Weekly Poem: HOPE

🌿 A poem a day keeps the blues away… 

🪴 Every poem I share is one that has moved me during the week. Today’s poem is about hope. 

I originally wrote the reflection below as an article for the Association for Coaching, for their April 2026 Coaching Perspectives edition on “The Age of Uncertainty”. Unfortunately, by the time I submitted my piece, Hope as a strategy in uncertain times, their shortlist had already been finalised.

I’m hoping (no pun intended) to submit a new article for their October edition on “The Art of reflection”. In the meantime, I wanted to share my piece on hope here with you. Although it is written primarily for coaches, I hope it will resonate more widely as well.

So, here it is:

Hope as a strategy in uncertain times

🪴 We are told we no longer live in a VUCA world, but a BANI one (Cascio, 2025).

The world is no longer merely Volatile, but Brittle. Not just Uncertain, but Anxious. Not simply Complex, but Non-linear. Not merely Ambiguous, but Incomprehensible.

Whether our world is VUCA, BANI, or some other fashionable acronym. Whether it is more uncertain today than ever before. Or whether this is just us succumbing to the “Peak Uncertainty Myth” (Fergnani, 2024). Uncertainty is a condition of being alive, and a deep and personal experience for every one of us.

So, as coaches, how do we support our clients in navigating a terrain that is continuously changing?

The literature offers many possible answers: resilience, adaptability, agility, emotional intelligence. Cascio himself proposes the “positive BANI” as his antidote to BANI: Bendable, Attentive, Neuro-flexible, Interconnected (2025). And these may all be useful.  But I want to propose something far simpler, far older, and more radical.  

Hope.

Not as a feeling, but as a strategy.

🪴 Hope through the lens of a poem

Uncertainty requires non-linear thinking. So, rather than proposing you a framework or a model, I offer you a poem as a springboard for reflection on hopeful living (and coaching).

HOPE

🌻 Hope has holes
in its pockets.
It leaves little
crumb trails
so that we,
when anxious,
can follow it.
Hope’s secret:
it doesn’t know
the destination—
it knows only
that all roads
begin with one
foot in front
of the other. 🌻

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from “How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope”

“Hope has holes in its pockets.”

From the first line, Trommer disrupts our usual thinking. We tend to see holes as flaws—something to be fixed. Here they become a key design feature for good living.

Some accuse hope of numbing people into inaction by encouraging naïve positivity or wishful thinking. I disagree. Hope is not blind optimism.

Blind optimism is a feeling.
Hope is a strategy.

Blind optimism may ignore evidence and deny difficulty.
Hope is defiance. It recognises reality and still chooses to move.

Blind optimism leaves us unprepared for when things go wrong.
Hope is our compass to find a way when the path disappears.

Blind optimism is an autumn leaf in a gushing wind.
Hope is an anchor, rooted in depth of convictions, values, and relationships. It draws strength from the belief that what we see is but a fraction of the larger intricate ecosystem we are part of.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was published with the subtitle: “The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust”. Frankl was not writing about optimism. He was writing about the human capacity to orient toward meaning even in the most brutal conditions.

Hope does not eliminate suffering.
It prevents suffering from becoming the whole story.

To live a meaningful life is to love and to hope.

As coaches, especially those of us supporting clients through difficult transitions or anxious times, hope matters.

🪴 Follow the crumb trail

Hope “leaves little crumb trails so that we, when anxious, can follow it.”

This single line could shape months of coaching: helping our clients notice the crumb trails that hope has already been leaving behind. In uncertain times, clients rarely need grand visions or five-year plans. They need help noticing what is already trying to guide them.

Unlike Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Trommer does not invite us to follow a bright yellow brick road, but little crumb trails.

Crumbs are subtle, fragile, and easily missed.

They can be ravaged by others.

If left unnoticed or ignored for too long, they decay and disappear.

They may show up as small impulses, half-formed ideas, moments of aliveness or irritation, flickers of curiosity, quiet values, recurring metaphors, bodily sensations, or longings that refuse to go away.

Our role as coaches becomes that of a wayfinder—someone who helps expand our clients’ sense of awareness so that these crumbs can be seen and followed.

From a Gestalt perspective, this means bringing what is in the Ground (what is in the background and unnoticed) into a Figure (what can now be examined and explored in the here and now). We do this, for example:

• by paying attention not only to what our client says, but to how they say it
• by noticing the impact they have on us—our own perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and bodily responses—and offering these as a relational feedback
• by using our own intuition and imagination to create small experiments that allow the client to experience their situation differently
• by highlighting interruptions to contact—“I can’t,” “I should,” “Never”, “Always”, “No one”—that often signal where hope is being blocked
• by exploring their convictions, values, commitments, relationships, and gently question whether these still serve them

This way of us showing up expands our client’s vision to new territories, new angles, so they can hopefully spot those crumbs left behind by hope.

And it’s work that requires “bravery” (from coach and client), and it needs to come from a place of care—and dare I say “Agape”(Zinker, 1978, p. 3, 6).

🪴 One foot in front of the other

“Hope (…) doesn’t know the destination—it knows only that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.”

This is the essence of uncertainty: we can neither carve out a five-year vision nor a ten-step plan. And this is precisely where hope steps in.

Where clarity fails, hope offers that next possible step, one foot at a time. And, as coaches, our task is to support our clients as they choose where to place their foot next.

This might sound like:

• If you believed this could work, what would you do next?
• If you trusted yourself just a little more, what step might you take today?
• If change were possible, where would you move?

And then we look at what’s preventing them from doing so: the thoughts, beliefs, those loud (or not so loud) voices in our head, the feelings and emotions trapped in our body.

Hope doesn’t eliminate uncertainty or fear.
It refuses to let them paralyze us and rob us of our next possible step.

And that step might be forward, backward, sideways, or a moment of rest for reflection and recharge.

Hope is a strategy that restores agency.

🪴 Hope begins with us

An Egyptian saying goes: You can’t give what you don’t have.

If we want to cultivate hope in our clients, we must cultivate it in ourselves—not as forced positivity, but as a quiet, steady…

… knowing that we are not alone;

… trusting that we are part of something larger—an intricate ecosystem—that can open up opportunities we never thought possible or imaginable;

… believing that meaning will emerge even when we are still muddling our way through the fog.

Hope trusts in what the Greeks called Kairos—the right time, the unfolding moment—not just Chronos, the predictability of clocks,calendars, and perfectly laid-out plans.

A hopeful coach is not someone with answers.
It is someone who can contain the discomfort of not knowing, for ourselves and our client, trusting that there is more to this than meets the eye.

🪴 A closing invitation

Where uncertainty exists, hope is necessary.

So, I invite you to ask yourself:

• How do I embody hope when the destination is unclear?
• How do I show up as someone who believes movement is still possible?
• How can I be a wayfinder who supports clients to spot those crumbs and find the courage to follow them?

Hope does not promise a safe or certain future.
It invites us into the next living moment.

And, often, that is enough.

🦋 Happy Sunday everyone! 🦋

With love,
Dina 🫶🏽

References:

Cascio, J. (2025) ‘BANI 2025 — an Overview’, Medium, 01 August 2025. Available at: https://medium.com/@cascio/bani-2025-an-overview-575d92026fe1 (Accessed: 10 February 2026).

Fergnani, A. (2024) ‘Why Peak Uncertainty is a Myth’, Farsight, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, 12 June 2024. Available at: https://farsight.cifs.dk/why-peak-uncertainty-is-a-myth/ (Accessed: 10 February 2026).

Zinker, J. (1978) Creative process in Gestalt therapy. New York: Vintage Books.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dina is a certified coach from the University of Cambridge, an advanced Gestalt coaching practitioner and trainer, a Gallup-certified strengths coach, and founder of Agape Heart & Soul. She holds an MBA and a Master’s in Communications & Media, and brings over 24 years of international experience, including a senior career in HR. Recognised as one of Basel’s Top 15 Coaches, her work integrates relational coaching, systems thinking, and leadership to support change with clarity, courage, and humanity. Former host of the AC podcast series “Coaching Beyond Tools”, she runs her own Gestalt Coaching Practice Labs and Relational Coaching Community of Practice.

www.linkedin.com/in/dinasabryfivaz