My Dearest Jess,
I am choosing to write to you now because you did not choose an easy path, and you are beginning to understand your journey and the lessons you were destined to learn. My hope is that when you get to the other side of your story, you will finally have your answer to the question you asked so long ago.
Your Beginning
Do you remember when you asked your mom, “Why am I here?” You were about three years old, and you were trying to understand why you had been born. I remember the feeling of genuine curiosity and a deeper knowing that there had to be a reason.
It must have been bizarre for your mom to hear such a big question come from such a small human. To her credit, she only skipped half a beat. Her response was clear and direct, “You are here to make the world a better place.”
While her answer may feel like a heavy burden at times, it was one of the most important moments of clarity in your life.
Your Journey
The majority of your career will be spent in, and around, some of this nation’s most broken systems because you needed them to do better – to be better – when you needed them. You will believe with everything that you are that you can change the way they work. You will tell yourself that you are an infiltrator – that you are there to break them just enough to make them work the way we promise they will.
It is important that you tell yourself this lie. This is the lie that allows you to look in the mirror and sleep at night.
During this part of your journey, you will try every tactic. Intelligence. Humor. Being quiet, loud, and exerting moral authority. Not because you feel in any way superior, but because you are searching for the one thing that will move the mountain that is ever-present and in your way. When that doesn’t work, you will try shrinking yourself – giving yourself the emotional whiplash that can only come from compromising your the values that drew you to the work in the first place. Finally, you will become a scholar of systems, leaders, and politics, and you will immerse yourself in environments that do not align with your ethics to learn from those you oppose, and you will use this experience to become subversive.
You will use these tools to confront injustice, harm, and oppression, and you will realize that you are not an infiltrator – you are a participant. You will do harm.
Your Becoming
Becoming a leader is a pivotal point in your journey. It is the part of your story that allows you to reclaim the best parts of yourself and reignite the spark that once sustained you.
From the beginning, you will see the humanity in the people around you, and you will recognize their desperate desire to reconcile their intentions with their impact. After all, it is the same monster you stare down every time you look in the mirror.
For a while, you will try all your old tricks. You will try to shift the system around you and your team, and you will strive to modify the broader culture to be more hospitable to their well-being and potential. Sometimes, I wish we weren’t so stubborn, but this is the path we chose to walk.
Your Pivot
At the point you feel the most battered, you will learn that you were set up to fail. You were never supposed to create change – not that kind of change. You will realize that the rules were rigged long before you arrived. Resistance to change is baked into the foundations that hold up our institutions.
As it often does with you, that single moment will change everything. You will resolve to create the conditions for your team to thrive – even in an openly hostile environment. Once you understand the rules of the game, you change your strategy and get to work.
Rather than continuing doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome, you will turn your attention to your actual sphere of influence – your team. You learn about Hope Theory – goals, pathways, and agency – and you take practical steps to incorporate what you learn into your leadership practice. For the first time, you will work on your own terms and the results you see in those around you will change your life and the way you lead. You see, not only do you help your team find their hope, but you will also restore your own.
Unfortunately, you continue to sit at the table built to keep people hopeless. With a renewed sense of purpose, you will try to convince yourself that you are there to dismantle it. The healthier your team becomes, however, the more you see the ways in which you help to keep that table whole. That lie you told yourself to sleep at night will slowly become fodder for your nightmares.
Eventually, you will experience a deep, spiritual burnout that will bring you to your knees. The kind that no amount of rest can resolve.
Your Lessons
It has been a long road to rediscover your reason for being. While this next part of our journey feels uncertain, you have become grounded in specific leadership principles that reflect the core of who you are:
- Hope Theory is a practical, strategic, and effective leadership framework. Hope can be taught.
- The systems, organizations, and social structures we inherited have never been healthy. They are working exactly as they were designed. The question is not how to go back to what we knew, but what are we going to build for the future we want to create.
- It is your responsibility to recognize, unlearn, and disrupt white supremacy and the cultural norms that continue to oppress others. When they remain in place and unchallenged, they will keep us all chained. We can, and should, decide to no longer use them.
- Readily accept the responsibility for finding the potential in people and have the courage to help create the environments in which that potential can emerge. Teach others to do the same. You are good at it.
- Step up, lean into courage, and strive to recognize your privilege in a way that enables you to be of service to others.
- You have no choice but to live authentically. You will not be able to blend in – despite trying to make yourself small. Stop shrinking. Stop hiding. It was never going to work.
- Courage is a prerequisite for doing excellent work. Remain willing to learn, lead, fail, recover, and persist. It will be worth it. I promise.
- You cannot build a square house on a crooked foundation. The work was never to reframe the walls. The work is to rebuild the very foundations on which we stand.
Your Purpose
While you thought your goal was to fix broken systems, you know now that fixing things was never your goal. You are a builder. Your goal is, and will always be, to create the conditions for people to thrive and cultivate hope within those who are ready to envision a more hopeful future.
You may be asking yourself:
- What future do we want to create?
- Which pathways are available to get from where we are to where we want to be?
- What is within your ability to make that future possible?
These are not just questions. This is the structure of hope – goals, pathways, and agency. These are the conditions required for hope to thrive. These are the right questions.
Your Truth
You will get to a part of your journey – the part I am at now – and you will begin to understand that the quest to find the person you needed when you were younger began and ended when you were three years old. It was never your responsibility to force the world to become a better place.
The world is a better place because you are in it.
Your task now is to go and create the future you want to see by reminding others that the leaders they needed already live among us – we just need to look within. It is time to reclaim a hopeful future. It is time to get to work.
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