Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (13 page)
Read Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others Online
Authors: Shane J. Lopez
By this time, however, most of the reformers were deeply committed. They were rapidly gaining the marketing, media relations, and political skills that would spread the word about Nettelhorst and sustain the pace of change. The school grounds became the venue for public events for the entire community, including a farmer’s market. Since Illinois ranked near the bottom in school funding, they recruited new volunteers to research and undertake sophisticated fund-raising from businesses and nonprofit groups.
Five years after they painted the school doors blue, the Parents Co-op had achieved every goal on their wildly hopeful Big List. They had raised more than $200,000 to renovate the science lab and auditorium. Another $210,000 came from the Chicago Blackhawks, a professional hockey team, to support the school’s sports, fitness, and health programs. They had created long-term partnerships with art centers, dance schools, and businesses to make the arts and sciences curriculum among the best in the city. Test scores had more than tripled, and
Nettelhorst was named one of the top twenty schools in Chicago for academic gains.
I’ve focused here primarily on the Nettelhorst start-up, on how a small group of parents took a leap of faith on a project with huge obstacles and no guarantee of anything but hard work ahead.
Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland later told the full story of the school’s transformation in their book,
How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance.
It’s an inspiring toolkit for all parents who want to stop wishing or complaining and start to build better choices for the future of their kids and themselves.
The Nettelhorst Moms and the Elements of Hope
The Roscoe Park Eight’s hopeful vision was powered and sustained by the three essential elements of hope I introduced in
chapter 2
. Each played a crucial role in creating the vision of a better neighborhood school and the forward movement that characterizes hope in action.
Goals:
More than a few Roscoe Park parents considered Jacqueline and Nicole’s Big List a pipe dream, especially on a short schedule and in a bureaucratic system. But the appeal of their vision combined with the specificity of their plans drew in hundreds of volunteers over many years. A park parent who was interested in nutrition could identify immediately with the heading “Healthy, organic lunches.” A book lover would want to work for the “Well-stocked, cozy library.” A musician could imagine how her skills could contribute in the “Music, art, drama” category. And by making highly visible (and low-budget) changes right away, the Eight sent a powerful signal that change was possible at Nettelhorst. Each interim goal achieved and checked off inspired new, more complex and far-reaching efforts.
Agency:
Many of the new families moving to East Lakeview were young professionals who prided themselves on making things happen. Jacqueline, Nicole, and the entire volunteer team were confident enough to cold-call potential donors and city bureaucrats—and keep calling. In Susan Kurland, they met an open-minded principal with a strong entrepreneurial streak who knew how to use their support. And the school’s engineer, who could have been a major obstacle, got behind them from the start and helped organize many infrastructure changes. This fund of agency helped them recover from the inevitable discouragements and failures along the way.
Some initiatives encountered so many obstacles that they had to be abandoned, but the group was willing to “bulldoze” (their word) when it came to their non-negotiables.
Pathways:
The eight captains each brought her own expertise to the project—from infrastructure and curriculum to special events, public relations, and marketing—based on their education and work experience. This ensured a rich mixture of priorities and plans, which were then debated and refined by the entire group every two weeks over coffee at a local diner. They also identified their knowledge gaps and recruited volunteers who could fill them. This became crucial four years into the project, when the school faced a huge budget shortfall—well beyond anything that could be made up by donated goods or neighborhood fund-raisers. A new kindergarten parent stepped up to research professional fund-raising techniques, providing a path to the new science lab and the major grant from the Blackhawks.
What do you see in your future? When I ask people this question, some of them respond right away with their own “Big List”—a lineup of specific goals. But there are also a lot of thoughtful folks who hesitate, all too aware of the uncertainties of life that I’ve touched on.
If you are looking for your Big List, here’s a technique I use to reinforce hope in clients, students, and colleagues. I wait until we are celebrating a recent success or the anniversary of a meaningful accomplishment. Then I ask, “Five years ago, did you see yourself here?” This often triggers a hope retrospective, a smile and a talk about the hard times and obstacles they overcame to arrive at the present. Looking back, they are reminded of how much can happen in five years. And they almost always talk about the combination of hope, desire, determination, and luck that pulled them through. Sometimes this is the first time they see how much agency they actually had—how they were able to bend circumstances toward a desired destination.
Then I am ready with my next question: “Five years from now, what do you want your life to look like?” Try it now, and come up with as clear a picture as you can. Don’t worry about probabilities or obstacles at this point; you know you will deal with them later. Put your future vision to work, and you will be surprised by how powerfully it can pull you forward.
I
WAS BORN
poor and smart. When I was a child, I felt like I’d been given half of what I needed to have a good life. As I saw it, most of the other kids were born on third base and I got to first only because I was hit by a wild pitch.
How would I ever catch up with the other kids—the ones who lived in big houses on the bayou and took vacations every summer? My kid mind thought that my family and I were going nowhere fast and I would always be far behind. These thoughts made me a very anxious third grader. Most nights it was hard for me to fall asleep. I began to have stomach cramps that lasted for days at a time and caused me to miss school, which made me even more anxious and brought on more pains.
Our family doctor couldn’t diagnose the problem and sent me to the hospital to see a gastroenterologist who ordered X-rays and other tests but didn’t find anything wrong with me, either. My mom tried some dietary fixes, but the pain would not let up. I started to believe that the stomach cramps would be with me forever.
Out of a nine-year-old’s desperation, I dreamed up my first psychological intervention: I decided to “act as if” I weren’t anxious and in pain. I didn’t have a clue how to do this, though, so I just started to imitate the kids who seemed happy and healthy. Sometimes I would act like my buddy Cory, who was full of confidence. Following his lead, I would walk right up to other kids and say hello rather than slinking around on the edges of groups of boys and girls at recess. My friend Bubby was always cool and laughing a lot, so I started spending more time with him. He and I got good at pulling pranks on each other. Day by day, my friends slowly rubbed off on me. I still felt lots of stress and my stomach still hurt at times, but the pain was much more manageable.
This was my first lesson in self-determination—the belief that I could act in a way that would influence my future. By changing my behavior, I could have a future with less anxiety and pain. In hindsight, third grade was when I started to believe that the arc of my life wasn’t entirely determined by my current circumstances.
Kids and grown-ups alike tend to believe that their personal circumstances and characteristics are the major determinants of where they end up in life. And—let’s acknowledge it right up front—to some extent, the rich do get richer and the happy do get happier. But a good bit of our future is not left to chance (see
chapter 6
). It is not predetermined by who we are at birth or even by who we are today. So, what does that mean for a kid who was born poor and smart? What does it mean for you? That’s what this chapter is about.
The one thing that I did better than most other kids was school. Because I made good grades and received academic honors, people praised me for being smart. By the time I was in junior high I believed that my intelligence—this thing that I supposedly possessed in greater quantities than others—would bring me success and even happiness.
These early beliefs followed me through grad school and the start of my career as a psychologist, as an intelligence researcher at a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical center. There, although I worked with the best, the more I learned the more disillusioned I became. Smart people with bad lives came into the lab every day. One man with a genius-level IQ used his smarts in antisocial ways, cooking up schemes that took advantage of other people. Another very bright guy didn’t know the basics about how to start a relationship. “How do I tell if she still likes me? What can we do on a date?” he would ask. Some smart people were unable to keep a job for more than a month or two. And many of the smartest folks seemed stuck, unable to get past problems they had been grappling with for decades.
After seeing this time and again, I started to drill deeper into the role intelligence played in success, asking, Does IQ account for most of a person’s success at work? Neuropsychologists who considered intelligence alongside memory and executive functioning couldn’t fully explain how people did on the job. In fact, innate cognitive ability accounted for only a fourth of the variance in success at work.
Toward the end of my time at the VA, I concluded that high intelligence wasn’t always accompanied by good intentions, common sense, or motivation, and that a bulging IQ didn’t guarantee success. But only after I encountered John the farmer and saw that
only when he was invested in the future
could he deal with his problems, did I begin to inquire into the relationship between intelligence and hope. John was whip-smart, but that didn’t buffer him from his fears.
In the years since, I’ve confirmed that intelligence determines little about how we think about the future. The research on this topic is straightforward. Give a large group of people tests for intelligence and hope, then correlate the two scores.
Whether you test children or adults, you’ll find that
there is no relationship between intelligence and hope
. In the real world, that means not all smart people are hopeful and not all hopeful people are smart.
While these two psychological resources don’t necessarily show up in high levels in the same person, they do complement each other, working together to help people achieve their goals.
Economics professor Armenio Rego of the University of Aveiro in Portugal, who is a leading expert on hope in the workplace, has shown that hope and intelligence reinforce each other to increase creativity and productivity. On one hand, hopeful people benefit from intelligence because it can help them get to the root of problems and find more and better solutions and opportunities. On the other hand, intelligent people can use their cognitive strengths more creatively when they’re high in hope.
Without hope, Rego points out, intelligence can be a “dormant” resource. The ability to learn from and understand the environment means little if it’s not jump-started by the motivational energy of high hope. His conclusion: “Many intelligent people do not succeed precisely because they are not energized with high hope.”
Money buys lots of things that make our lives better. It gives us access to good food, quality education, and modern health care. It can even buy us a little happiness. But can money buy hope? Or is hope an equal-opportunity resource?
The cost of hope can be quantified by considering whether the rich have more ideas and energy for the future than do the poor. And the income threshold of hope can be determined by pinpointing the level of income at which more money stops providing more returns on hope. When I analyzed the hope in rich and poor families,
there was
no relationship between hope and income
. When I compared the hope of elementary and secondary students enrolled in a free- and reduced-lunch program to the hope of students whose families didn’t qualify for assistance, there were no systematic differences.
Hope costs nothing. There is no relationship between hope and
money. The hopeful don’t necessarily have money and the rich aren’t necessarily hopeful. But I have noticed that people with lots of hope are masters at attracting resources. Remember Chuck, the entrepreneur beer brewer? People invested in him because he had a great idea and boundless determination. And in a few pages you will read about a woman whose big hopes were backed up with a seven-figure donation. So, while money does not give you hope, hope may attract money to turn big ideas into reality. In fact, if you are looking for a solid return on your money, invest big in hope.
