I looked out at the room of 60 people assembled for a conference workshop on how to thrive at work. All appeared cheerful and energized as folks do at a conference, away from the day-to-day routine, happily connecting with people face to face in a new city with permission to forget about the “to-do list” for a few days.

But I was about to turn them toward the challenges they face, to ask them to touch into the realities of their work. I didn’t want to be the killjoy at the party, but it was important they discovered they weren’t alone in the struggle as part of the solution.

In a world where the needs of customers are shifting in real-time, where the way work gets done must shift in response to those needs, and where we prize being adaptable and “comfortable with ambiguity”, it is easy to ignore the human need for clarity. We need reasonable clarity about our job expectations, our processes and agreements for how we will work together, and the value we are delivering as a team or organization. When we don’t have clarity, fear rises. When we do have clarity, we feel a fundamental safety. This supports meaningful, confident actions.

I’m longing for simplicity. How about you?

With so many challenges, both daily obstacles and massive global issues, the human nervous system can get pretty overloaded. The concerns we face are sometimes complicated and other times complex or chaotic. In our work, we sort through these challenges each day, trying to get something done. We could stand for a few things to be simple to solve. Our challenge is often recognizing the kind of problem we are facing and using the right kind of problem-solving approach. When we are overwhelmed, it is easy to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to every issue and miss the simple things that need simple solutions.

Hope, like love, can trigger a strong reaction.

If your response is related to your current workplace, what experiences come to mind? And what energy is linked to those stories?

These reactions to hope and their related narratives and energy are important to notice because it turns out that hope and what has been termed “hope culture”, which we will learn more about below, can be a strong determinant of not only persistence toward difficult goals but also thriving.

Adapting to change. Speaking up about important issues. Taking on a hard, new project. Attempting to solve a persistent problem. Exploring all sides of a solution. Pointing out an error that no one else realized was occurring and causing quality issues.

All these and more are common challenges faced by team members everywhere. And all these situations and outcomes can be helped by one behavior: Courage.

Some workplace fractures are obvious, easily diagnosed, and treated, while other fractures are hidden and take effort to understand and care to repair. The same is true for broken bones.

During the summer of 6th grade, I broke both wrists in a cycling accident while on vacation. It was immediately clear that we had to take the long ferry ride back to the mainland so that I could receive medical treatment. We were back on vacation 3 days later and after 6 weeks, the casts came off. In contrast…

I have a confession.

My workdays are not spacious. I fill my calendar with back-to-back meetings, saying “Yes” to too many things so that my days can be overwhelming and exhausting. As an entrepreneur and CEO of a start-up business, co-founder of a non-profit, a person on a mission to change the world of work, and leader of a growing team of affiliates and partner relationships, my days can start at 6 or 7 a.m. and end at 6 or 7 p.m. with barely a bio break.

I love what I do, but I am not proud of this habit. It is NOT good.