The Discipline of Hope

This bonus episode was recorded as a live workshop, with Alba Villamil, partner and facilitator at HmntyCntrd, joining for the second half to open it up into a Q&A. What follows pulls from both halves: the talk Vivianne gave and the conversation she and Alba had afterward about boundaries, grief, and what it actually looks like to keep choosing hope on the days it feels unreasonable to. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾

There is a specific kind of tired that has nothing to do with sleep. It is the tired of scanning the news before you have had coffee. Of watching a colleague get praised for a version of the work you have been quietly doing for a year. Of wondering, somewhere around your third scroll through LinkedIn, whether any of this is going anywhere or whether you are just enduring it with better branding. Most people call that burnout. It is closer to something else: the slow erosion of your ability to believe a better future is actually possible.

That erosion is what this episode is about. Not hope as a mood, and not the kind of forced positivity that asks you to smile through something that deserves your anger. Hope as something you build with your hands, on the days you have the least evidence it will work.

The Difference Between Helplessness and Powerlessness

Before you can practice hope, you have to know what you are actually fighting. Vivianne spends the first half of the talk on a distinction most people collapse into one feeling: helplessness and powerlessness are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is why so many of us stay stuck longer than we need to.

Powerlessness comes from outside you. A storm damages your house and you wait for the insurance company. A round of layoffs hits your department and there is no memo you can write that reverses it. Your flight gets cancelled. No amount of mindset work touches any of that, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of cruelty.

Helplessness is different. It lives in your internal beliefs about what you are capable of, often shaped by old failures, old rejections, or a childhood where personal agency was never really on the table. The person who never learns to swim because they have already decided they are not the athletic type is not blocked by anything external. They are blocked by a story about themselves that has calcified into fact. This is the part with room in it. Helplessness was learned, and what got learned can be unlearned, which means it can also be practiced out of.

Hope Is a Rebellion

The first way Vivianne asks you to hold hope is as a rebellion against despair, a refusal to accept that the current version of your life is the only version available.

But a hope that cannot make room for grief is not sturdy enough to survive contact with real life. She describes grief as a hallway. It is a place you pass through, not a place you were ever meant to live, even though most of us have at some point hung pictures on those walls and settled in like we were staying for good.

"Hope doesn't mean denying grief. It means acknowledging it, honoring it, but refusing to let it define us."

Her own therapist once told her she needed to learn to just sit with the hard and the difficult without rushing past it. Vivianne's honest response, on the spot, was something close to cool, cool, cool, how long is that going to take, because I have things to do. Nobody wants to get comfortable with their own pain. But every time you take even a small step forward in that hallway instead of unpacking furniture in it, you are rebelling against despair whether it feels dramatic or not.

The ritual she offers here is one she calls the burning bowl: a stack of sticky notes, a series of prompts (what beliefs about work do I need to release, what fears, what generational patterns, what heartbreak), one honest answer per piece of paper, and then a small fire where each page gets released one at a time. She does this twice a year at minimum, sometimes more when life demands it, and she is candid that certain names and certain griefs show back up on the list every single time. That repetition is not failure. It is just what tending something looks like.

Hope Is a Choice

Comfort is the harder opponent, and the more dangerous one, because it rarely announces itself as the enemy. It shows up dressed as stability, as being reasonable, as staying somewhere a little too long because leaving would mean admitting how much you have already outgrown it. A relationship, a job, a version of yourself you built years ago and never renovated. You do not stay because it is working. You stay because it is familiar, and familiar reads as safe even when it costs you something real.

Choosing courage over comfort is not a slogan here so much as a daily interruption of that pattern. It means catching the moment you are about to shrink back down to the size of a story that was never true about you, and doing something small instead. Vivianne offers two practices for this.

The first, Remembering Who You Are, asks five people who genuinely know you to answer one question: what shows up when I walk into a room? You collect those answers and hold onto them for the days your own read on yourself has gone dark. The second, borrowed from the Yoruba tradition of an oríkì, has you write your own praise name: your full name, a string of bold, unapologetic titles for who you are and what you protect. Vivianne's own reads, in part, builder and revere of dreams, taker of stages, conqueror of corporate chaos, protector of her joy. The point is not modesty. Most workplaces will never see you clearly, so you have to be the one who insists on it.

Hope Is a Commitment

This is where the conversation with Alba earned its keep, because hope stops being interesting the moment it stays theoretical. Someone asked how to protect your energy without turning cold, and Vivianne's answer started with the difference between guarding your heart and hardening it. Hardening looks like scanning LinkedIn for a fight, defaulting to everything is terrible and there is no way out, getting short with the people you actually love. Guarding looks like something quieter: reading outside your field on purpose, being deliberate about who gets access to your energy, and yes, building an astrology app for pets, because joy that has nothing to do with the crisis of the week is still doing real work.

Alba added her own version of this from therapy, picturing relationships as concentric rings and asking honestly whether someone's place in your life still matches how they have actually shown up for you. Vivianne's version of the same idea is what she calls marble jar moments: you test someone with something small, watch how they hold it, and let that determine how much of yourself you bring to them next time. Trust gets built one marble at a time, and it can also stop getting built the moment someone proves they are not a safe place for it.

The commitment gets its clearest shape in a story Alba told near the end, about a season of real depression when she was not investing in her own future because some part of her did not believe there would be one worth investing in. Opening a savings account became, in her words, an act of protest. A quiet insistence that tomorrow was coming and that she was going to be around for it. That is what hope as a commitment actually costs: not grand gestures, but small, repeated bets on a future you cannot yet prove.

Something to Sit With

Vivianne closed the live session with a question worth carrying past this post: what is one small thing you can do today that acknowledges who you are and what you are about? Not a five-year plan. The email you have been sitting on. The friend you have not told about the thing you are excited for. Hope, done right, rarely announces itself. It just quietly refuses to let today be the whole story.

If this is a season where the anger-versus-grief distinction is hitting close to home, that is worth its own conversation, and it is one we will keep having on the podcast.

If you want more of these conversations as they happen, subscribe to the Choose Courage Inc. podcast wherever you listen. And if the helplessness-versus-powerlessness split above is the piece that stuck with you most, The Life Audit is where we go deeper on figuring out which one you are actually up against.

Originally aired as Episode 6: The Discipline of Hope (Bonus Episode) on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.