Thoughts Unlocked – Hope and Despair

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00:00 Intro
01:14 The Challenge of Despair
02:11 Understanding Hope as a Discipline
04:06 The Nature of Despair vs. Hope
06:05 The Role of Leaders in Cultivating Hope
07:49 Emotional Leadership and Patience
09:31 Conclusion: Resilience and Moving Forward

I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome back to Unlocked, the podcast where we don’t rush past hard things just to land on a really, really clean, tidy takeaway. No, today’s episode, it’s built around a single idea that’s been sitting with me. And it’s because I just hear about a lot of hard stuff going on right now with my clients and with personal life, people and all types of things. It’s just a lot of hard stuff going on.

And I said this quote too, well, it was a quote from me. Let’s see. Which was, it kind of came out of my mouth and I was like, that actually sounds good. I’m going to do a podcast on that. And I said this, I said, “in the midst of current despair, we can always lean on future hope.” And I don’t want people to get rid of their feelings. I don’t want people to like not feel their feelings. I want people to feel their feelings.

But the idea here is that, if we just sat there in our feelings of despair all the time and just without the hope piece, then we have hopelessness or we just don’t have anything that all, we just think about our current misery and we just kind of wallow in it. And it’s okay to be in that for a minute, but we, I got to, we got to move at some point and that future hope is what’s going to hopefully drive us that direction. And before that turns into something stitched in a pillow, this quote of mine, which you can stitch in a pillow if you want to and send me a picture. I would love to see that.

I don’t mean hope in everything happens for a reason way. No, I mean hope as a discipline, as a decision, as something you practice when things aren’t working and pretending, they are, you know, aren’t working, pretending they are. I don’t want us to pretend that they are working because maybe they’re not.

Most of us are living in some version of discouragement right now and, it’s life, right? Work pressure, leadership, fatigue, family stress, the slow burn of disappointment when things don’t turn out the way you thought they would. And if you’re leading people, you don’t even get the luxury of falling apart quietly. No, you have to hold it together while still showing up.

Despair is sneaky like that. It doesn’t kick the door down. It just sits next to you and starts narrating everything. It says things like, “see, this is always how it goes” or “you know, you should be further along by now” or “other people have figured this out. What’s your problem?”

Despair is very convincing. It speaks in these giant full sentences. Hope usually just clears the throat a little bit. Just gets that gunk out. You know, the gunk. Yeah, the gunk. But here’s the problem when, when despair shows up, most of us try to fix it. We want it gone. We rushed to solutions. We numb it, we scroll, we stay busy. We tell ourselves to be grateful and then feel guilty that we’re not.

Psychology tells us what’s important, this important principle here. So, research on emotional regulation shows that trying to suppress negative emotions does what? It makes them stronger.

The more you fight despair, the louder it gets, which explains why telling yourself to just stay positive has never worked in the history of humanity. Hope doesn’t come from denying despair. Hope comes from zooming out without checking out. I’m gonna say that again. Hope comes from zooming out without checking out. Future hope is not optimism. Optimism says this will probably work out. Hope says even if it doesn’t this moment is not the whole story. Hmm. You see the shift there, my friends, optimism says, “you know what? This is going to work out.” And how many of you have heard those people come up to you say, “Hey, you know what? That you’re better off. This is going to work out. It’s for a reason,” etc. And you hate them for saying that you want to punch them in the face. I get it. Sometimes, you know, some of those we mean well when we say those things.

But hope, I think, is different. Because it says even if this doesn’t work out, this moment in time, it’s not the whole story. That’s a big difference. Viktor Frankl wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning. Have you all read that? He observed that people didn’t survive hardship because they felt good about the present. They survived because they were anchored to something ahead of them, a future conversation, a future contribution, a future version of themselves.

Hope isn’t pretending the room isn’t on fire. It’s like, I hope this isn’t real. I hope this isn’t on fire. I hope that my flesh isn’t melting. No, we’re not saying that. Hope is knowing the fire isn’t permanent. And this matters a lot for us as people and us as leaders, because when leaders lose hope, teams feel it immediately. You don’t have to announce it; it leaks it that your tone changes. Decisions get smaller, risk disappears, you start to think in scarcity mode, everything becomes about preservation instead of possibility. And here is something I want you to think about. Leaders don’t need to have answers to hold hope. They just need orientation instead of asking the question of how do we fix this? Ask. What are we moving toward? Hmm. Let’s think about that one.

How do we fix this versus what are we moving towards? What are we going towards? What do we want to be? What do we want to become? How do we want to be? Think of ourselves in the future. It shifts our nervous system. When we ask that question, it moves a lot of people out of this threat mode and into meaning mode. Social psychologists call this future-oriented coping the ability to tolerate present pain because it’s connected to something purposeful ahead.

Future-oriented coping. If we can think about that, what do I want to become? What kind of person do I want to be in the future? And am I working towards that? Before you roll your eyes and think, you know what, Skot, you sound super lofty today. I want you to make this a little bit more practical.

Hope doesn’t mean saying this is all gonna work out. Remember, hope sounds more like, this is hard and we’re not done yet. Or it sounds like, we don’t have clarity, but we still have direction or this isn’t the chapter we wanted, but it’s also not the last chapter. That’s not inspirational fluff. I call that emotional leadership. Yeah. I called it emotional leadership, you all.

A quick word to the overachievers listening. You know who you are. The ones who hear despair and immediately turn it into a self-improvement project. Just please don’t do that. Hope doesn’t require hustle. The hustle, you know, it doesn’t require that. It just requires a little bit of patience. Sometimes the most hopeful thing you can do is stop forcing movement and let the moment teach you something.

Growth doesn’t always look like progress. Sometimes it looks like endurance. Yes, that’s annoying. I get it. But here’s the line. I want you to all write down. Despair demands answers. Hope allows time. Despair demands answers. Hope allows time. You don’t need to feel hopeful today. You just need to remember that how you feel right now is not a prophecy.

So, if you’re discouraged, welcome to being a human. If you’re tired, you’re not weak. You’re paying attention. And if you’re unsure, that doesn’t disqualify you from leadership. It actually deepens it.

In the midst of current despair, we can all lean on future hope. Not because it feels good, but because it reminds us that today is not the whole story.

Thanks for spending these minutes with me on Thoughts Unlocked. If this episode gave language to something you’ve been carrying, share it with someone who needs their reminder.

And until next time, I want you to just keep going, keep fighting, keep bouncing. It’s something that we all need to keep doing. It’s called resilience. And even when it’s quiet, even when it’s slow, even when hope feels more like a whisper than it does a shout.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.