In this latest Enlivening Work episode, Goldenwood Co-Founder David Kim sits down with longtime futurist Bob Johansen, who has spent more than 50 years at the Institute for the Future advising leaders across business, government, and the military. Drawing on his remarkable career and his early studies at Crozer Theological Seminary, Bob brings a unique perspective to the intersection of faith, technology, leadership, and the future. His brand new book, Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age, provides a starting point for this timely conversation.
Together, David and Bob explore what it means to cultivate hope in an increasingly uncertain and rapidly changing world. From the transformative possibilities of generative AI to the importance of community, improvisation, and what Bob calls “useful friction,” they consider how our relationship with emerging technologies might shape not only what we do, but who we are becoming.
This conversation invites us to reconsider hope not as wishful optimism or confidence in our ability to predict the future, but as a discipline that can be cultivated through faith, practice, and community. As we learn to look beyond the noise of the present and imagine the future we are called to help create, we discover new possibilities for work that is deeply human, generative, and full of promise.
[EPISODE PLAYER: insert Buzzsprout embed here]
An Excerpt from Disciplines of Hope
Bob Johansen, Andy Doyle, and Jeremy Kirshbaum: Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age
Disciplines of Hope releases on November 17, but Bob has provided an excerpt for us below. You can pre-order your copy on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
To make better futures, we need new disciplines for hope in action that you perform, repeatedly, together—not hope or faith that you simply have or don’t have. This book shows you how to generate your own discipline of hope and grow your faith in the future.
These new disciplines will be things we do, not just feel. We have developed a new Credible Hope Compass that will help you generate your own discipline of hope, with generative AI (GenAI) as a mind-stretching amplifier. It will also help you seed hope and faith in the future in others.
This is not a religious book, though it draws seriously from religion and builds upon the gifts—while rejecting the harm. It is not a technology book either, though it takes GenAI seriously as a medium that will reshape how people make meaning. As with faith, we show how to receive the gifts of GenAI but reject the harm.
Futurist Bob Johansen, multifaith leader Andy Doyle, and AI poet/engineer Jeremy Kirshbaum have created this handbook for leading when certainty is not possible. We come from different worlds—futures research, spiritual leadership, GenAI development—but we share a conviction that the future is too important to abandon to cynicism or fake confidence.
We show how generating credible hope will be critical for leaders in business, government, social, religious, and charitable organizations. We spotlight how faith and trust have been weaponized by opportunistic leaders, and we do not look away from those failures. We explore the potential benefits and the risks that GenAI offers as a medium for meaning-making. The Credible Hope Compass will help leaders distinguish between hope that heals and hope that manipulates.
We are writing for current, emerging, and aspiring leaders: business leaders, educators, civic officials, pastors, activists, community builders—anyone responsible for helping others orient toward futures worth building. All leaders will need to inspire faith in the future, even those with no religious faith at all. We are also writing for people who have lost faith in “faith” itself and want to know whether the concept of faith can still hold weight.
Faith and hope will need to be regrown—not just retrieved. This book will show you how. It is the beginning of a conversation, with a vibrant discussion guide to speed the process.
Here is the Table of Contents:
- Introduction: Hope Is Something You Must Generate—and Here’s How
- Chapter 1: A New Compass for Seeding Hope
- Chapter 2: The Future Terrain We Must Navigate
- Chapter 3: Faith Traditions—Gifts and Harm
- Chapter 4: Varieties of Faith and Hope—Keep the Gifts; Refuse the Harm
- Chapter 5: A Surprising New Use for the Generative AI Medium
- Chapter 6: Human Generativity Augmented by Generative AI
- Chapter 7: The Wisdom of Leadership with Hope
- Chapter 8: Personal Coping, Meaning, and Resilience
- Conclusion: A Call for New Disciplines of Hope
Pre-order Disciplines of Hope on Amazon or Barnes & Noble
Full Episode Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Kim: Hello and welcome to Enlivening Work, a podcast from Goldenwood. My name is David Kim. Many of us today carry a quiet suspicion that the future is no longer really a shared project. Institutions often feel brittle, as we’ll get into a bit, anxieties run high, and the tools reshaping our lives seem to be moving faster than our wisdom about them. In this climate, people crave certainty. My guest today argues that certainty is exactly what will fail us, and that what we need instead is something older and perhaps even harder: faith that is practiced in particular ways. I’m really pleased to introduce Bob Johansen, who has spent more than 50 years as a futurist at the Institute for the Future, advising leaders in business, government, and the military. Before that, he studied at Crozer Theological Seminary, the same seminary Martin Luther King Jr. attended. His new book, written with Bishop Andy Doyle and AI practitioner Jeremy Kirshbaum, is Disciplines of Hope: Generating Faith in the Future for an Anxious Age. Bob, welcome to Enlivening Work.
Bob Johansen: Thank you so much. Great to be here.
David Kim: I’m looking forward so much to this conversation. Bob has been a friend, a kindred-spirited colleague, and a real mentor. He has paved the way for so much, not only in futures thinking but in how we engage with a new technology that seems to be taking over more and more parts of our world and our lives. I want to highlight the book he’s recently written. You’ll be able to get it in about a week, and at the end of our time we’ll share how you can obtain a copy. Bob, I wanted to begin with a bit of your background. Before your doctorate, you studied at Crozer, and at the end of the book you write about being there when Dr. King was assassinated, and how your interaction with Dr. King’s professors, particularly Kenneth Smith, led you onto the path of becoming a futurist. I’d love for you to share some of that background, because it’s fascinating and also gives context for the approach you take in the book.
Bob Johansen: Sure, happy to share that. I was there on a “look and see” fellowship. The Rockefeller Brothers sponsored these, and a number of divinity schools offered them. They were for people interested in world religions but not committed to ministry. For me it was a life-changing experience. I learned how to be a scholar there, and how to think systematically about faith, religion, history, and philosophy. It was a very rich program, and influenced by Dr. King. When he was killed, they set up a program, which I was selected for, to recreate his intellectual influences while he was in divinity school, and to understand much more about him as a person and how he became such a visionary.
That led to what I will call a calling, even though I was never ordained. I felt called to be a futurist. What I learned in that work, including with Professor Smith, who taught Christian ethics, was that Dr. King was not just concerned about civil rights. His larger frame was social justice. He was involved in the early peace movements, early efforts around environmental health, and anti-poverty movements. He had a clarity around social justice, and I think that’s instrumental to the signature line you referred to in your introduction. What we need to thrive in the future is clarity about the future, but we can’t have certainty. In effect, the future will reward clarity but punish certainty.
David Kim: I want to come back to that in a minute. But first, why write this book? You’ve written many books. This is your 16th, I recently found out. Why this particular book, especially given its faith angle, and why now?
Bob Johansen: It’s been a challenge for me, David. I’ve been trying to write this book for 20 years, and I never found the right time, the right frame, or the right partners, which I finally have. After divinity school, I went to a PhD program at Northwestern, thinking I would become a sociologist of religion and a professor. But while I was there, the internet happened. It was called the ARPANET in those days. I was one of the first social scientists to get interested in the social, psychological, and even spiritual impacts of technology. I got a job opportunity in Silicon Valley before it was called that. This was 1973. So I was there in the early days, and I grew up with the internet and with studying the impact of technology. But I had this lingering interest: what does this mean? How does new technology influence how we do our meaning making? My favorite definition of religion is meaning making. How do we develop our own sense of purpose?
I’ve had a phrase in my mind for many years: faith in the future. I mean it with an intentional double meaning. There’s the idea of faith in the future, but also the question of whether it’s possible to have faith in an increasingly chaotic and unruly future like the one we’re facing right now. I was working with that title with my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, whom I love. I’ve done my last 10 books with them. I used to work with the big publishers on the East Coast and had a literary agent, but now I write only with Berrett-Koehler because they’re so good at content editing. But as we tested the idea, even in that environment, we learned that the word faith has become not only controversial; it’s actually disgusting to many more people than I thought. When you say, “I’m writing a book about faith in the future, and I’m also interested in how generative AI can help us make meaning better in that kind of future,” the immediate reaction from a substantial number of very thoughtful people is that they don’t even want to talk about it. They’re disgusted with faith because of bad experiences. They’ve been wounded by religion. And many of those same people are disgusted with AI, because AI has been oversold and has underdelivered.
So we found ourselves writing in the gap between disgust on one side and awe on the other. For a lot of people, faith is awesome and wonderful, there really are good things in the traditions, and AI is very promising in some ways, although it also has a lot of problems. We ended up writing a book that probes the history of religion. We go deep on the history of faith and what can be learned from it. We also probe the future of AI, and generative AI in particular, and how to use it. But it’s not a tech book, and it’s not a religion book. We’re writing in the space between, trying to make something of it. I think we’ve helped people receive the gifts of faith without getting sucked into the harm, and receive the gifts of AI without getting sucked into the harm. That seems to me one of our biggest challenges as humans right now, because generative AI is really different and really profound, and we don’t know how to make sense of it. And because it’s being oversold and overhyped, it’s even harder to make sense of. In the book, we end up using the word hope interchangeably with faith. If you can’t talk about faith, let’s talk about hope. They’re very closely aligned. The other word we use a lot is trust.
David Kim: As I read the book, I see so much of your life in it, the particulars of your approach, and I think that’s one of its unique contributions to the growing literature on AI. I haven’t had the privilege of getting to know your two co-authors, but I certainly see your life and influence in it. And the mixture of hope and faith, and I would add love, if I can borrow a bit of biblical language, is certainly there. I know you draw on Tillich, particularly his understanding that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. You define faith in a way many of our listeners wouldn’t expect, and I appreciate that. Would you say more about that idea, that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty?
Bob Johansen: We probed this a lot. For us, the broad definition of faith is a meaningful leap into a highly uncertain future. It borrows the idea of a leap of faith but links it to meaning. It isn’t necessarily faith in God. We’ve been very careful in the book not to use God language. We’re fine if people hold a theological belief and that’s the language that carries meaning for them, but we didn’t want to constrain the book to theological faith. We did want to draw lessons from organized religions and faith traditions. There’s also a kind of calm knowing involved in faith. And faith is much more active. What we’re talking about is not passive faith or passive optimism, but active engagement. Faith comes to life in community, and it plays out in the context of constant, or at least periodic, questioning. Questioning is part of the process. The Episcopal tradition, which Bishop Doyle comes from, has a phrase: discerning questions. And one of the most interesting words in Silicon Valley these days is discernment, or discerning.
One of the really interesting twists with generative AI is this. We’re the longest-running futures think tank in the world, and I’ve been a practicing professional futurist for more than 50 years. There are few people on the planet who have been doing it that long. Now, with generative AI, it’s easier to do a forecast like the ones we do. Not a prediction, but a forecast: a plausible, internally consistent, provocative view of what we think will happen, with scenarios built off that base forecast. It’s easier to do a forecast, but it’s harder to discern what the forecast means. It used to be that we could do things in forecasting that nobody else could do. Now pretty much anyone who’s semi-skilled with generative AI can produce a forecast, but they won’t know what it means. So our job has increasingly shifted toward helping people discern what insight the foresight provokes. How do you discern what it means for what you should actually do? What choices should you make, given those external future forces?
David Kim: That really resonates with Goldenwood. Discernment is one of our key words too, and we would agree that in some ways it is the key skill of the future. The question is how you cultivate it. We have a certain progression for that. We always say we slow people down in order to help them perceive more. We think the tempo of our lives contributes to our lack of discernment.
Bob Johansen: Exactly.
David Kim: You also talk about the BANI framework, which I use all the time, so thank you for introducing it to me years ago, and about how the future punishes those who claim certainty. How do you cultivate discernment in your own work?
Bob Johansen: I think Goldenwood is, in a real sense, a discipline of faith. The way you’ve organized it, the practices, the rituals, the experiences: those are disciplines of faith, or of hope. What we say in the book is that you can choose existing practices and disciplines, or we show you how to create your own. We’re not arguing that one is better than the other, and we’re not advocating for any brand of religion or any particular practice. In general, what you need is a discipline, a practice you can do over and over again with others, to develop the kind of faith that prepares us for what we’re now calling the BANI future: brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible. Increasingly, that’s the kind of world we’re going to face.
So imagine practicing a discipline in a brittle world. It needs to be bendable, but with a resilient clarity behind it. You don’t want to be bendable in a wishy-washy sense. That can get you in a lot of trouble, or at least it’s hard to make your way if you’re only bendable, with nothing directing you. In an anxious world, you want to be attentive, with kindness, with empathy, with community. And one of the big surprises, which troubles me so much, David, is that in Silicon Valley now even the word empathy is controversial. Give me a break. In this very uncertain, very troubled world, how can you say it’s a bad thing to look out for others?
David Kim: This is the first I’m hearing of that. Why would empathy have taken on a negative connotation?
Bob Johansen: It’s such a self-interested world in Silicon Valley now. It’s so driven by profit, by growth, by market forces, that empathy seems like something that gets in the way. We can come back to that. I don’t know exactly how, but it certainly troubles me.
In a nonlinear world, you want disciplines of faith that build on the practices of improv. Here we’re very lucky. We have a history of comedy improv, theatrical improv, even international relations improv at places like Princeton and Harvard that have used improv methods. I recently did a podcast for Second City. They have a corporate improv group now. They don’t only feed Saturday Night Live; they feed corporations.
David Kim: Oh wow.
Bob Johansen: We need that. Most of the groups I work with are very senior executive groups, mostly at very large companies, and most of those people are taking or retaking improv courses, because improv is so relevant to this. It’s a discipline again. And finally, in an incomprehensible world, you want to be interconnected: to have a discipline of connecting with people who give you the perspective you need to thrive in this new world.
That’s the challenge. There are many ways to meet it, and no one right way. In the book, we outline the different faith traditions and models for how this might be practiced. In chapters five and six, we outline how to use generative AI to develop your own sense of meaning making and purpose finding. But it is a discipline, a practice you need to do over and over again, and it’s much better practiced in a group or a community than in isolation. Most generative AI tools today are individual rather than group oriented, so we’re paying more attention now to the group versions of generative AI.
David Kim: I want to get to the heart of the book, the hope compass, which I think is its central framing. But first I want to ask about the ways hope breaks under pressure, the defeaters, in a sense. How does hope break?
Bob Johansen: You can get overconfident. You can invest in things that don’t come to pass the way you thought they would. You can create the equivalent of idolatry out of hope. You can let it degrade into a vacant sort of optimism. Hope needs to be engaged constantly. One interesting principle here: we now have a strong medical history and a lot of data suggesting that hopeful people are healthier, and that hopeless people, people who feel no sense of agency, are less healthy. Hopelessness functions as a kind of toxicity. So there are many ways hope can be abused, just as faith can be abused, and you have to develop your own discipline and practice to find the version that works best for you.
David Kim: Can you walk us through the compass: outcomes, community, ethics, and evidence?
Bob Johansen: Sure. We wanted a takeaway, a kind of tool, and we searched through different metaphors before landing on a compass. It’s a special compass, because although it has four directions, you’re better off if you pursue, or at least consider, all four at once. It usually begins with outcomes. What outcomes are you seeking? To go back to what I said earlier, what’s your clarity, your clarity story? Then we ask, who is the community with whom you’re doing this? Faith works much better when it’s practiced in community. Then we ask, what are your ethical frameworks? What are your values, your purpose? What are the lines you will not cross? And finally, what’s the evidence? How will you know you’ve succeeded?
We have a whole discussion guide in the back of the book for using this in groups. I hope some of your groups at Goldenwood will use it, David. We’re working with groups to figure out how to take this more general idea of faith in the future and apply it in real-world settings. That’s what the compass is for. You can bring it with you into the field. It doesn’t tell you what to do, but it reminds you of what to consider.
Again we come back to the word discerning. We try to say discerning rather than discernment, because discernment implies that it’s finished, that you’re done. Discerning is a continuous process: thinking about outcomes, community, ethics, and evidence in an ongoing way. Built into that is a cycle of foresight, insight, and action. When people think about outcomes, we encourage them to think not only from the present forward but from the future back, because the present is so noisy. We’re recording this the day before the elections, and I don’t talk about politics, but I’m thinking future back. The present is so noisy that it’s very hard to discern what’s going on, and much of it is incomprehensible. But if you think future back, you can start to sense directions of change, waves of change, and figure out which waves to ride and which to avoid.
David Kim: I want to underline what you’re saying about discernment versus discerning, because I think it’s so true. It goes back to how certainty is, in some ways, the enemy. We live in a world that is so fluid, yet our personal operating systems crave certainty. So this is a whole different way of finding an anchor, a stability that isn’t based on a certain kind of permanence. And evidence, the last of the four, can sound strange next to the concept of faith. What counts as evidence that hope is credible, especially in a church or ministry context?
Bob Johansen: It’s asking, how will we know? How will we know if people are helped? What’s the measure of that? It may not be a quantitative measure. I think you can easily overemphasize the quantitative side. But what’s the evidence? I think that’s a legitimate question to ask in whatever context you’re in. How will we know?
David Kim: That’s a helpful clarification. Something I really enjoyed in the book is the idea of AI as a medium, not just a tool. You argue that generative AI is better understood as a medium, and I love the lineage of text media you trace, with generative AI as a major step forward. Can you talk about AI as a medium rather than a tool?
Bob Johansen: Sure. This is one of the challenges in understanding generative AI: we don’t really have language to describe it. We’ve got this awkward term, artificial intelligence, which is the worst term for an emerging technology I’ve ever studied. It takes you down a very narrow path. It implies that computers are going to replace humans, that we’ll all become artificial. That’s a reasonable scenario to explore, and there are risks associated with it. But I like how Tom Malone at MIT puts it: the big story is not computers replacing people. The big story is humans and computers doing things together that have never been done before. That’s the real power that can come out of these things, and that’s the challenge I think is well worth exploring. How do we get past thinking about these things passively and engage them more actively? How do we create, or augment?
The medium of generative AI is essentially the context within which we’re going to be asked to make meaning. A tool is something you use and then set aside; you move in and out of using it. A medium is a way. In religious traditions, books have had enormous influence: the Bible, the Torah. Before that, scrolls, and somewhere along the way, the codex. We have a long history of different media, and this is like a new medium.
We’re actually making a living book version of Disciplines of Hope that my colleague Jeremy is designing right now. I’ve been experimenting with it this weekend. It’s a visual map with the four points of the compass and the themes we talk about, and you can zoom in and out, picking up threads. You can ask any question or make any comment, and it responds from the book first, then uses generative AI to go beyond the book. In a way, it lets readers who have already read the book ask us as authors questions and talk with us. Not just question and answer, but conversation. And it extends beyond the book, because it has a life of its own. That’s a medium. It’s not just a tool you use within a certain frame of reference. You’re creating new frames of reference because the medium allows you to. So it’s profoundly different. We vary Marshall McLuhan’s line that the medium is the message: now the medium is going to start shaping the kind of meaning we’re able to derive. We think that’s going to be better, more profound, and more relevant to this increasingly uncertain future.
David Kim: I think that’s so important. Likening it to a medium is so helpful for framing a technology we can myopically reduce to a tool. It makes me think of the books I loved when I was younger, the Choose Your Own Adventure books. This feels like the next phase of that in some really amazing ways. I love how you’re opening up our imagination.
Bob Johansen: It’s very much like that. And your comment leads us into the world of gaming, because this is a medium that invites a gameful kind of engagement. Imagine where video gaming will go in a world of generative AI. It’s true that many of today’s video games are too sexual and too violent, in my opinion. But gaming is increasingly going to be how we learn. If you bring that gameful quality into generative AI as a medium for meaning making and purpose, there’s something really interesting and very powerful there. It also means young people are likely to have an advantage in that space, because many of them have grown up with gaming, and some are now growing up with generative AI. So even though it’s very troubling and confusing right now in many ways, it’s also very hopeful in many ways.
David Kim: That really resonates with me. At Goldenwood, we’re wrestling with how to cultivate a new vision of work. We almost equate work with toil, instead of what I think it was meant to be: a delight. Work should be a delight. Gaming is play, so how do we bring that delight into the work we do? So many of us would have a hard time even conceiving of that, but I love that direction. I think there’s something really there.
Bob Johansen: I do too.
David Kim: In contrast to the play that I think is so important, you also make a case for useful friction. AI is often marketed as creating a frictionless world, making everything easier. But you make an important case for what you call useful friction. Could you say more?
Bob Johansen: This is so important, and I’m so glad you raised it. It may be the biggest thing to notice about the current state of the generative AI marketplace. It’s driven by economics, by the claim that you can reduce the number of people, work faster, and work more efficiently. There will be some of that. I’m not denying it, though I don’t think it will happen at the scale the tech companies are selling. But what that misses is the part of life in which we need useful friction.
I recently gave the closing keynote for the NeuroLeadership Summit together with Nick Davis of UTS in Australia and David Rock, who heads the NeuroLeadership Institute. The three of us had a closing conversation about generative AI and neuroscience, and the phrase Nick used was generative friction. It isn’t just useful; it actually helps you generate. In the book, we draw on the work of the psychologist Erik Erikson, who said the major life stage of adulthood is what he called generativity, when we think beyond ourselves. That’s where faith lives. Faith is thinking beyond ourselves, about our kids and the next generation. That’s why I’m thrilled, in a real sense, that generative AI shares a root word with generativity. That’s a good fit of language.
In business systems, the push is to get rid of friction. That’s simple economics. But in the faith world, we want useful friction, because learning requires friction. If you make it too easy, it won’t stick. In the book we use an analogy: the guru at the top of the hill wants you to walk up the hill before he talks to you. He doesn’t want you to take the gondola.
David Kim: That’s right.
Bob Johansen: The friction is part of the process. So we have to ask, what’s the useful friction? Bob Sutton at Stanford has a book called The Friction Project, where he argues that even in the business world, we often make the wrong things easy and the right things hard.
David Kim: So true.
Bob Johansen: That’s something we need to think through in our work environments and in our spiritual environments: what’s the useful friction? I’m a writer, and I use generative AI to support my writing, but I’ve nicknamed my system Stretch, because I want it to stretch my thinking before I write. I want to have friction and conversation with Stretch before I write. I don’t want Stretch to write my books.
David Kim: That’s so good. I think that concept will be new for many of our listeners. Our imagination around AI can be all about a frictionless world, but as you said so well, useful friction is a category we need to think more about, and even ask AI about, because it can probably help us there as much as it can speed up other areas of life. I appreciate that distinction. As you look at where AI is being deployed right now, and in your conversations with leaders across sectors, where do you see it being used well, and where is it not being used in ways that bring out the best of this technology?
Bob Johansen: I’m really interested in how writers are using it. Let me speak personally. As you mentioned, I’ve written 16 books, and Stretch has read all 16 of them, and it remembers them much better than I do. So I’m able to have a conversation with myself, back through time. I wrote my first book in 1978. If you have a body of knowledge you’re working from, and all of us do to some extent, especially writers, you can put that body of knowledge into a large language model and either connect it to the outside world or keep it constrained. There are arguments in both directions. danah boyd, a wonderful researcher in the tech space, has said that generative AI is best at helping us get unstuck. If you think of getting unstuck as something really useful, and then think of it as stretching, I really like that word. Whenever you start using generative AI, I recommend giving it a name, because the name should remind you why you’re using it. Give it a name that’s relevant, and then keep probing. I do think stretching is a very basic and very effective way to use these tools.
David Kim: As we start to wrap up, I want to come to the image of the kitchen table that opens and closes your book. You write that no leader can generate credible hope in public without practicing it in private. You exude this, Bob. I know it’s woven into the warp and woof of your own life. What does that practice look like for you? How do you generate credible hope?
Bob Johansen: It’s tricky. You know my wife, Robin, who’s a constitutional lawyer deeply engaged in politics…
David Kim: And we’re on the cusp of the election tomorrow.
Bob Johansen: I’m focused 10 years ahead. So I’ll tell you the practices I use. I keep a gratitude journal, and that’s really important for me. I keep a similar journal of the strengths I want to bring out in myself, because I tend to be overly self-critical, and I tend to worry too much. That may be endemic to being a futurist. It may be that worriers become futurists. I remember hearing that people sometimes pursue careers in things they themselves aren’t naturally good at.
David Kim: That resonates.
Bob Johansen: There may be some element of that. At this stage of my life, I also really enjoy looking back at the work I’ve done and trying to integrate it. That has become a discipline. Working with Stretch and going back through my books, I’m now at the point of thinking about archiving my work. The Institute has a relationship with Stanford to create archives around futures thinking, so I’m organizing my work so that it will be easy for them to receive if they want it. That’s part of my discipline: recognizing what I know at this stage of life and what lessons I can draw from it. I think part of the discipline of hope is creating a routine that allows you to bring out your underlying purpose and meaning. Having that routine is really important. Exercise is an important part of it too. I have a time of day and a way of exercising.
I’ll use one simple metaphor. I played basketball in college, and it paid my way through. I wasn’t good enough to go pro. But when you learn to play basketball, shooting free throws is really important, and it looks really easy. It’s 15 feet away and nobody’s guarding you. It turns out there are methods of shooting free throws that everybody knows, but they require intense practice. My coach would have all of us come in before class, shoot 100 free throws, and record how many we made, over and over again. And of course it’s different in a game. I played at Illinois, and there were 16,000 people at our games. It’s really different to shoot a free throw with 16,000 people watching. So free throws are a helpful metaphor for me when I think about the question of what my discipline of hope is. You have to figure out the basics, do them the right way, and then practice them every day, over and over. Mindfulness and meditation are very similar. The methods are well known, but they don’t work unless you practice them every day, and you have to find your own version of meditation and your own version of mindfulness.
One final thing. Angela Duckworth, who wrote Grit, has a new book called Situated. She argues that it’s not only grit, pushing your way through tough times, but knowing when to ask for help and bring others in. What’s your situation, and what can you do yourself? My military friends call that situational awareness. My psychology friends call it mindfulness. All of those are relevant. But to come back to your question, you have to figure out for yourself which disciplines you want to practice over and over again, and then practice them. That’s part of discerning. You’re never really done.
David Kim: That’s a great place to end. It gives people practical ways to bring hope into what they practice every day at their own tables, and the day before election day feels like a fitting time to hear those words. Whatever tomorrow brings, we know that hope is always before us. Thank you so much for being here, Bob. Your friendship has meant a great deal to me personally, and to our community at Goldenwood. We hope you’ll get Bob’s new book, coming out next week. Bob, where would you point our listeners to get a copy?
Bob Johansen: It’s available everywhere as of November 17, and you can pre-order it now. The world of publishing depends on pre-orders; they’re so important. So I really encourage you to pre-order. Pre-ordering through Amazon or Barnes & Noble gives us the most help in getting the word out.
David Kim: That’s where we’d love to leave you. Please pre-order or purchase the book. And I want to leave you with a question: what is your daily practice of faith in the future? We hope you’ll consider it, and use the resources of Goldenwood and of this new book to begin cultivating those rhythms in your own life. This has been Enlivening Work from Goldenwood. Thank you for listening, and thank you again, Bob, for being here.
Bob Johansen: You’re welcome.