The future can be different from the present. Through our actions, we design the future.
If someone makes an assessment is made in a domain that something cannot be changed despite claiming to have enough grounding to assess whether something is open to change, that person is in resignation.
Resignation can be seen when we can produce a conversation that disputes the assessment that something cannot be changed (e.g, assessing something that can be changed what someone declares is unchangeable).
A resigned person does not see the future as a space of possibilities where they can make it different from the present. However, they don’t see it as resignation, it shows up as grounded realism.
In resignation, there is a tention between an assessment of facticity (we would like things to be different) and an assessment of possibility (things will not change regardless of what we do). This shows up as accepting that theoretically, something could be different but not knowing how to make the change ourselves. Since we don’t know what to do, we do nothing.
Moving Out Of Resignation
To move from resignation to Ambition:
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Reexamine the grounding of those assessments behind the resignation. Often, we don’t do something because we assume someone will decline a request before we ask.
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Resignation can happen because we just don’t see what actions to take. Reexamining the grounding of the assessments won’t help here. Instead, we can engage in conversations about possible actions to produce change. When we don’t know what to do next, we can take reflective action - the action that could take us to the actions that will take us where we want to go. This is action on our actions.
We can learn to expand our capacity for action when we don’t know what to do next. Learning can transform our assessments of facticity (“this looks impossible”) into assessments of possibility.