About Hope

What hope is, what hope is not, why hope matters... Let's talk about hope.

leo Guilbe 🦢

Jan 18, 2024

CARE.CHECK*: Where in your life do you confuse hope and trust? Where do you confuse hope and magic thinking?

Question 2: Does those nuances feel obvious to you—or do you wonder where I’m going with this?

If it’s the latter, please read today’s letter before going to question 3!

Question 3: What shifts within you when you realize the impact of those nuances?

Question 4: Choose a narrative to rewrite with this “updated” terminology and witness how different it feels.

Please let me know what came up for you! And of course play with any synonyms that would work better for you, your heart and your understanding of your story.

** ABOUT HOPE

Hope and trust. Those are the words I wish to write about today. Because hope gets a bad rep sometimes, and trust can be a very misunderstood concept. We all need clarity around those concepts and you know me, when I'm looking for clarity, I write.

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So here we go—with a focus on hope for this letter:

Some say that it’s the hope that kills you and it feels very wrong to my heart. I actually believe that there is nothing more empowering and healing than hope! When we don’t confuse hope with magic thinking.

Viktor Frankl described how there was no surviving in the concentration camps without hope. He describes how some prisoners would hold on until a specific date on which they believed liberation would come, and would die the following day, because they had no hope to hang onto anymore.

Hope is good for us. Hope is vital for us. We NEED hope.

But you know how every genie reminds us that they can’t grant us wishes that defy the laws of magic? They can’t bring someone back to life, make someone fall in love with us or change the past. Well, neither can hope.

Hoping that things will be different in the past is a hopeless and self-murderous practice. We cannot rewrite our childhoods, our tragedies, our missed opportunities, our so-called failures in or out of being: it doesn’t work that way.

When dealing with the past, we need acceptance, healing and understanding—not hope.

* Hope is vital for us. *

Someone can change in the present and they might change in the future, but they can’t change in the past.

Hope is magical—and hope rooted in realism.

** ABOUT HOPE & CHANGE

Also, someone can only change if they want to change AND if they commit to change. It demands both intention and commitment. Change is very hard! It requires willpower so it can’t happen against our will. It just can’t.

Change takes awareness, so people cannot change in areas where they have blind spots… and they won’t unblind their spots if they’re not actively trying to: how could they? How could anyone find something that you don’t see AND that you’re not looking for? It’s hopeless. Changing someone is not Hope’s job.

On the other end, that doesn’t mean that that person cannot change one day. Telling ourselves that they can’t is just as self-deceiving. When they’re aware that they need to, AND realize that they can, and IF they want to, anyone can change. Everyone can. Those who work in prisons all tell us that some of this world’s living saints live on death row. Not because they were wrongly accused, but because they changed. We can overcome our beliefs, our trauma, our addictions—WHEN and IF we deeply want to.

Change requires a lot of courage, intention and dedication. It requires a lot of support and a lot of self-connection. It requires honesty, accountability and the skills to deal with setbacks—or with the shame that comes when we fully reckon with our current limits.

* We can overcome our beliefs, our trauma, our addictions

—WHEN and IF we deeply want to. *

Share Care.check

Yes, there’s a lot of necessary conditions for change to happen.

But it doesn’t mean it can’t happen, it just means we need to adjust our expectations.

When someone hasn’t expressed their will to change, we can only hope something will make them want to—we can’t hope that they will change yet. Once again, hope requires realism to do its magic.

Hope can soften the horror of having to leave someone that we love but whose ways are abusive, because we can ground in our love for them and soften the pull of guilt by realizing that the second they want to change, we’ll welcome them back in. That doesn’t mean that we should wait our days waiting for them to change at all. It doesn’t mean either to expect them to change in an instant, once they express the will to make a shift. That’s not hope, that’s a tricky mix of denial and self-torture.

Hope is not there to rob us from our responsibility to take ownership of our lives and circumstances.

Hope is there to say: “Do the best you can to change this (if you can), or to accept this (if you can’t)… and know that I’m doing all I can behind the scenes to make sure that tomorrow doesn’t look nor feel like this.”

Hope is, I’ll repeat it once more, magical when we ground hope in realism:

Everyone can change. Not everyone will.

Everyone can change and change is hard and change takes time and a lot of trial and error—so change doesn’t happen overnight ever.

* Hope requires realism to do its magic. *

** ABOUT HOPE & DENIAL

Grounding in hope doesn’t mean that we never make compromises or even sacrifices. For instance, if we can’t afford to live where we live anymore, we can hope that a solution is coming or that something good will come out of this ordeal—but we still need to start packing.

And yes, we also still need to grieve.

Some things, some people will leave us.

Some things, some people we must leave.

Hope is not hoping that we will never face any hardship ever again, hope is knowing that they serve a purpose, while praying that they will be as temporary and light as a hardship can be, and that we’ll find love and light in and around ourselves, while we walk through the chaos and swim in our tears.

Hope is not denying the storm, it’s looking for any rainbow arising from it and remembering that the sun is still there, even when we can’t see it.

We can hope that something better, softer, kinder will come—in the next few months, weeks or even hours—BUT we cannot hope that what just happened did not happen.

We can hope someone will give context that will change our perspective, but we cannot hope that what we’re seeing is not what we’re seeing.

Hope works and heals once we’ve acknowledged and connected with what is.

Hope is how we find the way to overcome what happened to us—and how we find the strength and inspiration to morph our right now into a better tomorrow.

* Hope is not denying the storm,

it’s looking for any rainbow arising from it. *

Hope is how we find the strength and humility to change in the first place. Hope is the essence of change! (Which is why I find it deeply ironic when someone explains to me that it’s dangerous to hope for change…)

Hope is how we find the inspiration and stamina to show up for our dreams to come true, for policies to evolve, for our humanity to shine in the dark rooms built by our humanness. Without hope? We stay stuck.

Hope is how we begin again. How we learned to walk. How we learn anything.

Hope is knowing that no matter how bad things are now, they can still improve—and that once we’re done surviving, we’ll find our way back into living.

Hope is knowing that a better tomorrow can come even if there’s no sign of it now.

Hope is saying YES, not how.

* Hope is how we begin again. *

But hope is not thinking that, if we keep on doing everything in the exact same way we’ll get different results. That’s insane.

Hope is not thinking that if we tell someone enough times that we want them to act in a different way, they will suddenly change who they are. Hope is definitely not waiting for someone to come save us while we only focus on what’s not working—or forget that we have agency, at the very least, on our thoughts.

That is not the way things work on Earth!

Hope is not magical thinking.

**ABOUT HOPE & MAGICAL THINKING

Someone who is content with their ways will not suddenly drop them. Not should they! We don’t get to change people... We get to change our expectations of them. We get to change the access they have and how much we expose ourselves to them. That can be literal but when that’s not possible, that can just be through deciding what we share and do not share with them. We also decide how—and how much—we let ourselves think about them.

Hope is not deciding that the weather will realize it made a mistake and ruined our plans—hope does not summon the sun to reappear in the middle of a snow storm! I mean we can hope the sky will clear out, but we need to adapt to what is first. We can hope the sun will surprise us, but we still need to edit our plans in the meantime. If we do that, we’ll either have another kind of good day or a wonderful surprise! If we don’t, our day is ruined because we called “being a weather bully” hope.

In the same way, when there is a 15 min wait for a subway we would have needed to board 2 min ago to be on time, we can hope others will be late or understanding: NOT that we will still be on time, when it’s physically impossible.

Hope is knowing that pain is inevitable but that a solution will arise at some point.

Hope is knowing that suffering is optional and that we can hope that in the end this will serve us. That in the grand scheme of things, that on a long term basis, we’ll see that good came out of what appeared to be only defeating. At the very least, hope is looking for ways to find peace… in the ending.

* Hope is knowing that a better tomorrow can come,

even if there’s no sign of it now. *

And now one last word on the differences between hope and trust in our relationships—and how hope can remain even when trust has left the room.

**ABOUT HOPE & TRUST

Recently I was doing what Byron Katie calls “the work” (you can find more about this practice HERE or HERE) and belittling myself for trusting that someone would act in a different way than the way they always act.

Then, my facilitator kindly interrupted me to offer a very different perspective.

She reflected back at me all the things I had tried to do to try to prevent the annoying situation I was now dealing with: someone who always drops the ball in the middle of the meeting dropped the ball again in a meeting. She reminded me of how much time I had put into preparing with that person before the meeting, how I had put absolutely everything that needed to be said in writing for them to remember, how I had checked my own energy and made sure to enter the discussion open-minded and clear on my every intentions, how much I had coached myself and how the only thing I couldn’t change was the person itself.

She mirrored how HOPEFUL I had been, looking for a way to prevent what I knew could happen by changing the only thing I have power on: my thoughts—which also means my behaviors. She also highlighted that going through this level of preparation was ACTUALLY proof that I did NOT trust that person. That I didn’t trust them at all!

No one prepares this much for a simple conversation on a simple matter with someone they trust… She helped me see that I was not “an idiot for trusting someone untrustworthy”, I was kindly refusing to give up hope that there was a way for that person to improve, if given the proper support.

Hope is understanding that we have the power to make the best of any situation (at the very least through the life lessons they will provide); trust however invites us to only expect from others what they showed us we can expect.

We must trust people to be who they are and HOPE that we can find a new way to look at their ways—or that their ways will evolve. That’s the difference between magical thinking, trust and hope.

Magical thinking would have been going to that meeting, doing things the EXACT same way “because it works with everyone else” and refusing to accept that the person we’re dealing with functions in a different way.
Trust would have been going to that meeting, expecting it to go well.
Hope is preparing for what is most probable given on what has happened before, while trying to change what we can change.

* Hope is understanding that we have the power

to make the best of any situation *

Trust means knowing we can rely on someone; and trust must be EARNED.

Knowing that we cannot trust someone is not an attack on their character, it’s only accepting that what is is—and ackowledging that we all have some shortcomings.

We can HOPE that someone will change, while trusting our reality-based expectations.

It’s a tricky dance because what we expect we tend to get. So we must make sure to check ourselves and to not trap the other person in the role we unconsciously gave them. We must trust that, if it goes as usual, it will not go well, while hoping that by changing our ways we can still influence the situation. Not by changing them! But by changing our steps in the dance.

Maybe if we start a tango instead of a walz, they’ll find it easier to join us. OR maybe they’ll keep on walzing. We must take into account that they’ve always walzed before, yes, but we must also remember that we have agency on participating or not! We can offer another dance option or walk away. We can’t force them to stop waltzing, we can’t trust them to stop walzing, BUT we can hope there is a way for a walzer and a non-walzer to find common ground on Earth. That’s not delusional. That’s not idealistic! That’s hopeful.

Hope is rooting in what is now, while hoping that something great is coming AND while showing up to meet the moment with all the acceptance and resourcefulness we can find in our hearts.

Hope is knowing that things can change, that things can work out, that we can find joy and meaning in our everyday experience and that love exists.

There’s nothing deadly in knowing any of this. There’s nothing noble in denying it either.

* Hope is rooting in what is now, while hoping that something great is coming *

Hope is the fuel my dear friend, so YES: even with hope, we still need to mind the road… but without hope? We’re not going anywhere.

Anchor in hope today, and see what happens next.