This is a collage I created a while back about true love

It was highlighted to me this last month that I had completely lost hope in a particular area of my life. It’s not great as a life coach, part of whose job it is to bring hope to every situation, to realize there is a dark corner where you have none.

I like many of you was totally unaware as so much else was going really well. The problem is that losing hope in one area means losing vision and without you realizing it affects every area. The area that I had stopped hoping in was that of meeting my soul mate and getting married one day.

While I write I can think of someone I know who has realized their dream of getting married and having a child but has seemingly lost hope in another area: – that of working towards a vision they have to change the world for a better place. The challenge for him and all of us is that we can feel happy and content in parts of our lives, but we don’t perhaps see the need to want or to hope for more in areas that remain unfulfilled. We don’t want to dig up any feelings of discontent. It would after all be nonsense you might say, as we should be grateful for what we do have.

Well, maybe you can humour me for a moment and just stop and think, which area of your life have you ceased to hope in? Think about your work, business, relationships, home, maybe leisure pursuits, maybe something you always wanted to learn and have given up on the idea or maybe a dream to travel or live in another country. If it helps take a look at the Wheel of Life 2012 exercise as it helps you to identify which area of your life needs most attention.

Okay, so next try out this strategy on your weak area (s) and experience what hope in all areas of your life can feel like. Since I have sorted out my dark area, I feel happier, more at peace, more motivated and have more energy and purpose in all other areas of my life too. So it seems we are made to have glistening hope accessing all areas of our lives.

Okay so this is a little embarrassing, but I must tell you in order to illustrate my point. One thing I did was to start to watch wedding shows on TV. This is a strange blog I know, but let me make my point.

We can’t have hope if we can’t visualize ourselves in a specific situation which would represent our hopes being fulfilled.

As I watched wedding after wedding eventually it was a natural response for me to start to make choices and pick out what I would and wouldn’t want for myself. Hey presto! Visualisation has started!

So it’s your turn now, think of the area where you could do with greater hope and expectation. What would be your equivalent of exposing yourself to a picture of your hopes being fulfilled? It could be a TV show showing people succeeding at it. It could be befriending someone who already has breakthrough in this area. It could be reading about it. It could be setting a very specific goal with a deadline and working out a strategy to achieve it. The key is to find somewhere in the world where this has happened already and feed on it. Something I also did was to intently tune my ear to listening to stories of how people met and fell in love.

Alternatively if what you are hoping for has never happened before anywhere, find someone’s story somewhere in the world, where they have pursued and succeeded in something that was ground breaking and had never happened before and feed on it. It’s not difficult; the world is full of encouragement around us, to remind us that our current perspective of feeling there is no hope is warped.

I have done a few other things too, both spiritual and practical, to help regain my hope in this area. One huge thing is the need to examine our hearts and ensure we are ready to start to dream in this area again, even though it’s risky and may involve being hurt. In order to be filled with hope we need to take this risk. I’m happy to share more of what I did with anyone that is interested, just write to me.

Once you start the journey your creativity will spur you on to keep filling your hope tank until one day before you know it another dream is fulfilled.

Tina Southgate, Life and Business Coach, Smart Step Coaching