Growing Hope: How To Develop Your Hope Muscle

If I claimed that hope could improve your mental, physical and emotional health would you think I was being a little bit too hopeful? Give me 3 minutes. I will try and convince you otherwise.

Active Hope

First of all, I’m not talking here about hope as a form of wishful thinking or a raft to cling to when things look bleak. Those are important but I’m on about a different sort of entity, Active Hope.

Of course hope can be defined and researched from different perspectives and disciplines, but think of Active Hope as a state of being, something you can move in and out of. It’s not a fixed trait or personality type (Snyder, et al, 2005) or an optimistic outlook on life. It’s something we can practice. We can move towards and develop a more hopeful mindset.

Grow Your Hopeful State

We are not all on a level playing field when it comes to hope. Be it our personality, early life experiences or later ones, our hopefulness can take some knocks. But, if hope can be diminished then it can also be grown. Research shows that hope can be built, resulting in improved wellbeing and reduced unhappiness (Cheavens & Guter, 2018).

One important factor with our hopefulness is how much control we feel we have in a situation. How much we think we can affect outcomes through our actions.

Our support networks are another factor. Having the right people around us, especially when we are trying to turn things around. Until we have a hopeful belief in ourselves, having a positive community who believe in us can keep us afloat.

Upward Spirals of Hope

Hope is an important mediator of wellbeing. It can act as a catalyst to improve and maintain wellbeing, supporting positive change.

·        It improves life satisfaction and wellbeing, because if you are hopeful you are living with an expectation that things will work out, that your goals will be achieved, so it motivates, sustains and inspires us.

·        Which in turn supports us to plan and take action.

·        Which keeps us engaged in life.

·        We feel less vulnerable to life, more equipped to navigate the difficult times.

·        When you are more hopeful about your abilities, threats become challenges.

·        And less threat means less stress which supports our physical and mental health.

Hopeful people do better; in work, education, sports and relationships. And the positive spirals continue because with those successes, you increase your confidence and trust in yourself.

If You Think You Can Or You Can’t, You’re Right

Hope motivates us to get going on our goals and to keep going too, negotiating problems along the way.  That is crucial when it comes to changing behaviours and habits because we need hope to believe in ourselves and our own power to change things, it’s the self- belief that we can do something different.

Hope, like anxiety, is often concerned with the future but hope helps us to view those ‘what if’s’ more optimistically and more realistically, so we are less worried and more able to get out of our own way.

With a better sense of our own agency we have the resilience to handle the bumps in the road. So we can more easily adopt a ‘let’s not worry about that until it happens’ mind set. 

Belief and Planning

Snyder et al. talk about there being two strands to hope, Agency Thinking and Pathway Thinking (Snyder, et al, 2002). I find it easier to think of these as Belief and Planning.

We use our agency for setting our goals. This is the motivation or willpower aspect; a self-belief that we can do something or change something.

Pathways is about how we get there; our ability to formulate the plans, and back up plans, so we can be flexible when we need to be.

Some people are high in the agency / belief aspects but low in planning - they know what they want but don’t know how to get there. Some are the other way round – great at making plans if only they could get going. They struggle to see where they want to get to or simply don’t believe they could get there. Some get stuck on both.

Don’t worry there is action you can take to improve your skills in both areas.

Build belief by journaling about past successes and how you have reached your goals previously.

Build your planning skills by making you plans more conscious and detailed. Write them down, work through options with a friend and be sure to plan how you will manage with any possible setbacks.

I Hope This Has Helped

By tapping into hopeful thoughts, events or people we can boost our feelings of hope, creating an upward spiral. In a hopeful state we’re more open to opportunity, our self-belief grows, and we perceive our chances of success more positively. There is a greater sense of possibility. And of course, when we feel this openness and build on it by taking action towards our goals, our actual chances of success increase!

In short - hopefulness is a very positive psychological state to be in for our wellbeing. Did I convince you?

References

Cheavens, J. S., & Guter, M. M. (2018). Hope therapy.

Snyder, C. R., Cheavens, J. S., & Michael, S. T. (2005). Hope theory: History and elaborated model. Interdisciplinary perspectives on hope, 101-118.

Snyder, C. R., Rand, K. L., & Sigmon, D. R. (2002). Hope theory. Handbook of positive psychology, 257, 276.

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