Oftentimes we confuse hope with blind optimism. We may shy away from pursuing a hopeful state of mind, believing that it’s nothing more than pipe dreams or “pollyanna” thinking. However, hope and optimism are different constructs. Hope focuses on the attainment of specific goals whereas optimism focuses on positive outcomes more generally. Hopeful people, research shows, are active in their pursuit of life because they believe positive outcomes are possible. Instead of living in an alternate state that denies the difficulty of reality, research shows that people who embody hope actually tend to take better care of themselves and make wise decisions about their futures. This makes sense, right? If we believe that we have something to look forward to, we will make every effort to be present to experience it.
Additionally, hopeful people have more positive outcomes in life in general. Researcher Shane Lopez with Gallup devoted his life and research to studying hope in individual’s lives and, in turn, develop hope-filled interventions in the school system. Through his research, he identified that a hopeful attitude is worth about an increase in a letter grade in school. Having a hopeful perspective to encounter and overcome obstacles can make up for differences in IQ— kids who have a hopeful mindset with an average IQ are performing the same as kids with higher IQ’s and a less hopeful mindset. This matters because our mindset is something within our control, our inborn intelligence is not.
HOPE DEVELOPMENT
A key element of building hope is psychological flexibility. This is the ability to live open-handed, knowing that the stories we are telling ourselves about our present and future troubles may, in fact, have a variety of possible endings. Once we begin to live in that state of flexibility, we can begin to get a bit more specific and move into the second area of hope development which is similar to goal setting. Remember, hope is active, goal-oriented and specific as opposed to optimism which is more of a general feeling that things will work out. Hope requires specificity because hope is action-oriented.
Anytime we are seeking to achieve something we hope for— we need to consider what it will take to get there but we also need to consider what we have to give up in the process. In goal-setting coaching sessions, I’ll encourage clients to write out their goal, make it specific and then write down all the things required to reach that goal. In a separate column, I encourage them to write out the things they’ll have to give up in order to achieve that goal. Extra tv time, some sleep, perhaps family time or social time…there are always things we have to give up in order to achieve what we desire. In the development of hope-filled planning, it’s important to be realistic about what we desire because our brain knows the difference between a general sense of optimism about life that isn’t backed by measurable action steps and more specific hope that results in actionable life change. If you make the lists and see that you’re not willing to give up the things in the second column, you may want to re-consider your goal or one facet of your goal.
Many goal setting experts use the acronym SMART to help in the process of hope development. Consider if your goal has these characteristics and adjust accordingly if not. Perhaps it’s a shift in the timing of the goal or the scope of the goal that needs editing, not the entirety of the goal itself. Use psychological flexibility in this exercise and you’ll find a more helpful, positive outcome.
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time- based
After opening the door to a more hopeful future, coming to terms with what you’ll have to give up to attain it and walking through the steps above to make sure it’s a reasonable goal, you’re on your way to a more hopeful future. Here’s why: Walking through these cognitive activities shifts the template in your brain from “uncertain” or “negative” pathways regarding your future into hopeful, goal-oriented ones. Every time you do this, you develop and enhance neural pathways in your brain and as you continue to revisit those goals (and have compassion on yourself when you mess up in the process) you’ll start living and acting in ways that will lead you toward your goals. Hope builds upon itself with a snowball effect when we live it out practically.
FUTURE FEELINGS
We think hope is a feeling, but most often hope is connected to a belief system: about ourselves, the world around us, our capacity for change, the mechanisms for change. When we stay stuck on whether or not we feel hopeful, we get stuck. Don’t forget that our feelings oftentimes follow our thoughts. Not only that, but humans, in general, do something called “affective forecasting.” Affect is a clinical term for feeling or emotion, and affective forecasting looks something like this: We have this idea that when we finally get what we want and become happy that we’ll be happy. Not only that, but we create this “forecast” that once we attain this elusive desire, we’ll be happy and fulfilled for a long period of time, possibly forever. We muse, “If I only had x amount of money or Y relationship, surely that would make me happy.” When we do this (and we all do this) we are forecasting our transient future emotional state and assuming it’ll be permanent. But that’s not really always the case. Even with really good things, eventually we acclimate to the new way of being and things level out. We begin to want something new and grasp for the next big dangling carrot we think will bring us security and significance.
This makes life difficult at times because we may feel as if we are always striving since that emotional “high” doesn’t last forever. Fortunately for us, though, the same thing happens with negative or sad emotions. We get hurt or have a difficult season and we think, initially, that we will be sad forever. We believe that our emotional “low” will forever be our new normal. However, over time, we start to make sense of what happened in new ways, we edit and adjust our story and identity and we begin to move through the difficult thing. Just like we don’t feel immense happiness forever, we don’t feel immense sadness forever either. This is important for us to remember in the moments when hope is difficult to grasp and we feel overcome with hopelessness.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” -Winston Churchill
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