As a voracious reader from an early age, who would swallow the works of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and many others, I must admit that for many years I was among those who thought that the concept of hope is… useless.
Whenever the conversation led to mentioning hope, I would say, “I don’t believe in hope.” I think you can have hope only in one instance: when your ship has sunk and you are floating in the open sea — you can hope that sharks are not going to show up to eat you. But if you can see the shore, swim.
Nonetheless, life kept sending me messages, helping me gain an understanding that hope is actually something different. I began questioning myself and listening to others, and I encountered different theories and opinions about what hope is: a feeling, an emotion, an inner belief that everything will eventually be good, a practice, etc.
Many people mistake hope for optimism. For those who are interested, there are studies that discuss the importance of optimism and compare it to hope, but Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning provides a clear picture of what allowed people to survive in the concentration camps during WWII. He was able to observe people and predict who would survive and who would not. The optimists were dying first, pessimists were the next group not to survive, and only those who were able to accept reality in all its undeniable horror and atrocity — and, despite that, make a decision to live, no matter what the future might hold — were the ones who survived.
Dr. Charles Richard Snyder, a psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, spent his career studying and researching hope.
Snyder et al. (1991) define hope as a dynamic motivational experience that is interactively derived from two distinct types of cognitive tools in the context of goal achievement — namely, pathways and agency thinking.
According to Dr. Snyder, highly hopeful people:
- are able to set a goal;
- have a sense of agency (they know they can do it);
- are able to create a path to reach that goal; if the first path doesn’t work, they will regroup and create a new one.
Brené Brown, in her many speeches, points out a very important distinction: if highly hopeful people fail, they do not see themselves as failures, which instantly reminds us of Thomas Edison’s words about his experiments with the light bulb: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
This brings me to an understanding that success and hope are inseparable. Success is a product of personal growth, and hope is a practice that makes personal growth possible. Success doesn’t happen to anyone; it is the product of meticulous planning and work, including inner work.
But let’s return to the first feature of highly hopeful people and think for a minute: “They are able to set a goal.” Here is the tricky part: to be able to set a goal, you need to know what you want, and unfortunately, you cannot know what you want until you know who you are. (Shakespeare said it in the 16th century: “Know thyself.” or Aristotle’s “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” 322 B.C.) The reality is that very few of us were lucky to grow up in an environment that allowed us to develop and grow in alignment with our True Self; most of us were shaped and molded by our families, society, religion, and culture.
Many people later in life find themselves “living not my life,” “stuck in a vicious cycle,” or saying, “I hit the wall, and I am hitting it again and again, and I don’t know how to overcome it.”
And the safest and fastest way to change is psychotherapy, and the beginning of this incredibly interesting journey inward — learning who I am — because “knowing thyself” is where the sense of agency comes from.
It is important to understand that therapy is not about changing someone; rather, it is about undoing the changes by unfolding the layers we were wrapped in by our families, society, and culture, which molded us into a more convenient version of ourselves, and rediscovering our True Self.
Thank you for reading.
More information can be found here:
Frankl V. E., (1959) Man’s search for meaning. Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Snyder C. R., Irving L., Anderson J. R., (1991) Hope and Health. Measuring the Will and the Ways. Handbook of social and clinical psychology: The health perspective. Elmsford. New York.
Snyder C. R., (2000) Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications. Academic Press.