Creating Waves of Hope and Healing

There’s something profoundly human about the pull we feel to alleviate suffering, even when it’s distant or we’re unsure how to help. It’s empathy in action—the emotional resonance of compassion, the cognitive understanding of another’s pain, and the physical instinct to reach out, all working together. Research from the HeartMath Institute reminds us that our hearts are wired for connection, generating fields of coherence that can ripple outward, affecting others in ways we may never see. While we can’t do it all, even small, intentional acts can create waves of hope and healing in a world that deeply needs them.

Our first Monday Kickstarters session of December 2024 roused us from our day with an opportunity to support someone who felt deeply impacted by the anguish of other people’s suffering. Here’s how we approached her sense of feeling powerless.

Positive Frame

Using the Conversations Worth Having flipping technique, we started our session in this way:

Name It: I feel powerless in the face of human suffering.

Flip it: I feel empowered about alleviating human suffering.

Frame It: Every day I take small steps and work with others engaged in community support and empowerment to make a big impact toward alleviating human suffering.

When creating a positive frame, it’s important that it inspires action and that it will resolve or dissolve the original issue. Tuning in provided us the opportunity to focus on the sense of feeling powerless as the primary challenge and allowed us to create a frame with an affirmative or positive step forward.

The frame was derived by reflecting on other suggested frames and knitting the most compelling aspects together in a way that resonated with the person who offered the challenge. The other suggested frames included:

• Actively engaging in community support and empowerment
• I make an impact every day in my words and actions
• I value partnerships for greater collective action

Generative Questions

With the selected frame in mind, it was time to develop and contribute generative questions that encourages us to discover more of what is around, within, and beyond us.

• What’s one small step I can take today to move in this direction?
• When have I done something like this before and what made it possible?
• One year from now, what do I want this to look like?
• When did I recently feel energy in community service?
• Who is an expert in this that I can learn from?
• Where is flourishing happening and what can I learn from that?
• What else do I need to know about what a positive impact is?
• Who is most impacted by this situation?

Cool Tip!

In each post, we typically offer a Cool Tip to enhance your Conversations Worth Having practice. In this session, however, we’re receiving the heartfelt gift of witnessing someone’s courage to be vulnerable and open to new possibilities. It’s a reminder that the essence of meaningful conversations lies not just in what we say but in how we show up for one another with openness, empathy, and trust.

If you'd like to learn more about how to transform your relationships and communities through conversations, enroll in our Spring 2025 bootcamps, also available in Spanish, or take the On-Demand course, 

Shared by: Kelly Stewart, a certified Conversations Worth Having trainer, founder of The Positive Business, and co-founder of the CWH Institute.

Photo credit: Photo by GivingTuesday