Let’s Talk About Hope!

16.8.2020

Let’s Talk About Hope!

Author: Shiri Ben-Arzi, PMC

Hope is a word that comes up a lot in my coaching practice.  I hear it through questions “do you think there is still hope?”, statements “I need to find a way to have more hope”, worries “I don’t want to set myself up for failure through false hope” and beliefs “I won’t make it if I don’t have enough hope”.

 

For healthy people, hope is a wide and universal concept that holds the energy of moving forward to a better, higher, optimistic outcome/future.

 

For people living with health/medical challenges, hope can be a fluid and changing concept:

hope that there was a mistake in the diagnosis,

hope for a miracle cure,

hope for better test results,

hope the insurance will cover the treatment,

hope for a day with less pain and suffering,

hope to be able to lead a more normal life,

hope to be there for a loved one for their wedding/graduation…

 

For healthcare practitioners and caregivers, hope is a resource as well as a wish for themselves and their patients.

Many times I am asked, “how can we talk about hope when there is no cure?”

I always answer the same way: “ask the person you are caring for what does hope mean to him/her right now and be willing to be ok with an answer that is different from yours.

Once you can hold that space with empathy and love I can start teaching you Medical Coaching communication skills.

 

For medical and health coaches, hope is both a coaching skill and a coaching tool.

We model hope through our verbal and body language, use it as a perspective, explore new metaphors for it, reframe it as a resource and anchor it, create embodied experiences of it, and turn it into measurable behaviors.

To be able to create a space for the hope we need to be able to hold a space for sadness, frustration, disappointment, and anger.

In the contest of health/medical challenges, these are not “negative emotions” but normal emotional reactions to an abnormal situation.

Hope can be a dynamic concept, and we can have different concepts of hope that serve us through different periods of our lives.

 

I want to invite you to ask yourself, what does hope mean to me, right now?

What is one hopeful thing that I can do today?

 

If you found this useful share it with someone else that can benefit from it.

 

Shiri Ben-Arzi

Master Medical Coach

CEO of MCI – the Medical Coaching Institute