Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (4 page)

There are many paths to my goals.

None of them is free of obstacles.

The excitement we experience while pursuing our goals primes us to find pathways or routes around obstacles that stand in our way. We reinforce our capacity for hope each time we experiment with problem-solving strategies and persist until one works.

People who develop these hopeful beliefs are resourceful. They identify multiple strategies for moving toward their goals. They are realistic because they anticipate and plan for difficulties, setbacks, and disappointments. They are resilient because they know that, if one path is closed, another can be cleared.

This type of thinking about the future gives us momentum and staying power. The sustained energy we devote to our most important goals represents another crucial way in which hope parts company with plain old positive thinking.

These four core beliefs are prerequisites for hope and they prepare us to craft and pursue goals that matter to us most.

Along with my thought experiments and conversations with Rick, I wanted to know what nonacademics—the people I met and worked with daily—meant when they talked about hope. I began asking friends, family, and clients. I polled the students in my psychology classes. I’d try to draw out audience members whenever I gave a talk. That’s how the Head-Heart-Holy test came into being. In its current form, it goes like this:

Today we will talk about hope in your lives. Before I get started, I need to know how you make sense of this thing called hope. Here is what we are going to do. I’d like you to raise both hands, and then, on the count of three, please point to where
your
hope comes from. Given your background and all of your life experiences,
where do you think hope originates . . . in your head [I point to my head]—that thinking part of you . . . in your heart [I point to my heart]—the feelings that move you . . . or from the holy [my hand makes circles above my head]—whatever you find sacred? Maybe all three, but since you only have two hands, you’ll have to choose your top two. Or you can point to one place with both hands. So, on three, . . . one . . . two . . . three.

What have I learned over the years from this (admittedly unscientific) exercise? First, people don’t hesitate—they each have a working theory of hope based on their experiences. And second, they inevitably look around for the people who share their brand of hope.

“Heart” almost always gets the most votes. Most people see hope primarily as an uplifting feeling that makes brief visits to our lives. But many others consider it a gift of the mind that builds on information while putting emotions on the back burner. And “holy” evokes a range of responses, from churchgoers who immediately point straight up, to those who wave their hands around a bit and speak of a higher power, of faith, of the sacred, of nature, of whatever most gives meaning and purpose to their lives.

Which way do you lean? The truth is, wherever your hands land, you can probably expand your sense of hope. As I’ll try to show, feelings of hope may be ephemeral, but they strongly influence our actions. Hope also requires complex cognitive operations that incorporate emotions, not dismiss them. And hope almost always involves a leap of faith, as we move toward a future that even our best efforts can’t guarantee.

We often think of hope as a sunny feeling, but it actually calls on the full range of our emotions. Hope encompasses awe, interest, joy, excitement, and even euphoria (like the hope we take away from weddings, births, spiritual awakenings, and even college basketball championships). Hope inspires us to transcend ourselves. We dream a little bigger, we aim a little higher. But the cognitive, reality-testing side of
hope reminds us not to take euphoria with us when we’re shopping for a home or trying to solve a serious problem. We may be lifted emotionally by a goal, but our vision may need to be tweaked many times on its way to being fulfilled.

Hope also walks hand in hand with fear, one of the most universal and most painful emotions. When fear is working for us, it reminds us of realistic limits or alerts us when we’re straying from our path to a meaningful future. But fear can also hijack us.
Fear gives us only three behavioral options: fight, flight, or freeze.

I sometimes describe hope as the golden mean between euphoria and fear. It is the feeling where transcendence meets reason and caution meets passion. This interplay between hopeful thoughts and feelings is dance-like. Thoughts react to feelings and feelings respond to thoughts. As I’ll describe in
chapter 3
, we use our big brains to integrate our thoughts and feelings about the future with the experiences of a lifetime. We draw on our memories of the most hopeful people we know, of our own hopeful pursuits, and of our successes at getting out of tight spots in the past. These thoughts and feelings may help us see pathways where others see brick walls. We persevere when others give up; we work harder when it would be easier to quit. And the whole time, we are carried along on a current of energy to a better place in the future.

I’m going to pull these ideas together with a story you probably remember from childhood.
It’s Aesop’s fable about an ant and a grasshopper sharing a corner of the wilderness. This is the version I like to read to my son, Parrish:

While lounging on a floating lily a carefree grasshopper puffed on a tiny harmonica. After playing a jaunty tune, he hollered to a colony of bustling ants as they filed by. “Fellas, fellas, slow down. You’re working way too hard.” Each ant toiled with a grain he carried from a nearby field to an underground storage room. “Come on, guys, it’s a beautiful summer afternoon. Take a load off. Come dangle your busy little tootsies in the pool—or better yet, grab a
partner and sashay on over. I’m just getting warmed up! Besides, all your marching is messing up my rhythm!”

One serious little ant stepped out of line. “We are gathering food for winter, sir, and if you don’t mind a little friendly advice, I suggest you do the same.” And, without another word, he balanced a kernel on his head and shuffled back to the procession.

You may recall how the standard version works out: the pleasure-loving grasshopper starves to death and the prudent, hardworking ant survives, snug in his winter nest. But here is the revised ending I read to Parrish, starting with a proposal from the grasshopper:

“Well, little fella, how about we work together? I will play some more tunes to lighten the mood and make your work go faster. Any talented musicians in your crew?”

Throughout the day, music played and insects worked. The grasshopper soloed while the ant worked hard with his friends and then a five-ant band played while the grasshopper followed his serious little ant buddies in collecting food for winter.

When we’re hopeful, our ideas and feelings about the future work together. Our thoughts look ahead and tell us what we need to do today to get where we want to go. Our feelings lift us up and give us the energy to sustain our effort. Hope is the work of the heart and the head. Hope happens when our rational selves meet our emotional selves.

That’s the moral of the story I want to tell, and it’s also the secret of the most hopeful people in the world.

Jerome Groopman, M.D. lived through a nightmare of chronic pain. A running injury followed by failed back surgery led to nineteen years of
severe disability, to the point where Groopman monitored every movement to avoid “the electrified fence” of searing pain. And as he says in his book
The Anatomy of Hope,
“Along with unpredictable pain came its companion, a sense of prevailing fear.”

Everything Groopman tried made things worse, until a colleague referred him to a specialist who made a startling claim: his pain was not from permanent injury but rather from lack of use. An intensive program of physical therapy could restore his mobility, the doctor explained. He could live a normal life again. But it would require months of pushing through the pain he would experience when his atrophied muscles were forced to move.

As Groopman faced this choice, he realized that he had “completely abandoned” hope. He had no assurance other than his doctor’s confidence in the program. (Past doctors, with equal reputations and equal confidence, had made his condition worse.) But this doctor had ignited a sense of possibility.

Groopman had to decide whether to take the risk. On the one hand was the promise of improvement—maybe even of regaining a “normal life.” On the other was the reality of more pain and the chance of another crushing disappointment. He was up against a natural human tendency: we often fear loss even more than we desire gain.

In the face of doubt and uncertainty, Groopman thought of a future that was compelling enough to help him overcome his fears. He summoned up what he called “a dreamy vision of the future: walking hand in hand with my daughter to a pond some two miles from our home to feed ducks and search for frogs; emerging from an airplane feeling strong and ready to explore a new city; dancing a traditional Eastern European circle dance at a family wedding.”

He carried this vision into his physical therapy, using it to keep going despite the pain, imagining how every small improvement brought him closer to his psychological and physical destination. Whenever he brought these special scenes to life in his mind, he felt
“a current of warm, soft energy” that seemed to suffuse and soothe his body. And a little over a year later, he reports, “I awoke in the morning unafraid. . . . I felt reborn.”

Consider how thoughts and feelings—the cognitive and emotional parts of hope—are intertwined in Groopman’s account. He deliberately chose and crafted the images of the future that would support him most. These detailed visions were rich with emotional content—his love for his daughter, the excitement of travel, the joy of a family wedding. His hopeful thoughts shaped his decision-making, but they were more than dry, rational goals. They were aims that excited him, that were worthy of his longing.

Hope is created moment by moment through our deliberate choices. It happens when we use our thoughts and feelings to temper our aversion to loss and actively pursue what is possible. When we choose hope, we define what matters to us most.

To attain hope, you need to create momentum. It’s helpful to name the core beliefs that support the how of hope, but it’s even more important to know how they work together. So I’d like to offer another way, first proposed by Rick Snyder, to understand hope in action. It combines the beliefs into a three-part process that carries us to a better future. It also describes each element of the process as a set of learnable skills. Here are the three parts:

Goals:
We seek out and identify an idea of where we want to go, what we want to accomplish, who we want to be—whether tomorrow or over a lifetime. Some goals are vague or fleeting and quickly forgotten. Others are actively shaped and modified over time. Hope is built from the goals that matter most to us, that we come back to again and again, and that fill our minds with pictures of the future.

Agency:
The word
agency
is shorthand for our perceived ability to shape our lives day to day. As “agents,” we know we can make things happen (or stop them from happening), and we take responsibility for moving toward our goals. Over time, we develop our ability to motivate ourselves; we build our capacity for persistence and long-term effort. Agency makes us the authors of our lives.

Pathways:
We seek out and identify multiple pathways to our goals, pick the most appropriate routes for our situation, and monitor our progress over time. These are the plans that carry us forward, but we’re aware that obstacles can arise at any time. So we remain curious and open to finding better paths to our desired future.

For now, I just want you to visualize these elements as a continuous feedback loop. Each element can set the others in motion. Each interacts with the others in ways that can reinforce, modify, or diminish them. When each is strong, together they form a cycle that enhances hope. When even one is weak, hope diminishes until we intervene to strengthen the element that is undeveloped or faltering.