#144: Keep Hope Alive

 

 

Chris Carson looks at his therapist, “I end each night with blood on my boots and spit on my face.” He jabs his finger into the side of his head and twists it back and forth, “I’m losing it. In here.”

Carson is an urgent response officer in Liverpool. He is the protagonist in a BBC series, The Responder. Outside of the therapy room, gangsters are threatening his family, he witnesses a childhood friend knifed to death and can’t save him, he is trying to save the life of an addict who lies repeatedly, his actions draw him deeper and deeper into the grey, he’s at risk of going to jail, his mother is dying of cancer, his wife is watching him drown, she wants to help, he rejects her efforts not knowing how to accept help.

His harried therapist, herself overworked, drowning in dozens of cases, says, “I want you to imagine you’re walking through a forest…”

He closes his eyes, but his eyelids flutter, his teeth grind.

She stumbles on – following the formula, aware she’s failing, but too exhausted to listen deeply, to connect and find a real solution – until he is seated on an imaginary bench breathing in green forest calm and asks, “Do you feel better now?”

He is stunned. His eyes shoot open, wide. He shakes his head as if attacked by a hornet. He exclaims, “No” and bolts from his chair, out the door.

Well-intended solutions, disconnected from reality, can be worse than useless.

Last week’s letter triggered a flurry of messages.

You wondered about the serious tone. You said that you were simultaneously grateful for its reflection of the hard reality of this moment. It validated your experience. You knew you were heard. And so, you felt more able to reflect on your experience of this time. With that understanding, you started to see possibilities emerge in your world. Actions that made sense, grounded in your reality, leveraging the power of who you are. And that gave you hope.

Ultimately, Carson, in desperation, tells his wife the whole truth. She responds, “You have no choice. You must fix it” and “I trust you and I support you. You know how to fix it. You will figure it out.”

He does.

Visualizations, in the right context, are great. Keeping hope alive needs us to understand where we are so that we can act appropriately. Dreams are best rooted in concrete action.

In a sense, like Chris Carson, we never have a choice – we have to make it better, whatever it is.

Last week, we stayed with the hard reality of the moment in order to create the possibility of meaningful action rooted in your understanding of what your context requires.

Today, we explore two examples of concrete action. I am sure they’ll trigger thoughts of possibility for you.

Havel tells us that the complexity of the world means that many of our solutions will be “limited, halfway, unsatisfying and polluted by debilitating tactics” but that we should, nevertheless, persist by focussing on “concrete consideration(s) of the authentic needs of life”.

Often, when confronted with the complexity of running our businesses, we spend weeks formulating even more complex strategies. The resulting Powerpoint decks are so weighty, that even our email servers, say “too much”.

There is another approach that says, given the concrete needs of the business/department/team right now what is the one thing we can do (or stop doing) that will make it better?

Action rooted in reality immediately makes the present better and unlocks more energy which you can then use to find more creative and effective solutions.

I see it time and again in my coaching practice. The context is overwhelming, so complex, that it is incomprehensible. We take small, pragmatic steps based on the reality of the moment, and the complexity melts. We gain more energy. We act more effectively. The world becomes less scary.

In American politics, the Justice Democrats are looking to redefine the Democratic Party by recruiting “extraordinary ordinary people” to run against some of the most powerful incumbents in Congress.

They made their first efforts in 2018. The results were indeed limited, much less than Havel’s halfway. Out of the dozens of candidates they backed, only one candidate won. But wait, that one candidate was the one and only AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has helped all of us reset our expectations for what a politician can and should be.

None of us will forget AOC’s response to Ted Yoho’s abuse – “…I have tossed men out of bars that have used language like Mr Yoho’s…” and “What Mr Yoho did was give permission to other men to do that to his daughters…and I am here to say that is not acceptable” (You can watch an excerpt here).

The Justice Democrats describe themselves as nimble and scrappy. They focus on pressing community issues. By getting one person into Congress, they created new dreams for millions across the globe. Their focus on the “concrete considerations of the authentic needs of life” has given hope. (You can read more about them in Andrew Marantz’s 2021 New Yorker piece.)

Closer to my home, in South Africa, extraordinary ordinary people across the country are stepping into the breach of political failure in local government, restoring water purification, repairing roads, and tackling all manner of challenges. Of course, that is not as it should be, but they – like the Justice Democrats – exemplify Havel’s injunction that “every piece of good work is an indirect criticism of bad politics”.

And in, Cape Town, the city in which I live, I love the V&A Waterfront’s Joy from Africa to The World initiative.

Their CEO, David Green, explains in this post, that four years ago, they decided to ‘ditch imported tinsel and plastic’ and instead work with local artists and crafters.
The result is a magic potion of Christmas cheer catalysed by African aesthetics. Click on his post to see the alchemy that results from concrete actions taken in the place where you stand.

We can all imagine how that one decision will trigger quantum effects.

The child visiting the V&A, inspired by the engineering of the art, reimagines their future…new possibilities created for the artists, the crafters, and their families…and on and on.

There is no end to what might emerge from that one decision.

You can move the world. You just might not know how you did.

Yes, the world is complex. Our actions will always be partial solutions AND we can’t predict how much possibility will emerge.

Find your authentic needs. Find those of your team, your business, your community. Take one concrete step. You will create hope. Your nightmares will soften to dreams. You will awake inspired to enter the day.

There is so much more I wanted to share with you today, but I think I’ll leave it there for now. See you next week.

Karl

PS: If you’d like to work with me, you can find out more here and subscribe to this letter here.