Remedy to Resignation

America's path to possibility

What can be done when you’re resigned, when you’ve given up? What can be done when you find yourself immersed in an ocean of conversations that argue against progress and that defend an unworkable status quo? What can be done when a mood of hopelessness and “no possibility” captures a crowd, a community, or a country? 

Moods, both positive and negative ones, capture us all the time. A mood only becomes problematic when we become trapped in a story about why it has arisen or when we give it meaning beyond our experience and attempt to control or suppress it. Our challenge then is two-fold: first, to be conscious and present to the mood as it arises and, second, to acknowledge it as a mood. 

In the case of resignation, acknowledging that you are resigned in a specific matter is the first step toward letting go of the mood and recovering your ‘self’. Recovering your self means you are, once again, able to have your life be a continuous expression of your commitments, your dreams, your ambition, your creativity and, most importantly, an expression of the possibility your life is and can be.

The remedy to resignation is possibility.  

One of the skills I teach in my work with people is how to have a “conversation FOR possibility”. It’s very simple and straightforward. Begin with a goal, a project, a situation, or a problem. Notice the difference between focusing on whether something is possible versus considering that something IS possible. 

What’s possible is almost always greater, in some way, shape or form, than what’s predictable. 

Let’s look at a typical annual budget meeting as an example. On the table is the question, “How much can we grow next year?” Almost always we try to answer the question by projecting historical trends onto the future, looking at our assumptions, and then discussing what is and is not possible in the coming months. “What’s possible” in this conversation is usually synonymous with “what’s reasonable”. If a proposed number exceeds what is deemed reasonable, we typically shoot it down as ‘unrealistic’, and end up agreeing to a number that can be justified based on past results and pre-existing resources and capabilities. At the end of it all, we come up with a number that is predictable, rather than a number that reflects what’s possible.

Possibilities aren’t predictable. By definition, they don’t exist in reality. (If they did, they’d be examples.) 

Possibilities are not a function of analysis. 

Possibilities are created. 

If history and reasonableness are the criteria, then most progress and virtually all breakthroughs would be impossible and resignation would not only become inevitable, it would be a sensible way of dealing with most things in life.  

Here’s where a conversation for possibility comes in. It breaks up the automaticity of our thinking: it literally begins by asking us to stop looking at whether something is possible and instead to CONSIDER something IS possible and then see what we can observe and imagine from that perspective. Going back to our annual budget meeting, if 10% growth is predictable, we can imagine that 50% is possible. What else then becomes possible or needs to change? Perhaps we need new products, new ways to enlist customers, new opportunities for saving, new people, new markets, and so on.  

This isn’t the same as brainstorming. Brainstorming can stimulate ideas, but only inside the historical boundaries of what is conventionally considered to be reasonable and predictable. Participants in a conversation for possibility, on the other hand, shift the context of the conversation from looking at whether something is possible to creating the point of view that it is, in fact, possible. That different context of possibility stops us from drifting along with our circumstances. Other new possibilities appear effortlessly and, viewed from within this different context, are even obvious. At the end of the day, the only question left to answer is, “Which possibilities are we committing to?”

One of the most important functions of leadership is being responsible, within the scope of his or her role, for the moods of others, be that a team, an organization, a community, or a country. When a leader communicates the vision they have for a group of people, they are expressing some picture of the future as a possibility. Typically, when those people experience the leader’s vision this way and relate to it as a possibility that they would, themselves, like to see realized, they are naturally inspired. However, if they relate to the vision as simply another “big goal”, they may agree or disagree, but will rarely be inspired. 

In my experience, with possibility, it takes very little time to shift the mood of an individual, a team, or an organization from resignation to some level of enthusiasm for the future. 

Individual leaders can use possibility to shift the mood of a nation from resignation to inspiration and inspired action. Many of our most iconic twentieth-century models of leadership were committed to a possibility before there was evidence that it was even possible. Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States out of its Great Depression at a time when a vast percentage of our population was feeling despair and many were, indeed, giving up. Time and time again, Winston Churchill inspired England and its Allies to keep the faith, to believe in the possibility of defeating Nazi Germany even when it appeared the war was lost and winning was hopeless. When Mahatma Ghandi first shared his vision of India being free of British rule, he was considered naïve and few took him seriously. Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, which was all about possibility, mobilized millions to break 200 years of systemic discrimination and oppression, something many had considered impossible a few years earlier.

Just as living in resignation can become habitual, living in a context of possibility can, after a while, also become habitual. I have personally seen this occur for thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations. 

In a recent post, American Populism & The Slippery Slope Toward No Possibility, I pointed out that it seemed as if the United States of America was heading, like Argentina, down a slippery slope into a mood of resignation. If we are to avoid that national slide into “no possibility”, I believe it will either be because enough of us believe our country can recover that post-WWII mood of “anything is possible” and/or because enough of us are having conversations for possibility and not succumbing to the complacency I’ve written about concerning the 2024 election.

Writing that last sentence has me wonder.  

What if, in 2030, our nation is no longer polarized? What if our country has reunited? What if trust in our institutions has been restored, and major gains have been made in our relationships with other nations? What if there are unprecedented levels of collaboration and cooperation globally on issues related to climate, energy, food security, water, health, and education?

And if this were indeed the “way it is” in 2030, what else might be possible that we can’t even imagine yet?