After an extremely difficult and challenging 2025, although not without blessings and miracles and beauty as well, and as I turn my attention to 2026, I often find myself thinking about hope at the beginning of a new year.
I’ve talked about hope before, and specifically there are two kinds of hope. This is really relevant to how you approach this coming year, and is directly about what my Sufi sheikh called “medicine for the heart” so let me dig in.
The Two Kinds of Hope
One kind of hope is an escapist fantasy hope. This is where you dream that in the next 12 months somehow, inexplicably, miraculously, your business will be doing 3-5 times more revenue than it’s doing now, without any bumps. It will be as if you’ve been transported to an entirely different reality.
While this does happen to some people (I’m sure there’s some astronomical amount of money in a lottery somewhere), in this I agree with what many say: don’t attach to this kind of hope.
However, there is a more grounded hope that is available. The simple cherishing of yearnings that things can improve, they can get better, in real, measurable ways.
To not embrace this kind of hope is to perhaps risk indulging in despair, or at least feeling stuck in the feeling that nothing can ever change.
Not true. It’s just false.
Asking versus accepting
Related to this is the question as to whether you should ask for what you want, or whether you should surrender and accept what you’re given. There are solid cases to be made, spiritually, for both.
Here’s the kicker: both are true, at different times and in different ways.
I’ve learned through Sufism about what is described as the 28 Stations of the Way, where different heart-stations are described in terms of your progress. In some stations the medicine is to be humble and silent, just accepting everything that comes to you.
In other stations you are supposed to ask for what you want and need.
No station is permanent, you move through them. What is the perfect medicine in one station is what will stop you in your tracks in another. You need to be alive to what’s true and real in your heart.
Given this, I want to encourage you, if you feel open to it, to ask for what you want in your business, to cherish your hopes.
What to do
Take some time in your heart to name 2, or 3 or 5 hopes that you have for your business this year. Make sure you are really connected and grounded in your heart and body, because we’re not looking for escapist fantasies. These are hopes that may be a stretch, may be slightly unreasonable (or totally reasonable), but you can -feel- them in your guts, in your bones, in your heart.
What’s more, is to let your hopes be concrete.
If you’ve ever worked with us on our Heart-Centered Goal Planning, then you might know we’re big fans of connecting with qualities like Love, or Generosity, as an anchor for goals, and not being as attached to physical outcomes. Physical outcomes are important, but by fixating on outcomes you can get caught in your ego’s will battling reality. Not so surrendered or nourishing.
Here I’m talking about something else. Because it’s a hope, and not a goal or a strategic project, I want to say that it’s useful to think concretely. You can hope for 30% more income, or a significant increase in your client base, or to finally have a website that you love up and running.
So connect with your heart and name your 2 or 5 hopes. Write them down. Put them somewhere.
Then, schedule 15-20 minute dates in your calendar on a quarterly basis to review them. Not to workshop or process them. Just to reconnect to the hopes you cherish.
With hopes cherished and recorded, ahhh… such a more nourishing way to move into action. I get why my sheikh said that hope is a medicine.
What hopes are you cherishing?
With love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
The Heart of Your Business begins Tuesday
The escapist hope is built on nothing. But the medicine of hope develops on solid foundations of knowledge, care and awareness.
The Heart of Your Business starts next week, and the nourishing pre-work is available right now. The Unveiling Your Jewel exercise will fill your heart and help you take in hope for this coming year.
The course itself will lay the foundations, practical, strategic and spiritual, for a year in which your business develops in beautiful, nourishing ways.
Remember: The intention I have for you is that the gifts you bring also can sustain you financially, and your business is a sacred vehicle for that.
Join me, and let’s help your business fly this coming year.
Pay from the heart pricing. Deeply nourishing. Powerfully strategic.
