or with a manager where your autonomy or ability to influence is limited (micromanagement, top’s down leadership), or you may feel a sense of ‘imposter syndrome’ and be blocking yourself from having hope about your ability to develop and act on skills of interest to you.
If we imagine hope as a spectrum, we can envision negativity and hopelessness on one end, and blind optimism on the other. Zaki warns us that negativity can be seen as more intelligent and attracts more attention; and optimism can be perceived as pollyanna and not rooted in action. Hope, a happy medium, is shown to be more effective than both pessimism and optimism, as it is more active. Hope is shown to generate more waypower and willpower - tools which help us to clear a path forward and bring about the change that is hoped for, respectively.
In Zaki’s article, we learn that hope is a learnable skill, and Zaki recommends three actions for leaders to integrate. Below, I will share these recommendations and how I apply them.
“Set Goals around Shared Values”: Whenever I begin a project or program, or have changes to my team, I hold a 30 minute values session to help the group get to know one another and take their implicit preferences and make them explicit. I have found this practice helps to create easy rules for working (chat > email, no response past 6pm, etc.), lowers barriers to feedback, and establishes a foundation of respect that allows us to easily construct a set of shared goals we can track over a given project or time period.
“Find Ways to Empower”: In addition to getting to know a team in a group setting, I make an effort to get to know folks one-on-one. What are their priorities and goals? How can I help to facilitate those goals - whether through making a professional connection, prioritizing a requirement in a project, or giving them space to lead on something they are passionate about? Knowing a few things I can do to be personally helpful to the folks I am working with has paid dividends - I get the pleasure of helping someone, and they feel seen, heard, and fulfilled - win, win, win!
“Celebrate Progress”: Work can be hard and it is critical to celebrate all of your wins - whether big or small. I use both formal and informal channels to celebrate progress. For formal channels, I am sure to proactively contribute feedback for the performance cycle and also make a point to reach out to managers and leadership to let them know who contributed the impact we are celebrating. For informal channels, we celebrate our program milestones and operational wins with lots of baked goods, memes, and air fives on Zoom. With our key stakeholders, we make sure to publish a Quarterly Wins Newsletter to document and radiate what we are doing in support of the organization. I also take opportunities I have with leaders to share how recent improvements we have made have had a positive impact on their team (any kudos I hear through those conversations get passed down to the team to further celebrate).
I am curious to know, how do you instill hope within your team? Do you use any of the methods I shared above? I would love to learn what does, and doesn’t, work for you!
Political
I recently started a reading group with two other white women. Among some of our friend groups, we find ourselves to be the furthest left. We wanted to create a space where we can learn from one another and stretch our understanding. The first book we chose to read is Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit.
As I have engaged in political work, I have struggled to want to engage with hope or concepts of joy. I think white women, in particular, are keen to escape into that element of the work, when, in my opinion, we should be at the forefront of the riskier elements of the work as a function of our privilege (direct actions, front line of a protest, calling out problematic behavior in spaces we are in, etc.).
In the last couple of months, I realized my frame of mind was not constructive, nor sustainable, for the ways I want to show up in the world. It became clear something had to change, and upon learning that hope is not rooted in delusional optimism, but instead, calls for active engagement and forward progress, I have been trying to find opportunities to lean into hope.
Solnit writes, “Despair demands less of us, it’s more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity - seeing the troubles in this world - and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable,” (page 49). I had been lost in despair, with flash and bang moments of engagement, only to be swallowed again by what felt like insurmountable grief. Now, I am working to stay grounded in hope. To find a few ways each day to work towards building the world I want to live in. To engage with skills I am building that I believe will serve my community today and in the future. To encourage a friend to take one step further on a passion project. To find a less capitalist way of doing something. To slow down, to celebrate wins, and to enjoy the good moments when they happen so that we are refueled when the next hard moment comes.
I encourage us all to find hope. Hope is offering us an opportunity to engage with our imagination, to explore passions and interests, and to use our creative energy to create something to make the world a better place. I can’t help but imagine what could be achieved if each day we dug for a little hope, and took one action based on that hope that was designed to make something incrementally better. I think we would get much farther, much faster, than we realized.
Personal
As I shared above, hope has not always felt accessible to me. I think that as my sense of community has expanded, my sense of hope has expanded alongside it. I am always amazed by the power of what even a few people can create when they are working in concert with one another. Special talents, interests, and knowledge can combine to create pretty incredible outcomes. While I see the power of community today, and feel thankful to be a part of shared spaces, this was not always the case.
I want to use this space to talk about the ways we can find hope within ourselves. I believe there are some tools from the spiritual space which may help us to re-engage with our imaginations and understand our motivations in a way that will allow us to create more hopeful futures.
There are two sources I would like to share about how we can identify and foster hope within ourselves. The first resource is “Ask your Guides” by Sonia Choquette and the second resource is “The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent” by Esther and Jerry Hicks. I share these resources with some hesitation. I have found that spiritual books written by white folks often overlook and bypass the material conditions formed under imperialism and racial capitalism. I want to acknowledge that those most marginalized by the systems we live under may find these tools inaccessible or not fully rooted in their lived experience. With these considerations in mind, I believe there are some elements of these bodies of work that are worth considering if we hold the concepts in a more robust context that acknowledges and considers the material conditions all people face.
I will begin with Sonia Choquette’s work - titled “Ask your Guides”. In this book, Choquette defines the beings in the spiritual world that are here to support us in our corporeal form. Choquette offers meditations which can be done to access our higher self and learn more about our spirit teams. When I read this book, I found it particularly helpful to understand the distinction between different otherworldly forms of support that are available to us. Choquette outlines that we have guides who are teachers, healers, and helpers in our lives. When I find myself in a place of hopelessness, I will make a point to meditate and engage with my guides. Based on how I am feeling, I will call in teachers or helpers to aid me in re-engaging with a sense of hope and to help inspire the next idea I need to take action on. While the concept of angels may not resonate with you personally, I encourage you to think about accessing the part of you which can help you tap into inspired action - how can you hold and make space for that part of yourself on a regular basis?
The second body of work I would like to explore is “The Amazing Power of Deliberate Intent” by Esther and Jerry Hicks. In this body of work, the Hicks’ are helping us to understand how intent operates both outside of, and within, our material existence. The Hicks’ share that our consciousness (or vibration, energy) ranges from the physical to the non-physical. Physically, for those who are able, sight and sound are experienced as vibration. Non-physically, the Hicks’ assert that our emotions carry a vibration. When our physical and non-physical vibrations are aligned, it leaves us in a state to have purposeful intent and to fulfill our goals because we will be aligned across our states of consciousness. I see value in the idea that what we feel, physically and emotionally, is a signal to us to help us explore our alignment. If we feel badly, it is an opportunity to try and change, even incrementally, our situation to create more ease. The Hicks’ suggest this can begin with our thoughts - if we can imagine something better, we can begin to seek experiences and emotions which align with those thoughts, and it will be more accessible to take the actions necessary to bring those ideas into reality - our intent! This concept helps me to frame hope. If I can think of a better outcome, I can begin to think about how that better outcome will feel. I can then seek experiences which align with the feeling that outcome will produce (through taking aligned action). As I take that action, I can manifest that outcome and materially make a change towards the idea I was hopeful about.
