How to Learn How to Hope
“The capacity to hope is an essential component to the ability to be resilient in the face of adversity.”
If you’re reading this, you likely know that I’m a big advocate for hope. Not only is my business tagline “finding threads of hope on the horizon™”, but I firmly believe that there is hope to be found in every crevice of the grief season. A large part of my approach as a counselor and consultant is building hope.
We often think of hope as an emotion, something like sadness or disappointment or joy that comes and goes, ebbs and flows, with our lived experiences. This warm sense of possibility and optimism can kind of feel like an emotion because we often experience it in sporadic intervals rather than having it embedded in our cognitive processes as a useful coping tool.
But did you know that hope is actually a learned skill? While it does have affective (a.k.a. emotional) elements, too, it is largely motivated by cognition.
The capacity to hope is an essential component to the ability to be resilient in the face of adversity— whether that be grief or anxiety with the state of our world lately or a trying season in your professional life. We often define it as the ability to visualize a pathway from our current set of circumstances (typically ones that aren’t ideal or might even be painful) to another much more desirable set of circumstances.
According to the research of C.R. Synder , author of The Psychology of Hope, hope is something we can learn, just like mindful breathing or setting boundaries or meditating. When we think of hope like this, we can liken it to learned optimism, self-esteem, or self-compassion— all skills that help us walk through life more prepared, more resilient, more balanced.
Hope from this viewpoint is much more, well, hopeful. Isn’t it a consoling thought that we can teach our brains how to hope, how to see a way out of lived experiences that, yes, often need to be lived to be learned, but that might be painful or detrimental to your mental health?
So how do we learn hope?
Three Components to Synder’s Hope Theory
“Learning hope starts with knowing you have the capacity to rewire your brain and change your circumstances.”
While learning hope extends far beyond this blog post alone, knowing what is involved plays a crucial part in putting it into practice.
Pathways and Agency Thinking: Goals are one of the most important parts of our thinking. They have the ability to guide our behavior and create meaningful change within our lives. In fact, most of our behavior as humans is goal-oriented, whether we notice it of not! Pathways thinking helps us use those goals to actually generate and visualize different pathways from present to future. This kind of thinking has a set of steps towards an actual goal. Agency thinking— also crucial to hope— is the belief that you have the power to change your circumstances. It includes intention and confidence, and it’s what takes that pathways thinking from a mere idea to action.
Positive Emotion: While the pathways and agency thinking surrounding goals gives us direction, optimism is like the motor running behind those goals. If we are pessimistic around goals, we are much less likely to be motivated to reach them.
Self-Inquiry: Asking questions from both a pathways thinking and agency thinking standpoint helps us get realistic with our hope, to set goals that feel tangible for you and your unique situation. For example, you can ask yourself “What do I seek to change?” or “What is stopping me?” These are from the pathways thinking camp, and they help pave the way towards who you hope to become. From an agency thinking perspective, you might ask yourself: “What innate strengths do I possess that can help me realize this goal?” or “When I’ve been successful in the past, what has helped me most?”
Learning hope starts with knowing you have the capacity to rewire your brain and change your circumstances. When we feel lost, especially when we have lost someone and enter into the grief season, it can be tough to find a sense of direction again. Hope helps us navigate how to make meaning from the pain and see that the hurt is temporary and the legacy of who or what we are grieving is forever.
If hope-building feels like the next step in your healing journey, I encourage you to reach out to me, and together, we can find threads of hope on the horizon.