ON WORK AND PLAY

It is the best possible day when work overlaps with play. For a formula to ensure satisfaction at work I would turn to advice given by Stuart Brown: “So I would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential -- where you set aside time to play -- but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play.” And here is something I have learned while studying my history of work and play: At those times when my work has not allowed me to be playful and proudly call it work, I haven’t much liked my work. I do not know if this is true for all workers, or only for those of us who are by nature playful.

SEEKING A MENTOR

I hope to find a mentor who can teach me what I need to know in order to make my knowledge relevant and interesting in the business world. I express it as a hope rather than a goal because I don’t really know if you can set the goal of finding a mentor. Mentors in my experience have always surprised and delighted me by their presence. Sometimes it has taken me years to realize that they were mentors. What’s more, it’s hard to look for people who can teach you what you need to know when you don’t know exactly what you need to know. So my search for a mentor is a hope, more like a pleasing vision than a plan.
Even though it’s not really a goal, I am hoping to find a mentor. It’s a little difficult because I don’t exactly know where to look. Hopes aren’t quite so pressing as goals. So, rather than do nothing at all, I am filling my time with other things while I try to figure out where to look for a mentor.
One of my projects is to develop a hope presentation that would be interesting and relevant to people in the business world. It’s a bit of a stretch, since my experience lies in the area of developing topics of interest to people in health care and social services. But you have to start somewhere, so I made a start. I started with my specialty, the language of hope. I drafted the following promotional paragraph with a broader audience in mind. I didn’t have a business mentor yet, so I emailed it to my husband. .
Those who speak the language of hope have the power to engage others and change the direction of any conversation. The language of hope has impact. Obama used it to gain political strength. Charities use it to inspire donors. Successful companies give it a prominent place in their advertising. The language of hope extends far beyond positive thinking and pointing out the good things. It makes room for honesty and realistic assessment. This presentation offers tools you can use to enhance your oral and written communication with the language of hope.
We were sitting at the supper table when he acknowledged receiving my emailed paragraph. His response was lukewarm. I had the feeling he wouldn’t be shelling out thousands of dollars for this presentation any time soon. He asked me why he would be interested in learning a language of hope. I could give him no response. I was tired. I was frustrated. I was too busy controlling the impulse to throw a glass of milk at him. If I had been able to answer that question, I wouldn’t have asked for his help.
I didn’t have an answer. The silence dragged. Disappointment clouded my eyes. Tears threatened to fall. Finally he came up with an answer. It was a good answer—good enough to make me want to drink the milk in the glass, the kind of quality answer a mentor would give you, though I admit that it took me a day-and-a-half to appreciate it.
He said he would want to speak the language of hope on a day when he had one promotion to offer and two worthy employees who would be disappointed because they didn’t get it.

THE BRIDGE BETWEEN HOPE AND BUSINESS THEORY

Hudson H. & Perry, B., (2006). Putting hope to work: Five principles to activate your organization’s most powerful resource. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

LEARNING ABOUT HOPE IN MANAGEMENT TRAINING

Recently I have begun to wonder how my enormous experience with hope in conversation might be useful to managers. When I posed the question to my husband, he responded that my experience in hope has been incredibly useful in his management role. He said he has learned to think about the need to be positive before he speaks, and to govern his language according to that need.

The credit for making these linkages goes entirely to him. He has gained his knowledge through a process of seepage over the years—sitting in on my Saturday morning hope presentations to foster parents and cancer patients; manning the book table during my hope workshops at conferences on elder care and clinical hypnosis. He’s taken the inspiration from my stories about impossible things becoming possible, and things turning out better than expected. He has noticed how language changes perspective. But the day is rapidly approaching when managers will not have to learn these things through seepage. Hope will be a popular topic in management training.

There’s a new trend in hope studies these days. People are beginning to ask how hope strategies could help managers do their work more effectively.
Though much attention continues to focus on strategies for sustaining hope when people are ill or otherwise challenged, and hope continues to be a topic of great interest to doctors nurses and social workers, hope is finding its way into management theory. Books and articles that take hope seriously are beginning to appear.

If there’s one excellent reason why managers ought to be interested in hope it is this: Hope and hopelessness are silent factors in most work environments, active yet unacknowledged. Research in the counselling world has shown that new opportunities for growth are created when the influence of hope and hopelessness is brought out into the open. Many of the strategies we use for making hope explicit in counselling can be applied in other types of conversations as well. They can be used in one-on-one encounters and also in group settings. Hope and hopelessness shape individual and group behavior. So it is not surprising that management theorists are beginning to pay attention to hope.

Hope is a motivator that keeps people moving forward. It is the underlying emotion that makes us want to pursue goals. Not only do we hope to achieve goals, but goals often make up part of a large picture with hope at its centre. Our underlying hopes give goals their importance and personal meaning. Hope is a complex, yet simple concept. It is a feeling that changes the nature of thoughts, actions and relationships. High levels of hope, according to the research, can be linked with success at just about everything. People with high hope scores do better at athletics and academics. They cope better with illness and pain. Hopeful people direct attention toward a future that seems important to them.

Hopelessness, in contrast, is a de-motivator. It is the absence of purpose that keeps people plodding forward without inspiration, confines them in the old ruts, limits them to sticking with what is familiar. Without stepping out to take either credit or blame, hopelessness gets in the way of many things that could be happening.

People in general are interested in talking about hope, reducing hopelessness and rallying around hope symbols. This interest can create opportunities. Managers could now be using knowledge about hope and hopelessness to make things better in the workplace. Ultimately there will be management training in the area of hope. You can see it coming.

Hope theory and management theory have begun reaching out to one another. Patricia Bruininks and Bertram Malle have conducted conversational research to identify perceived differences between hopes and goals.
Longtime hope scholar Kay Herth has emerged from a nursing context to write about the role of a hope leader. Management consultants Harry Hudson and Barbara Perry have built a management book around five principles for promoting and sustaining hope in organizations.

As hope theory and management theory converge, managers will find themselves learning how to talk about hope. Like other management training, the hope training will start with big ideas and move toward practical strategies that make sense to the trainees. The gap between the big ideas and the small contextual strategies is still relatively unexplored. Most of the knowledge about how to inspire hope through guided conversation still rests in the counselling and nursing literature. It hovers expectantly at the brink of the gap, searching for bridges, waiting for invitations, preparing to cross over.

References
Bruininks, P. & Malle, B., (2005). Distinguishing hope from optimism and related affective states. Motivation And Behavior 29(4)
Herth, K. A. (2007). Hope-centered leadership in practice. Academic Leader, 23(8), 4-5.
Hudson H. & Perry, B., (2006). Putting hope to work: Five principles to activate your organization’s most powerful resource. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

ASKING THE CALENDAR

Look at the fall calendar! What is coming up before the mid-November??
An interview on national CBC
A memorial speech for a beloved client and friend,
A talk to the Boys and Girls Club conference,
A conversation with teachers on disability
Three conversations with ALS patients
Two conversations with Alzheimer Disease family caregivers,
A talk to kidney patients, on Sunday because the dialysis units are closed that day,
Two talks to families derailed by addictions,
A training day for foster parents,
A training day for mental health workers,
Training days for child protection workers,
A dinner speech to parents of severely disabled children,
More on-line lessons for hope students,
Supervision for two baby counsellors,
Supervision for a provisional psychologist,
Counselling as usual
And yes, ironically--
A speech at a conference on compassion fatigue.

How do you keep from being Pollyanna
Is the question a reporter asks.
And I say it is not that hard to keep from being Pollyanna.
If you act like Pollyanna, people in pain will turn away
Leaving you talking to yourself.
They will only tolerate Pollyanna
When they think there’s a reasonable chance that you feel some of their pain.

It’s a strange world, really.
Strange that you can lead yourself by hearing what you say.
The research says that young people who do word puzzles with God words in them Demonstrate more generosity than others who do word puzzles without the God words.
My instinct says I am not doing much.
Maybe not pulling my weight this fall.
Maybe I’ve said that I’m not doing much
So I look for a second opinion.
What does the calendar say?

ON FATIGUE AND REFRESHMENT

As I sit here in the sunshine, preparing a hope talk for a conference on compassion fatigue in the health care environment, I find myself reflecting on change, and the advocacy that generates change, and the fatigue that assails and embitters the advocates.

It’s amazing how quickly things can go forward. Thirty-five years ago I entered the adult world with small technologies, a white cane to help me get around, a Braille alarm clock to wake me up, a slate and stylus with which I could punch out Braille dots by hand. I never imagined the time when I would have a talking clock radio, a talking thermostat, a talking computer, a scanner that reads to me, a Braille printer that prints things I can read and a GPS navigational aid that tells me where I am and what direction I am going.

That said, it is discouraging how slowly some things go forward. Traffic signals can be adapted to share their red and green messages with blind people, but most of them just keep on the old way. That won’t change until somebody makes a very public fuss. What’s more, new elevators have sported Braille and raised print numbers for thirty years, but the elevators in my dentist’s building still operate the old way, with heat sensitive panels that offer only heartache if you can’t see them. The dentists have long claimed that they asked their landlord to make the changes. In the meantime, they hope I will continue to find the seventh floor somehow.

Meanwhile, it is absolutely infuriating to stand by helplessly while some things go backwards. I worry that I won’t be able to find a stove I can use when it is time to replace my old stove. My worry extends beyond stoves to embrace dishwashers, laundry machines, and all other things with inscrutable electronic displays. In the old days, when we bought appliances, we took them home and made them accessible by filing notches into their dials, or marking their numbers with strips of tape and blobs of silicone. But there is no way around it now. The average person is powerless in the face of an electronic display. Somebody needs to speak about this. But who will speak, and to whom?

It’s not hopelessness that gets me down when I consider all of this. It’s advocacy fatigue. I don’t mind being blind, but I get very tired of asking for things that compensate for the deficiency. I get tired of being angry, which is what I have to be before I can motivate myself to start the action that changes these things. I don’t want to be angry. I would rather drink exotic beverages with David on the veranda, and hear about the world from the younger generation, and hear about the history of the world from the older generation. I want to savour fabulous dinners, and work in my flowerbeds, and pet Pirate, and read novels, and play music, and learn new counselling techniques. I want to play cards with friends, and go to storytelling festivals, and sleep through the night instead of waking at 3:00 to feel the plan for an angry letter pushing back the peacefulness of my dreams.

Still, I find myself wondering what efforts are being made to ensure that blind people will be able to use electrical appliances in the future. It is not enough to be infinitely grateful to the people who have created today’s magnificent technological abundance. It seems to me that I ought to be taking some kind of action, rather than just worrying about the future. And that, I guess, is why I need to drink exotic beverages with David on the veranda, and hear about the world from the younger generation, and hear about the history of the world from the older generation. I need to savour fabulous dinners, and work in my flowerbeds, and pet Pirate, and read novels, and play music, and learn new counselling techniques. I need to play cards with friends, and go to storytelling festivals, and sleep through the night whenever I can—because these are the things that make life worth living, These are the things that give me the energy to ask for consideration, to write angry letters when nothing else will get attention. I have to remember that successful advocacy—far from being the cure for advocacy fatigue—is actually the demon that tempts you to make it worse by doing more advocacy at times when you ought to stop for a drink on the veranda.

Perhaps our greatest possibility for error in the face of fatigue from advocacy or compassion is to assume that nothing good can be happening as long as we are sitting on the veranda. On a really good day, somebody else may be picking up the slack while we are having a rest. And if we persist in thinking that the solution lies only with us, we may not notice the efforts others are making, and we may neglect to thank them.

SOME THOUGHTS ON RETIREMENT

I might not choose to retire this week
Even if I won a lottery
And had all the money that I would need
To go on cruises and expensive trips
And buy houses for my kids in today’s hot market
And pay their tuition at Harvard or Stanford
And book the Royal Suite at the Hotel McDonald
For days, or weeks, or months at a time
And buy the most expensive wine on the menu.

I might not choose to retire this week
Even though I’m doing so well on holidays
Not getting up before 7:30
Having a nap in the afternoon sunshine,
Thinking of work whenever I want to
But never because I have to.

Come Monday morning I’ll crawl out of bed
And into the shower to wash off the cobwebs
And groan as I climb all the steps from the valley
And count the weeks until my next holiday.
On the way to work where I’ll hope to remember
Why I might not have chosen to retire this week
Even if I won a lottery.

WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT HOPE WORK

What have I learned about hope work?
I have learned to appreciate questions.
And expect unexpectable answers
To go forward on pure speculation
And take time to secure the foundation
I have learned to be bold and audacious
And ask questions when others are suspicious
That hope work can often mean hard work
And hope work is frequently fun.

Why do I bother with hope work?
Because hope, according to the research,
Is definitely positively associated
With success in many achievements
And coping with terrible adversity
And hope work ultimately helps me
Keep from telling them just to be positive
Find a place of shared understanding
With those who are tired from struggling
While I listen pondering and wondering
What I can do to help.

What do I watch for in hope work?
For hope that is quietly implicit
For chances to make it explicit
And give it an on-stage performance
With lights and applause and encores
For ways it can be the foundation
That our counselling can rest upon.

What do I know about hopeful?
That hopeful is a way of being
That I can become more hopeful
If I hang around hopeful people
And ask myself hope-focussed questions
And remember that hope is contagious
And notice the things that are hopeful
Then tell other people about them
So that they can reflect what is hopeful
And send it right back to me.

When do I proudly do hope work?
When people are asking for hope work
Which happens amazingly often
When hope is observably absent
Obscured by the fears of tomorrow
And the lack of a way to address them
When hope work makes sense in the context
Of a credible counselling plan.

What’s in a hope worker’s toolbox?
There are scrapers to gently uncover
The hopes that lie quietly waiting
For something to bring them to life
There are highlighting words to adorn them
And respect for the hopes that seem hopeless
And unbridled curiosity about any of them
From which anything good might grow

There are searchers exploring the history
For things that were better than expected
And impossible things that were possible
And times when things seemed to be terrible
But were better than ever they seemed.

There is string for connecting the senses
To things in the world that are hopeful
To pictures and fragrance and music
And hope heroes beckoning forward
Showing the way to be hopeful.

There are tools to envision the future
A future desired and embracing
As if it really could happen
As if it were already happening
And tools to build the hope up
During the time of waiting
Tools to relieve the burden
And chart the way to go.

What have I learned about hope work?
To respect that it’s always in progress
To forgive it for not being perfect
To honour and learn from its critics
To follow the paths where it leads me
And thank it for showing me so much
Of a world that I might not have noticed
If hope work had stayed in the shadows
Instead of tempting me to try it
On a day when I might have ignored it
And chosen some other career.