Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (3 page)

My message seems simple to me now, but it took me more than a decade to figure out:

Hope matters.

Hope is a choice.

Hope can be learned.

Hope can be shared with others.

I
USED TO
think hope was just a warm, vague feeling. It was that sense of excitement that I got before Christmas when I was a child. It lingered a while and then disappeared.

Working with John changed the way I thought about hope. When he saw himself as a man with no future, he was at best paralyzed with fear and at worst suicidal. But when he was doggedly pursuing something that mattered to him, he was full of life. That got my attention. I wanted to know more about how our thoughts about the future could affect us today.

So I became my own guinea pig. I made up some simple thought experiments to test my future thinking. For example, I tried to
not
think about the future. Go ahead. Try that for a bit. Unless you are in a deep meditative state, totally focused on a task, or sleeping, your mind goes to the future within minutes, maybe even seconds. I discovered that my mind jumps to the future even before my feet hit the floor in the morning.

I then tried to recall the first time I understood that the present and the future were connected through my behavior. As a little kid, I went
to the bank with my mom every Friday to put money in our family’s Christmas Club savings account. It surprised me that she was thinking about the holidays even during hot and humid Louisiana summer days.

I noticed that, like my mom with her Christmas Club, good parents invest in the future on behalf of their children. Parents purposefully or inadvertently teach their children how to think about what’s coming up. They calm a child’s fears by describing what happens at a doctor’s appointment—and talk about the treat the child will get afterward. They take their preschooler to kindergarten roundup to foster excitement and reduce anxiety about starting school. Or they preview travel destinations through books and brochures to build anticipation for a family trip.

Sometimes parents use pointed questions to spark future thinking. “What will your grade be in physics?” one friend asked her daughter. That question got the girl talking about what was possible for her in a very challenging class. It led to a long conversation about the grade she hoped for, the steps needed to achieve it, and the role of her own effort in getting the desired outcome.

After tracking my future thinking back to my past, I started another thought experiment: I tracked advertisements that play on our tendency to think about the future. Suddenly I was noticing how marketers make every effort to associate their products and services with tangible future outcomes. Bankers, insurance agents, and money managers promise to shield us from disaster and assure us a golden retirement at a beach house or golf course.

Tracking my future thinking and those “plan for your future” media messages led to two important realizations. First, we think about the future a lot—both because it gives us an emotional boost and because other people (parents, teachers, marketers) encourage us to do so. Second, not all thoughts about the future are created equal. I wanted to examine this discovery a little more closely, so I did what I often ask my clients to do: I recorded my thoughts.

Every day for a week, in fifteen-minute stretches, I wrote down my thoughts about the future. This gave me a snapshot of my future
thinking, which fell into three categories.
Sometimes I was
fantasizing
: I had big thoughts that were pure fun and entertainment about a fast convertible, next summer’s vacation, or retirement on the beach. These gave me a quick high—sometimes followed by a bit of a low. At other times I was
dwelling
: I hyperfocused my future thoughts on the bad things that might happen, such as struggling to get a job, taking thirty years to pay off my student loans, or never being able to retire. These made me anxious. And sometimes my thoughts balanced fantasizing and dwelling, which were exciting thoughts about my future even while I acknowledged the challenges before me. That’s when I was
hoping.

Hoping felt different than the other types of future thinking. When hoping, I felt compelled to act. Hope came along with a whole rush of plans for moving toward that future. To understand why hope had this effect on me and to learn more about
how
people hope,
I called my grad school professor, Rick Snyder. A master in the classroom, Rick was at his best when talking about his favorite subject—hope. But when we met for our first one-on-one chat, I had to admit that I hadn’t really bought into hope until I worked with John. This didn’t faze Rick, who said, “Our clients teach us so much.”

John had shown me that hope was active, not passive. And that it took hard work. Rick listened intently to my account of John’s therapy sessions and then chimed in with a simple observation: “John realized that he could get there from here.”

“You can get there from here.” That favorite saying of Rick’s has become one of mine, too. It’s shorthand for a potent way of thinking about the future. “Here” is the present, which is in some way less desirable than our imagined future. “There” is the target of our longing. And “you” are the one moving yourself from here to there. We expect something from the future, and also from ourselves.

In our minds, our beliefs firm up links between ourselves and the
future, priming people for hope. People do this by setting high expectations about the future (somewhat tempered by reality) and then acting on them.

The hopeful share core beliefs that set them apart from others. Two of them are:

The future will be better than the present.

I have the power to make it so.

The first belief comes naturally to us.
The Gallup World Poll shows that the vast majority of people on the planet think their lives will be better in time.
Regardless of age, most people have an optimistic bias, generally believing that tomorrow holds some promise, and that things can change for the better.

The second belief, “I have the power to make the future better than the present,” requires us to see ourselves as lead actors in our life own story: we have some say in how our time on earth unfolds. This belief is learned, usually in early childhood. (Toddlers are trying it out when they insist, “Me do,” and even when they say “No” to almost everything.) We hold on to this belief if we have some wins in life where we can see the link between our actions and good outcomes in school, sports, creativity, and work.

This way of thinking about the future differs from its weak cousins, such as wishing and the various kinds of unrealistic “positive thinking” that are touted in popular culture. They share a positive vision of the future, but wishing and thinking like Pollyanna don’t connect us personally to that future
through our own efforts.

Two more core beliefs that underlie hope require some mental flexibility, which comes from experience. As Rick emphasized, the way from the present to the future is seldom a straight line, and almost never a single line. We need to do some cognitive work to get from where we are now (Point A) to where we want to be (Point B). Hopeful people believe: