How to Have Hope in Your Future
By: Greg Longoria
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Self, Mental Health

I sat hunched in the early morning grey, head in hands, scared out of my mind. I fought hard to control my focus and to keep panic in check. It was October 2009, and I had just started my business in the depths of the Great Recession. I didn’t have any clients, but I had something much more valuable:

Hope.

You may be surprised to know that hope is not a feeling; hope is something you can cultivate. Dr. Benjamin Hardy says that hope is a key predictor of your future success. So as you turn the page to a new year, ask yourself, how can I be a more hopeful person?

Hope needs these two ingredients

To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act. (Anatole France)

If you’re like most people, you think about hope as an emotion, a feeling, something that happens to you; but that’s not what the research shows. Dr. Charles Snyder, a preeminent researcher of hope, asserts that hope causes and precedes emotion.

If that’s true then, what is hope?

Hope, says Dr. Snyder, is the result of having two key ingredients — agency and pathways. Agency is taking control of your decisions and ownership of their consequences. Pathways are the strategies you develop and pursue to get something you want.

Hope = Agency + Pathways

Case in point, my business start-up.

When I launched my company, I took ownership of my future and repeatedly reminded myself that I could do it for myself because I did it for others. Every day I fought failure by exercising my sense of agency; I put my future on the line.

But as Dr. Snyder asserts, hope also requires a path forward — a pathway. Similarly, I drafted a business plan, identified prospective clients, created a services menu, and projected the profits. Every day, I planned the work and worked the plan.

Hope, then, is your ability to take ownership of your situation and see a path forward. You need both; you can’t have just one.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself: how do I feel when I’m not in control, AND I can’t see a way to solve my problem? I’m sure your answer is — hopeless.

Friends, cultivate a mindset of hope. Research shows that hopeful people are more:

Open-minded

Flexible

Future-oriented

Goal-driven

Hope-filled people are successful because they make decisions based upon where they want to go.

How to boost your hope

Having hope will give you courage. (Job 11:18, NLTse)

Cultivate hope by growing your sense of agency and prospection. Prospection is your superpower to envision the future, and it’s directly linked to your ability to identify pathways. (Click on the links to learn more about how agency and prospection are crucial to your success.)

Next time a difficult situation confronts you and you need a boost of hope, ask yourself the following:

What caused the problem? How can I solve the problem? When will I resolve the problem? How will my life be better when the problem’s gone? What will I learn from this experience that will make me stronger?

This last question is vital because how you perceive the context of your situation determines how you see your future.

If you view the struggle as making you stronger and smarter, then the challenge isn’t a potential defeat, it’s a tool to improve your life.

When you exercise hope, you will begin to see that challenges can make you wiser and more successful.

But that’s not all.

For many of you, hope has a powerful spiritual dimension. To have hope in a power that transcends time and space is encouraging when the going gets tough. To have hope in a power that’s bigger than your capabilities is comforting when the world is crumbling around you. Spiritual hope is to trust in something beyond your capabilities and outside of your control. Spiritual hope is trusting in something outside the natural; it’s trusting in the supernatural.

Hope is passionate trusting. (Rick Warren)

Fast forward eleven years from that early grey morning, and my business is going strong. It started with a dream, led to lots of tough decisions, and plenty of prayer to a power bigger than me. Without hope, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So I encourage you to put hope into action, it can make your dreams come true.

Be wise and successful