Tell Me What’s Good.
The Tell Me What’s Good approach is where 4those really began.
In the darkest times in the NICU after our son Zev was born, we were met with devastating daily - hourly - updates that threatened to leave us feeling hopeless and lost in a sea of confusion, uncertainty, and grief.
To change the narrative, we began insisting that our meetings with medical staff begin differently. “Tell me what’s good”, we would say, imploring doctors to find a ray of hope in the dark.
So much of the narrative around extreme prematurity can point to what many would consider less: our son would never walk or talk or eat or breathe on his own, he would be blind, he would never be able to have a healthy and thriving life (if he was lucky enough to even have a life at all), his story and our story would end here, in grief and despair and suffering, without hope in a future, that none of this suffering would be worth it or matter.
“There is grace and there are miracles underfoot when we step out of our fear and walk boldly into an unknown future, believing that no matter what comes, we will rise.”
Tell Me What’s Good. interrupts and challenges that way of thinking. It took what would be for our son and our lives and turned it into what could be instead.
Saying these four words did not change our circumstances or the outcomes we faced, but it did create a sense of balance, of the fuller picture, when faced with impossible choices. Each time we said it, we found ourselves not in despair, but in possibility and in hope through acceptance of what was unfolding and surrender to the outcome.
The Five Principles of Tell Me What’s Good.
When you are faced with challenging circumstances and are eager for hope in a future beyond this moment. When you receive devastating news and the negative voices feel too loud and you need to invite a balance of perspective. When you are faced with impossible choices and desire peace and clarity to make them, whatever the are and wherever they lead. Tell Me What’s Good. can help you to do the following:
Pause in the Chaos: Just saying Tell Me What’s Good. interrupts and quiets the often overwhelming negative narrative, inviting a new voice to the table
Listen to Your Intuition: When the emotional noise of fear, uncertainty, doubt and scarcity is quieted, the deeper, truer voice of Love, gentle, caring, tender and strong, within can rise, and help you to engage in a new way with the news
Observe Your Agreements: When that innermost intuitive voice is present, you can more freely observe your truest feelings about any of the information that you are facing. This allows for you to shift and change and sift through what is most inherent and honest to how you operate, not in fear, but in Love, toward yourself and toward others.
Face Your Reality, Weigh Your Options: Do not push aside the realities of your circumstances. Tell Me What’s Good. cannot change the circumstances you are facing. This is not a practice in positivity or gratitude, although these two feelings may be a byproduct of your experience. Tell Me What’s Good. is that it allows you to more fully engage with the reality at hand and make decisions based on the clarity you have right now.
Surrender the Outcome: Tell Me What’s Good. allows us to surrender peacefully in the face of crisis and helps to invite hope and possibility into the narrative. There is no telling where each journey will end, but when we surrender the outcomes of our circumstances, we find new freedom to live through and beyond the outcome of right now.
Hear It Live: Steph Hauser Talks “Tell Me What’s Good” Onstage in Boulder
The hope we reclaimed through Tell Me What’s Good. was not tied to an outcome - whether Zev lived or died or never, never, never - but instead became a posture of expectation that no matter what came next, Love would meet us and guide us through.
This shift in focus allowed us to push back against a narrative that felt so pervasive in that space: that life would be less than, that heartbreak was inevitable, that we were without options or possibility. Now, we’re telling a new story.
Tell Me What’s Good. has inspired a number of cultural touchstones, from The Zev Project podcast, to various appearances on stages and in media, to an apparel line that offers these four words of changed perspective, wherever one might need them.
The 4those movement is modeled after this positive act of defiance.
We will not be afraid.
We will not give up.
We will not accept that life will be less than, or that a life with challenges is something we cannot handle.
We will face this bravely.
We will focus on possibilities while surrendering to what is.
We will remain hopeful for what is to come, no matter what it might be.
4those will offer families a place to live out the Tell Me What’s Good ethos in real life, fully embodying the promise contained within a future that lays ahead, illuminating all of the hope that can exist when we focus on all that is truly possible.
