Dear Hopestars, 

I hope you had some special time off relaxing with your family and friends, maybe appreciating this time of equinox, maybe celebrating Easter, or simply noticing the quiet shift in the light.

I’m finetuning this offering into something that truly meets your need for hope. Your feedback is always welcome, and so helpful. Keep it coming!  

I have extracted the following insights from my writing this week: 

Truth

All cultural narratives are made. So all narratives can be remade.  My culture is still in the grips of this one: “Success is wealth, status, and recognition.” Any narrative isn’t more right or wrong, only more or less useful to our collective flourishing. The narratives we cling to expose our fears, our constraints, and our ambition – revealing the boundaries of our hope. 

To shift those boundaries, we must re-examine what we believe makes us thrive. We need to confront the fear of disappointment, especially the shame attached to aiming for new horizons and falling short, because hope asks something of us: that we keep trying, and try again, and try again.

Narratives are the rudders on our boats. They shape our cultural journey. And when we recognise the direction is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go we can turn, and plot a new course. 

What intentional narrative will you play with this week? 

Beauty 

Zoom out. If the world is a single organism, and we are its cells, each playing a role, then we are its experiential and emotional system, its nervous system. We are how the world feels, how it notices, how it appreciates beauty. This might be the work of being human: to take in the world at the highest bandwidth possible, to meet it with our full attention. 

Realness

We have yet to see what is possible when hope is scaled. When we teach it in our schools, embed it into our institutions, and weave it into the very chemistry of design, creativity, and strategy.

We are preparing to have a puppy, so I am deep in Puppy Leadership Training. At the same time, I have been doing a certificate in Developmental Psychology. My brain is feeling all lit up – I am seeing patterns and connections everywhere. How we learn. How we shape behaviour. How quickly things stick. It is genuinely thrilling.

I wish I had known some of this beforeI had my kid. There are obvious differences between puppies and human babies. But in one very specific way, they are the same. Probably all mammal babies are.

We learn through the same basic mechanisms. Reinforcement. Repetition. Association. What gets attention grows. What gets ignored fades. It is so simple it almost hurts because I can see now that if I had understood this earlier, I would have parented differently.

And I would have treated myself differently too. Better self-parenting, less accidental harshness. More awareness of what I was reinforcing in my own mind.

Which brings me to hope – because what are narratives, if not learned patterns? They are not innate. We are not born believing that hope is naive, or weak, or impractical. Those ideas are trained into us.

We absorb them from everywhere; our families, schools and advertisements. Our culture decides what gets rewarded and what gets dismissed. 

We learn the “right” stories. Stories about success and power. Stories about what is realistic. Stories about who gets to feel hopeful. 

In our culture, there are some pretty dominant narratives about hope. Loudly asserting it is wishful thinking. That it is a bit soft. A bit cringe. That it belongs to religion, or to people who do not understand how the world really works. That it puts power somewhere else, rather than in our own hands. That it is not practical. Not strategic. And definitely not cool!

None of these ideas are neutral - they do something to us. They shape how we feel. What we attempt and what we dismiss before we even begin. 

My kiwi culture feels very pragmatic and cynical.  Sure, go for it, you can aim high (we think you're a  bit foolish), but you better stay braced for disappointment.  We don’t want to put ourselves out there backing something, in case it crashes down.  And causes great shame. We don’t like failure here. We are not practiced at it. 

That is one reason change has been slow for my country - we have been slow to adopt a circular economy, slow to regulate for outcomes that are better for planet and people. We are scared to look silly if it fails. Underneath our lack of ambition to transform is fear. Fear of failure and disappointment. Fear of not getting it right. 

Fear of wanting something and not getting it. 

So rather than be ambitious,  we learn to downplay hope. 

Hope, in its truest form, is not passive. It is an activation. It is the thing that unlocks imagination. The thing that allows us to see alternatives. The thing that shifts us, even slightly, into a state where creativity, connection and action become more available.

This is not the opposite of realism. It is what makes change possible.

Which means we have a choice.

Just like we can train a puppy. Just like we shape a child’s behaviour. Just like we have, often unconsciously, shaped our own. We can retrain our narratives. Not in a forced, fake way. Not by pretending everything is fine. But by consciously choosing the stories we rehearse.

I am an old dog. It is hard for me to learn new tricks. So I have found a way to do this for myself which is very deliberate and failsafe. Some people write affirmations. I write new scripts that feel true and expansive and braver than my default thinking. Then I read them out loud, I record them and then I play them back. Over and over. Over days and weeks and months. 

I am giving my brain a new pathway to walk, i am updating my rudder, my navigation hardware.. Repetition builds familiarity. Familiarity builds belief. Slowly, the new narratives start to carry more weight.

And the old ones, the ones that used to feel like absolute truth, start to fade. They do not disappear overnight, but they lose their authority. They become like overgrown tracks that you could follow if you wanted to, but no longer need to.  

Hope is not something we either have or do not have, It is something we practice. And like any practice, it gets stronger the more we engage with it.

Which is good news because it means we are not at the mercy of the stories we inherited.

We can write new ones. And maybe, just maybe, we can pass those on too. Here are some that work for me. I would love to know what feels true and important to you.

Xxx Megan

P.P.S This year I am delivering a special executive strategy and support package designed around the needs of Impact Leaders and people heading up small NGO’s. I have only 2 places remaining for Q2. If you or someone you know operating in the NGO/Impact space could benefit from some special support, get in touch.