… Hope dies last, You can’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you lose everything.
– Jessie de la Cruz
So here we are in that period at the end of the year between the celebrations of Christmas and the New Year… A time when many, if not most, accept that there is little that will get done… A time reserved for reflection and perhaps planning… the making of resolutions and promises… a time of hope. Hope that what we have learned can be used to make for a better new year… improvement in not only material outcomes but also in our experience of what is to come.
An often belittled, if not ill-regarded force, hope is nonetheless a powerful force… perhaps the most powerful of forces. But its power is found only when properly harnessed. So how does one harness that power? How do you harness hope?
Experience has taught me that hope can be best harnessed when we do the following:
Accept that all things are temporary. Develop a vision of the possible future, knowing that we are not bound to the past or for that matter the present… Never giving up… Persisting… Setting achievable next steps toward incremental goals. Daring to dream again aware that obstacles will surely occur. Overcoming disappointment, disillusion and circumstance. Remembering always that all things are temporary.
Twenty years or so ago, I worked as a volunteer telephone counselor at the Birmingham Crisis Center. Here we encountered many types of calls… people reaching out in a moment of need or anguish… frequently in moments of hopelessness. First and foremost, my job was to listen… to allow the caller to be fully heard.
On occasion, those moments of hopelessness were extreme… the caller being unable to see a way forward. As irritating as it may sound, my responsibility … my “job” if you will… was not to solve the caller’s problem but to help the caller to develop hope in a better future and to aid the caller in deciding on what they might do next to move things in a different direction.
This was most frequently accomplished by asking the questions: What would make your situation better? What would you like to change? Then working with the caller to develop a simple to do list of things that they would/could commit to toward that end with the promise that they would check back in with us as needed to work through the obstacles that were sure to arise as they moved forward.
I am no longer a telephone counselor but a Realtor… a real estate advisor/counselor. My job remains largely to listen, to help my clients move forward… step by step toward their goals… their dreams… their hopes… Hope is a powerful thing.
An integral part of our human nature… Hope is the defining characteristic of the optimist. But even the pessimist hangs on to it, for to be hopeless is to lose everything. My hope for us all is that we will use this week as a pause to reflect on what we want to change and our next steps in making that or those things happen.
May the market be with you… and may your New Year be all that you hope for.
