Hope without limits

In all what I am doing HOPE plays an important role. When I work on a project with an organization, there is behind the hope of the team that the activities of the project will contribute to change the identified situation. I design and moderate a training session with the hope that the participants will take home with them enough knowledge, skills and motivation to apply what they have just learned. When I start with a new coaching process, most of the coachees come with the hope to change something in their actual life. Hope makes us move. We need hope to get active and to believe in the possibility of change. I agree very much with Rebecca Solnit when she states:

---

“Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.” R. Solnit: Hope in the Dark. London 2016

Hope helps us to find the door which we sometimes only imagine and it seems to me that by imagining the door we sometimes create it. True hope is very much linked to trust: trust that this door exists, trust that we can change our situation, trust in the unknown, and trust in a better future. What distinct hope from faith is the fact that hope is linked to activism: we act to change our self or a specific situation. It is often this activism itself which generates more hope. This becomes very clear in a coaching process when the coachee is doing the very first steps in the unknown and new direction. This experience of “I can because I want” empowers the coachee to go ahead despite uncertainty and fear from the unknown. My role as coach is to strengthen the hope of my coachee that she/he can change here/his world by starting to act. Hope helps us to grow, to step into the unknown. “The emotion of hoping expands out of itself, makes people wider instead of narrower; insatiable, it wants to know what makes people purposeful on the inside and what might be allied with them on the outside”. (Ernst Bloch: The principle of hope. Berlin 1959) Hope is part of the necessary base for transformational personal and social change. It helps us to imagine what may lie beyond our current problems and difficulties. “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”. (R. Solnit: Hope in the Dark. London 2016) Without hope we cannot act. Without hope we are hopeless and helpless. With authentic hope we overcome fear and despair and become ready for change. Hope is the starting point for change. There is nobody who can oblige us to hope, but there is also nobody who can limit our hope. “It is important to learn hoping. Its work does not despair, it fell in love with succeeding rather than with failure.”(Ernst Bloch: The principle of hope. Berlin 1959)