The Hope Dispatch

A living inquiry into the power of hope

Why I Chose Hope as a Leadership Practice

Last year, our family moved from our beloved village of Paekākāriki on the Kāpiti Coast to Ōtautahi Christchurch, so that my husband could work on the animated feature film Kiri and Lou - an opportunity he couldn’t possibly turn down. I used that year of upheaval to make a transition of my own.

I could see that changes in the economy were going to reshape the world of work, and my industry sits squarely in the crosshairs - vulnerable to both AI and shifting Government spending priorities.

Rather than asking fear-based, scarcity-thinking questions like “what can I do that won’t be automated in two years?” or “what could I retrain for that doesn’t require four more years of study and debt?” - I asked the biggest, most expansive question I could think of:

“How can I make myself of indispensable value to the world?”

In that question, there is hope. There is service. There is alignment. There is honesty.

It felt like something I should have asked myself much earlier - and kept asking. But there is no better time than now to start : )

The answer surprised me: I can bring hope in dark times. I can use everything I know about communication to tell a story I’m not hearing out loud - how to move through this difficult, uncertain moment and arrive, eventually, at the shores of our greatest longing. Because we should be allowed to set that destination as our compass.

As Brandan “BMike” Odums wrote in his well-known mural: “We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.” So we have to keep wild dreams too.

I have always been an optimistic person. But I’ve also watched my positivity land badly - feeling more like toxic positivity than honest hope. So I had to learn what real hope was. I had to live inside its tutelage.

That, I believe, is what this moment is calling for. Who will be honest and hold hope at the same time? Who will do that work?

I put my hand up - knowing it was my vocation, if not yet my career. And with that, I launched the Hope Dispatch. It is now a year old, and I’ve just developed a new video format so it can be listened to, watched, and enjoyed however suits you.

With a year of hope under my belt, and time spent in the Hope Dojo at Rogue Union honing my Hope-Based Communication practice, I can now offer services that make communications more potent - leading to greater uptake of ideas and, ultimately, greater impact.

Hope-based communication is not lightweight - it is strategy. It’s an evidence-informed approach to leadership in complex, change-heavy environments.

Here’s what I’ve discovered: hope isn’t a soft idea. It’s a practical leadership competency; the capacity to hold realistic challenges and genuine possibility at the same time, to maintain agency when everything feels unstable, and to lead others forward when the path isn’t clear.

Leaders who develop hope as a practice don’t just survive complexity, they navigate it with more clarity, more confidence, and more capacity to bring others with them.

Hope isn’t positive thinking. It’s about building the internal and strategic conditions that make forward movement possible, even when everything around you is shifting.

Sign up to get an almost-weekly dose of hope here.