232 | How To Stay Hopeful, Mindful and Resilient During Physical Recovery

Show Notes:

Feeling hopeless, exhausted, or stuck in your recovery? What if hope wasn’t something you feel—but something you practice?

In this powerful episode of Whole Again, Michael shares a raw personal moment and unpacks three truths about hope—ones that can gently shift how you show up for your healing, even on the hardest days. Drawing from the insights of happiness researcher Arthur Brooks, this episode offers a clear path to reframe hope from passive positivity into something you can actually do.

Takeaways:

• Learn how to anchor meaning into suffering without spiritual bypassing
• Discover why agency—not blind optimism—is the true foundation of hope
• Explore simple, daily actions that restore your emotional strength and remind you: you’re not alone

Take a deep breath and discover how to build real hope into your recovery—one intentional step at a time.

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover three truths that can help you feel a little bit more hopeful about your healing process.

Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors of physical injury and trauma reclaim their strength and resilience of the wisdom of Kazuki. Today I want to share a few words about hope with you, but not the woowoo, wishful thinking kind of hope, but rather the kind of hope that allows us to stay in the game.

And I say we’re gonna talk about hope today because as a family, we are living through this. One of my family members went through a surgery and there have been some complications. It can feel like the world is ending. It doesn’t feel all that hopeful as I record this. He is tired and challenged and we are as well.

I’m a little sleepy as I drive back and forth from my home here in New Jersey to where I grew up in upstate New York, and as soon as I get done recording this for you, I travel back up to provide more care. On my drive home the other night, I started thinking about hope again, not the wishful thinking kind of hope, but rather the kind of hope that helps us take some action that helps us take a step forward that helps us stay in the game, whether we are the patient or a caregiver.

So as I was doing my drive back home the other day, I thought of Arthur Brooks. He is a smart guy. Went to Harvard actually, I’m not sure if he went to Harvard, but he is a professor at Harvard and he is also a happiness researcher. I think he writes for The Atlantic as well. So pretty righteous dude as they would say.

He has a quote that I’ve often come back to over the years. Hope is not optimism. Now, I will say I’m an optimistic person as well, but they are different. Hope is not optimism. It is the conviction that you can make the future better and that you have a role in making it so you have agency. Let that sink in.

Hope is not passive. It’s not sitting back and wishing upon a star or crossing your fingers or perhaps your toes as well. Hope is active. Hope. There’s a discipline to it. A habit of saying, yes, this is hard. Recovery is hard. Healing is hard, right? You know that. But I can take one step forward, a small step.

Hope along with gratitude and mindfulness and our pause, breathe, reflect, practice that I teach got me through my recovery. It was a cornerstone to my mantra. Work hard today to create a better tomorrow, and I would say that mantra throughout the day to keep me engaged in my recovery as well as those around me, because we go far together, right?

So let’s dive a little bit deeper. I have three things I wish to share with you around healing, around hope, and they happen to be three truths that Arthur Brooks shares. So let’s start here. Suffering is a part of life, not the end of it. Many people, in fact, say that Buddhist said that life is suffering, which is not really the translation.

It’s closer to in life, there’ll be disappointment. So whether Buddha was talking about suffering or disappointment, I think you know what he was trying to lay down. Brooks goes on to say in his work, in his research, that we often misunderstand happiness. It’s not a life without any suffering. It’s not an easy life.

No, he doesn’t. Talk about it that way. It’s a life where when they’re suffering, because there will be suffering in life, we know that personally because we’re going through healing, the suffering becomes meaningful, maybe. We didn’t choose what’s happening to us or what’s happening for us. I know I didn’t choose getting hit by that SUV.

You didn’t choose your suffering. We didn’t want all this to happen to our mind and body and heart and soul and all that, but you do get to choose your relationship to it. This doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t come too soon. We have to go through the initial phases of the injury or trauma that we’re dealing with, so we don’t take it on all at once, but slowly, with compassion, with kindness, we get to ask ourselves, what is this moment?

What is this suffering? Teaching me about who I’m becoming, who we’re becoming as we work towards becoming whole again, and that’s the beginning of real hope because we start to place some meaning around what we’re dealing with. Okay, here’s the second thing. Hope requires agency. According to Brooks, people who are hopeful believe that they have a say in all this.

Remember my mantra, work hard today. That’s action I could take to create a better tomorrow. That’s hopeful. So again, Brooks says that people who are hopeful believe that they have some agency, they can make choices in how they show up, how they respond to their situation. Even when the circumstances, well, they suck.

They’re really hard. Now, we might not be able to change what’s happening in our body. We can’t change our diagnosis or our injury, but we can choose how we speak to ourselves. We can choose rest over guilt or ruminating or allowing it to fester. We can choose. A glass of water to hydrate. ’cause we need our hydration.

Or maybe if we can walk, we take a walk outside or maybe we do exercises in our bed, maybe we can just take one deep wrath to let the body know that it’s safe that we’re here. These are not small things. They look small in my recovery. Again, the foundation was small steps, little steps, because I had this belief that if I could take a whole bunch of little steps and I could string them together, then I could look back and see how much progress I’ve made.

So these small steps that you can take, they’re a form of agency. They’re moving you towards reclaiming your power in. A season, if you will, where you feel, or you might feel like you don’t have any power at all. So these micro decisions or micro actions that you can take and maybe very few people see, they build hope.

They create hope. All right, now onto number three. And as we know, three is the magic number. What Arthur Brooks also talks about is that hope grows in connection. You’ve probably heard me say that together, we go far. So Brooks reminds us that we’re never meant to do any of this, especially this thing called life and our recovery alone.

Because here’s the thing, when we isolate ourselves physically or emotionally, hope starts to shrivel, hope, atrophies. It becomes weaker. But when we reach out, even a little, something begins to shift. I know that firsthand. Maybe it’s just texting a friend or maybe watching something on Netflix together at the same time.

On your computer. They’re on their computer. Maybe it’s listening to a podcast like Whole Again, or another really cool podcast. Maybe it’s telling a friend or your partner, Hey, you know what? I’m not doing so hot right now, but I’m still trying. I’m still in this. My hunch is when you say that, it can also help them feel or stay hopeful.

Hope loves company, and we’re not talking about the type of company who is trying to fix us, but rather people who just sit with us and gently remind us that we weren’t broken to begin with, that we have this strength that’s within us, that strength to keep pedaling. So how do you use all this in your recovery?

All the things that Arthur Brooks talks about around hope. Well, it could mean this for you. Instead of trying to stay hopeful or feeling hopeful, you can practice it instead. That will help you gain some traction, hopeful traction, if you will. And you can start with this simple question. ’cause I do believe that as we go through anything, as we.

Our questions matter more than our answers. So here’s one question you can ask yourself, and you can do this one in the morning. What’s one small thing I can do today that honors my healing, that honors my health? In fact, as I think about it, you can ask yourself this one throughout the day, and it might be taking a power nap or a little journaling to remind yourself what you’re grateful for.

Because gratitude can be also part of your secret formula for recovery, and it could just be repeating to yourself a powerful mantra, much like I did work hard today to create a better Tomorrow. You can remind yourself that this isn’t the end of your story. That in itself is hopeful because it’s not.

You are taking a step towards who you are becoming.

As always, thanks for being here and thank you for being a fellow survivor. In this episode, you discovered that hope is something that’s active, not passive. Yes, there’s suffering in life, but we can do something about it in the small decisions or the small actions that we take. Arthur Brooks reminds us that the people who thrive in life are not the ones that never suffer, but rather they put some meaning or purpose behind the suffering, or at least tie it to it.

It’s a form of faith and quiet strength. Hope can change everything if we allow it to do so. Again, thanks for being here,

and if you wish to learn more about creating beautiful ripples and how to prevent a bad moment from turning into a bad day, please visit my website, Michael O’Brien schiff.com and sign up for my newsletter called The Ripple Effect, and join us each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday here. At Whole again and discover how you can heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience.

Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.