What are You Hoping For?

Three times in the first ten minutes.

"I hope that..."

Hope that one of his vendors would take responsibility for their costly mistake. Hope that one of his people would just make the “right decision” without being coaxed or cajoled. Hope that the client who was paying too little and had drifted  out of scope would recognize it and remedy it.

Each “hope” felt reasonable.

Each one pointing somewhere other than him.

I didn't push back right away. There is usually something deeper to hope that has to be understood before you challenge it.

What it’s protecting.

Most people aren’t actually hoping for a different outcome.

They’re hoping for a different path to it.

A path where the conversation becomes unnecessary. Where the decision is made.

Where someone else finally sees what needs to happen and acts without being asked.

The longer we talked, the clearer it became. None of these situations were due to a lack of information.

The vendor knew what was expected. That “right decision” felt obvious, to only him. The client relationship had been uncomfortable for months.

The problem was that each situation required something from him that he was reluctant to provide. A difficult conversation. A firm boundary. A decision that would disappoint someone.

So the situations remained unresolved. Not because the next step was unclear, but because it carried a cost.

Hope is useful because it asks very little of us.

Just the possibility that the situation improves on its own.

At one point, I asked him the question that had been sitting underneath the entire conversation.

What are you hoping to avoid?

Most of the time, we already know. We know which conversation needs to happen. We know where the boundary belongs. We know which decision has been sitting on the table, untouched.

What we’re hoping for too often isn’t clarity.

We’re hoping to avoid the discomfort that comes with acting on what we already know.

At some point, the question isn’t whether the situation will resolve itself.

It's whether you're willing to be the one to resolve it.