Episode 116 How to be hopeful with Bernadette Russell Zoe Blaskey: Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Motherkind Podcast with me, your host, Zoe Blaskey, where each week I chat about all things motherhood and well-being. My mission with this podcast is to help you reconnect to you—to feel happier, more joyful, calmer and a little bit kinder to yourself. Because I think life as a mum in this hectic modern world is hard enough as it is. I believe becoming the happiest, most alive version of ourselves is the most important and inspiring thing we can do for our children. Hi everyone and welcome to this episode of the Motherkind Podcast. I hope you are really well. This week, today, we are going to be chatting about all things hope and kindness. How beautiful is that? And don't we need a lot of that at the moment? I know that I need constant daily reminders and practices to keep me connected—compassion for myself, compassion for others and hope. And Bernadette Russell is my guest, she is an expert on hope and kindness. She's written a Little Book of Kindness, a Little Book of Wonder and her new book, which is called How to be Hopeful, which is a celebration of the power of hope. So in this conversation, we talked about kindness about how one small incident totally changed the trajectory of her life. And we really deep dive into hope, and how actually Bernadette, very wisely says that hope is daring, and it is daring to hope because we might feel that if we don't get what we hope for, we'll be disappointed. But she shares how actually being hopeful is the only way to be, if we want to connect with those beautiful feelings like joy and positivity. We also talk about the news and have a fascinating discussion about treading this line between knowing what's going on in the world, but not feeling all consumed by it. And also the positivity bias of children, and what we can learn from our children. You know, I loved this conversation. It really brought home to me something that I deeply believe, which is that it's the small daily actions that we take that make the difference in our lives, not the big acts that we do once a month, or once a year, even. But actually, it's the small daily things that interwoven into our busy lives that make a radical difference on how we feel. So I hope you really enjoy this conversation. As ever, please do share the conversation. Also, if you want to look up any of the resources that Bernadette or I mentioned, or maybe you prefer reading than listening, then there are full transcripts on the website, motherkind.co. Just search, under Podcasts, you'll see this episode and there is a full transcript, show notes, timestamps, which shows you what we were talking about at different times during the conversation, and there are tons of freebies on my website. So I have a guide for how to start to reconnect to you. Many of those small daily actions I was just referring to are in there. There's also my reading list. If you're a regular listener of the podcast, you will know that reading is my thing, learning is my thing. I average a book a week, and I have pulled together the most powerful books I've ever read on parenting, transformation, healing, feeling happier, defining our own version of success and a vision for our lives. They’re all in there, so please do have a look at the website. It’s totally free, so you can download it at motherkind.co. Here is the episode. Welcome to the podcast, Bernadette. I'm so excited to be connecting with probably the most beautiful energy in the world in this conversation, which is hope. Bernadette Russell: Oh, it's really lovely to speak to you. In fact, I've been looking forward to this conversation. Zoe: So I've read your book, which I found beautiful and just underscores to me so many ways that I tried to live my life. And so I'm really curious, how did you come to think so deeply about hope and its importance, particularly in the times that we find ourselves in now? Bernadette: So I've been focused on sort of compassionate practice and kindness and wonder and beauty and joy and all that kind of thing for the last 10 years. And I would say around a year ago, I started to notice increasingly, when I was doing workshops, or when I was connecting with community groups. I thought people are doing amazing things, amazing community initiatives or kindness or self-compassion practice. They were still expressing a sort of hopelessness, and I have to say, this was largely connected with the needs to that it kind of sought really big issue for me. And then I remember hearing that wonderful Greta Thunberg, talking about how she didn't need our hope because the house was on fire. And I thought about that—I love her, and I absolutely champion her and all the other many amazing young home activists. I was like, ‘I don't know about that. I think I need to be hopeful. I think I need to think that in order to affect change, whether that's in my life, or in my community, or in the wider world, that there's a possibility it might be effective’. So I started thinking about all that; my thought when I think of it, ‘People need hope’. Because otherwise, despair can freeze you and immobilize you, and that's the last thing we need at the moment, again, whether that's on a personal level or community level, on a global level. So I thought I really want to focus on this, prepare, and the first thing I did was re-read a story of Pandora's box. Do you remember that story? Zoe: Yeah. Bernadette: Yeah, that is exactly what I expected. So most people are like, ‘Kind of’. So I think it's one of those stories that basically, very simply, it's one of the Greek myths that was recorded by Hestia, did it in the seventh century. And he wrote down the story that Pandora gets given a jar—it actually wasn't a box in the original story—and she told not to open it. And being a brilliantly curious young woman, she does open it and outflows all the troubles of the world—greed and misery and hunger and jealousy and envy and violence and she's like, 'Oh, no, that's torn it'. She puts the lid back on and then she hears whispering coming from it. Again, she decides to open it, she's like, ‘Really bad things have already happened’. And inside it nestles hope, and described as a tiny, plucky little hope and this beautiful, tiny little creature to battle all the evils of the world. And I was just like, ‘That's an amazing story. That hope is the light that helps us, helps human beings combat all of those difficulties’. So that was my starting point, and I really liked it that it is a young woman that released those things and released hope. So I just started a journey of talking to people and I made those conversations, and that journey is wide and broad as possible. So I just looked for people who were doing hopeful things or used hope, and I thought about children and hope and how hopeful and optimistic they are, and how and why we lose it as adults. I looked at people that were doing stuff in their community and how they utilized hope and where they found hope. So I just spoke to as many people as possible from all over the world and researched as many people as possible all over the world and to sort of develop a journey to discover hope and to find out how it can help those. Zoe: That was amazing. Bernadette: I finished the first draft and then lockdown. Zoe: How is that? Bernadette: I’m laughing because I was like, ‘First draft. Amazing’, sort of, ‘What an amazing journey’. But none of us—I didn't see COVID coming. So lockdown happened, and I was like, 'Oh, wow. Okay, so I have to accommodate this. It's really important. Obviously, it's a global experience’. What happened actually was, I was incredibly moved, as I think many people were, during that period by this absolute explosion of compassion and kindness and good humour and generosity and time for thinking and time for people, time for more times with friends and family and people getting to exercise or think or dream. And they just seem to be suddenly, a reconsidering a time for us to reconsider in the pause, how we live, or how we might like to live and also loads of kindnesses. People were really looking up to each other, loads of mutual aid, groups springing up and people doing things. I was like, 'Here’s hope here on abundant display’, and actually, even though obviously, we're only short way down this long journey, we don't know how we're going to emerge on the other side of it. I think there's a lot to hold on to from what we experienced in lockdown.