Cultivating Hope
As we’ve demonstrated, Hope has tangible, practical benefits that can improve your present and your future. While we are often unconsciously conditioned to have our behaviors and cognitive processes, Hope is a skill that can be learned and taught. In order to cultivate Hope, we must learn how to:
- Have an optimistic explanatory style
- Recognize our agency
- Engage in pathways thinking.
How to Navigate this Page
We’ve compiled a collection of resources for you to read through and engage with to grow your Hope muscles! Many of the exercises we’ve put together can be done over and over again for different goals. Click on the buttons to access the resource. Some will take you to another page with more content or a quiz, while others will open .PDFs for you to print.
Additionally, this website, overall, is chock full of related topics that are intrinsic to Hope. While these will also be linked as relevant in each of the sections from the blue bar, the following topics on AMeaningofLife.org are both interwoven with and complimentary to Hope.
Hope Overall
If you’re looking for a broad approach to integrating the pragmatic aspects of Hope into your life, the following resources will aid you in directly engaging with the practice of Hope.
Hope Quizzes
Based on the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale developed by Dr. Rick Snyder in 1991, the ADHS is a self-reported assessment that measures level of Hope based on agency and pathways thinking as a stable personality trait.
In response to the lack of circumstantial focus of the ADHS above, Snyder and colleagues developed another questionnaire to distinguish if someone was hopeful in a particular situation. Take this quiz to see if you’re hopeful about something specific in your life.
This quiz determines if you see yourself as a lucky person, a perspective that relates to your explanatory style and the application of Hope. Studies indicate that considering yourself to be lucky or unlucky is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Based on Darren Webb’s “Pedagogies of Hope,” this quiz will help you determine the way you typically experience Hope in your life.
Our sense of future possibilities have a significant impact on setting goals and taking actions towards them. Take this quiz to assess your Hopefulness from a slightly different angle: your expectations of the future.
Practices, Exercises, and Printouts
This guide worksheet is designed to help you through all the steps involved in Hope Theory. Before beginning, make sure you are in a quiet space where you will not be interrupted. This activity requires both dreaming and critical thinking!
Hopeful people reap hordes of benefits in their lives from finding greater levels of success in their work, to increased satisfaction in relationships, to better overall health. To cultivate more Hope in your life, try integrating the following ways of being into your daily life.
Researcher Shane Lopez suggests creating a map for your Hopes, and a visual option is a fresh and accessible way to approach the process. By being explicit and detailed about what your goals are and how to get there, they become more accessible.
Developed by researcher Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues, WOOP is a dynamic, evidence supported approach to increasing your follow-through on goals. WOOP (Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan) is the process of “mental contrasting with implementation intentions,” meaning it involves both visualizing your obstacles and planning for them.
Maintaining our motivation toward our goals can often be a challenge. Putting together a collection of things that inspire us to feel Hopeful about the future can provide a little extra energy to believe in ourselves. This exercise guides you to put together an inspirational portfolio to boost your Hopefulness when it is low.
A collection of journaling prompts to help you access your feelings of Hope and generate motivation and inspiration towards your goals.
Having someone who believes in you and supports your journey towards your goals is indispensable. This exercise is designed to help you brainstorm who the most supportive people in your life are, so you can consciously keep them close while you pursue your dreams.
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The Power of Stories
Storytelling has been used to pass on important life lessons and cultural values further back than recorded history. They are a powerful way to teach Hope. Stories affect us on a neurological level in real time by syncing up brain waves between the teller and the listener. They stimulate the release of hormones in response to positive and negative events in the tale and bond us empathically. Psychologically, they can reframe the way we see ourselves, others, and events in our lives. Personal stories help us develop resilience by allowing us to vicariously overcome adversity in the scenarios we are being exposed to.
Myths typically follow the Hero’s Journey structure, a format that chronicles the self-actualization of a character as they overcome obstacles. Studies regarding the impact of listening to another person’s story suggest that by relating to the characters through these stories, we can build our own psychological resilience and Hope (Brennan et al. 2012). This implies that we can prime ourselves with stories of success to hijack our availability heuristic and confirmation biases, thus increasing our optimistic explanatory style. This can jumpstart our cultivation of Hope.
Expose yourself to inspirational stories of success for a morale boost. Exposing ourselves to what people are capable of can increase our sense of Agency.
- How I Built This is a podcast from NPR. “Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.”
- Anthologies of Hope is a podcast that believes “that talking about the hard things in life makes them more bearable and more manageable. Some of the most difficult situations we find ourselves in, as people, are mental health-related and current or recurring mental health issues, but feel we cannot talk about them due to fear, shame, or stigma.” The podcast explores stories of overcoming hardship.
- OptionB is a website dedicated to helping people build resilience. It has a rich collection of personal stories about overcoming hardship, a community to promote connection, and resources for learning about and developing resilience.
- 10 Famous Failures to Success Stories That Will Inspire You to Carry On
- 10 Inspirational & Successful People Who Did Not Let Failure Define Them
- Humans Of New York is a blog that includes interviews of strangers from around the world. Almost all stories included have a theme of Hope in them.
- Stories of Challenge – Our section on Challenge dives deeply into the art of resilience. Hope and Challenge go hand in hand. Check out our collection of stories about challenge for more on the power of Hope.
- Even More Stories – Our Inspiration and resources page has even more stories for you to explore!
Hope, Through History – Welcome to Hope, Through History, with Pulitzer Prize Winning and Best Selling Author and Historian, Jon Meacham and directed and produced by Cadence13. HTH explores some of the most historic and trying times in American History, and how this nation dealt with these moments, the impact of these moments and how we came through these moments a unified nation.
Connect to Your Future Self
One effective method for connecting the value of the actions we take today to what we hope to gain in the future is to connect with our future self. Psychologist Hal Hershfield demonstrated that when we connect with our older selves, our likelihood of saving more money and acting more ethically increases (Hershfield 2011). People with high Hope see their actions as valuable and effective- and you can as well by connecting to the future you!
- Aging Apps
- Connect with your future self by using an aging app. There are several applications available today that create disturbingly accurate renditions of ourselves throughout the aging process. Reference the photo regularly or post it in a place you will regularly encounter it to remind yourself of the impact what you choose to do today will have on your future self.
- Me in Time
- Housed in our “Get in the Mood to Think About Life” section, this page is a rich collection of thought-provoking resources to aid you in considering your life in the context of time.
- Write a Letter to Yourself in the Future
- Simply the act of writing to yourself in the future can provide some perspective on time. You can do this the old fashioned way and save the letter for a specified date, or use something like the website futureme.org to have it automatically delivered to you.
- Spend Time with the Elderly
- Reflecting on life with elders can provide a long-term perspective.
- Related Books
- Alter Ego by Todd Herman is all about connecting to another version of yourself. While this is a book about peak performance in the moment, it can add some nuance to your ability to connect to your future self.
- The As If Principle by Richard Wiseman explores how acting as if something is already true can create the reality we’re desiring. In the context of Hope, the As If Principle applies because we begin living with consideration for our future selves and creating our dreams by imagining we are our best possible future self.
Optimism and Positivity
We can change our explanatory style through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques, an approach that focuses on challenging unhelpful thought patterns. While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a vast discipline, you can employ a grounded, CBT-related approach to this with our Your Storied Life section. Before being able to effectively change your explanatory style, you must be aware of the stories you are telling yourself and how you relate to your experiences. The assessments below can help you begin that, and we recommend a more thorough examination of your self-talk and beliefs (perhaps through YSL). After becoming conscious of your stories about yourself and your life, and understanding how those impact you, you can address the stories that are not serving your wellbeing. Below, you will find a brief introduction of some of the techniques that can be used to transform your explanatory style.
In addition to re-hashing your interpretation of adversity, increasing your positivity and expectations contributes to your Hopefulness. This is done through consciously giving attention to what is going well in your life. We have some suggestions below for increasing positivity in your life!
Optimism and Positivity Quizzes
There are nuances to Optimism. As you can learn on the ‘Fundamentals of Hope’ page, Optimism isn’t only a sunny outlook for the future. Because we use the word very generally in our cultures, we may understand Optimism differently and employ it in unique ways in our lives. Take this quiz to see how Optimism operates in your life.
Pessimism, it may surprise you, has degrees of nuance to it. The way it actually shows up in our own lives can vary. To find out how Pessimism shows up in your life, take this quiz!
Curious to learn what your Explanatory Style is? Based on the Life Orientation Test (Revised), this quiz will help you determine if you are currently more Pessimistic or Optimistic.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s work focuses on the power of positive emotions. She recommends maintaining a ration of 3:1 positive to negative emotions. You can take this quiz on her website to learn where you currently stand (before checking out our resources for cultivating more optimism and positivity!)
While the Positivity Ratio model has been criticized for the math behind it, the value of gaining greater understanding of your relationship to your life cannot be underscored. This quiz is a great tool to shed light on this.
This quiz determines if you see yourself as a lucky person, a perspective that relates to your explanatory style and the application of Hope. Studies indicate that considering yourself to be lucky or unlucky is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
We’ve talked about Growth Mindset a few times (including its criticism) throughout the Hope section. Find out if you lean toward believing your abilities and skills are fixed or that you have influence over improving them.
Optimism and Positivity Practices, Exercises, and Printouts
Gratitude is a powerful practice that is a scientifically-backed boost to our well-being in several areas of life. Consciously feeling grateful and showing appreciation are at the core of the practice. Taking time to focus on what is working in our lives cultivates positivity and helps train us to more readily recognize positive events, feelings, and possibilities. Check out our section on Gratitude to learn more, and attached is a simple Gratitude reflection worksheet.
Barbara Fredrickson suggests we maintain a Positivity Ratio of 3:1 positives to negatives daily. By increasing your ratio, you can engage in the Broaden and Build cycle and increase positivity and quite likely Optimism in your life.
- Take this quiz to assess your current ratio
- See this printout for list of tips and practices to increase your ratio
Again, though the Positivity Ratio model has been criticized for the math behind it, the value of gaining greater understanding of your relationship to your life cannot be underscored. This quiz is a great tool to shed light on this.
The HEAL approach is a four step process for cultivating positivity described by Dr. Rick Hanson in his book, “Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence.”
HEAL is an acronym for:
Have a positive experience.
Enrich it.
Absorb it.
Link positive and negative elements.
Attached you’ll find our summary of the process and an exercise to put it to practice for yourself. You can go further in depth on the HEAL model in our Happiness Section.
Disputing a thought or belief is essentially arguing against it by weighing its validity and accounting for how it affects your feelings and choices. When you recognize a belief about something is unserving, you can challenge it with evidence to the contrary or other possibilities.
Martin Seligman framed this approach as “ABCDE,” or “Adversity -> Belief -> Consequence -> Disputation -> Energization.”
An alternative to Disputation is Distraction. Distracting ourselves is a tool that works for thoughts, beliefs or feelings that relate to uncontrollable situations.
See the PDF for a detailed guide and exercise for this process.
Attached you’ll find a collection of journaling prompts to help you access your feelings of Hope and generate motivation and inspiration towards your goals.
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Gratitude
Gratitude is a powerful practice that is a scientifically-backed boost to our wellbeing in several areas of life. Consciously feeling grateful and showing appreciation are at the core of the practice. Taking time to focus on what is working in our lives cultivates positivity and helps train us to more readily recognize positive events, feelings, and possibilities. Check out our section on Gratitude to learn more.
The Work
Another approach is framed by author Byron Katie in “The Work.” She advises us to answer the following questions to dispute limiting pessimistic thinking:
- Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know it’s true?
- How do you react—what happens—when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without the thought?
- Turn the thought around- consider its opposite.
Ultimately, after recognizing and questioning a negative belief, consider what an optimistic explanation would be and how that would feel and affect your choices. Developing an Optimistic Explanatory Style is akin to developing a Growth Mindset.
The following resources are worksheets from Byron Katie’s website for you to explore her approach.
- Introduction to The Work (a booklet)
- Instructions for The Work
- Additional Resources to be used with Instructions
- Emotions List
- Universal Beliefs
- Judge Your Neighbor (Worksheet/Cards)
- One Belief at a Time Worksheet
Agency
The conscious interpretation of your life is itself an exercise in agency and self-efficacy. Everyone begins in a different place when it comes to believing in the influence they have over their experience and what they can achieve. It can be a long journey to become conscious of and rewire how you perceive events in your life, but it ultimately helps empower you to be and experience what you desire.
This is accomplished through self examination and consciously choosing what to pay attention to. We go into considerable depth on this process and its payoffs in our sections on Freedom and Presence. Please visit these topics to learn about foundational skills for having agency in your life. Once you begin responding to your life instead of reacting, you can cultivate an optimistic explanatory style and begin a self-perpetuating cycle of increasing agency and possibility in your life.
Agency Quizzes
We’ve talked about Growth Mindset a few times (including its criticism) throughout the Hope section. Find out if you lean toward believing your abilities and skills are fixed or that you have influence over improving them.
Do you believe you have control over events in your life, or that most things happen to you? This quiz will help you determine how much agency you currently believe you have.
Agency Practices, Exercises, and Printouts
Disputing a thought or belief is essentially arguing against it by weighing its validity and accounting for how it affects your feelings and choices. When you recognize a belief about something is unserving, you can challenge it with evidence to the contrary or other possibilities.
Martin Seligman framed this approach as “ABCDE,” or “Adversity -> Belief -> Consequence -> Disputation -> Energization.”
An alternative to Disputation is Distraction. Distracting ourselves is a tool that works for thoughts, beliefs or feelings that relate to uncontrollable situations.
See the PDF for a detailed guide and exercise for this process.
Having a high degree of self-efficacy is something we can augment in our lives. People who have high agency engage in a few habits that support their agency and perpetuate it. Luckily, these are things we can all consciously choose to do.
Those with high agency are more likely to put effort into challenging situations because they believe that their actions have influence over the outcome. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they increase their odds of success by engaging with the challenge, whereas a low-agency individual may not try at all.
Psychologist Albert Bandura, whose work focused on self-efficacy, claimed that developing agency came down to four factors: Mastery Experiences, Vicarious Experiences, Verbal Persuasion, and Physiological Arousal. The exercises below can get you started with intentionally incorporating these into your life.
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Your Storied Life is an invitation to consider how the stories you hold shape the way you engage with the world around you. We all write stories for ourselves; the desire to make meaning out of the events of our lives is natural. But here we ask: how do those stories serve us? Do they push us to become the people we want to be? Or do they shut us down from realizing our potential? And most importantly, how do we recognize our stories as stories so that we can empower ourselves and others?
Our Freedom of mind enables us to become more empowered and make conscious, intentional choices in our lives. This extensive section is worth exploring as a whole, and the following topics are essentials regarding Agency:
- The Power of Perspective “…nothing you experience will be free of context. Every single experience will take place through a lens by which you see the world. Even evaluating your own experiences, or evaluating the lens itself, will happen through a lens of perception. …Depending on how we wield this ability, we may continuously suffer, reaction after reaction, or find gratitude in the face of great pain. Everything on that spectrum is available to us.”
- 100% Responsibility “In 100% Responsibility, we start to think of responsibility as ‘self-mastery’ or the knowledge that our experience of the world is subject to our beliefs.”
Mindfulness is a technique and practice for better understanding perception. Through consistent and long-term practice, you may come to the profound understanding that thoughts and feelings (including negative ones) are transient. They come and they go and ultimately, you have a choice about whether to act on them or not. Mindfulness invites us to become the watcher of sensory perceptions as they arise without getting caught up in them.
Presence is a state of heightened awareness of your conscious experience. With an intentional focus on what is occurring in the current moment, Presence allows us to embrace our experiences with openness and more clearly see the mechanisms at work that determine them.
The Power of Stories
Expose yourself to inspirational stories of success for a morale boost. Exposing ourselves to what people are capable of can increase our sense of Agency.
- How I Built This is a podcast from NPR. “Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world’s best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.”
- Anthologies of Hope is a podcast that believes “that talking about the hard things in life makes them more bearable and more manageable. Some of the most difficult situations we find ourselves in, as people, are mental health-related and current or recurring mental health issues, but feel we cannot talk about them due to fear, shame, or stigma.” The podcast explores stories of overcoming hardship.
- OptionB is a website dedicated to helping people build resilience. It has a rich collection of personal stories about overcoming hardship, a community to promote connection, and resources for learning about and developing resilience.
- 10 Famous Failures to Success Stories That Will Inspire You to Carry On
- 10 Inspirational & Successful People Who Did Not Let Failure Define Them
- Stories of Challenge – Our section on Challenge dives deeply into the art of resilience. Hope and Challenge go hand in hand. Check out our collection of stories about challenge for more on the power of Hope.
- Even More Stories – Our Inspiration and resources page has even more stories for you to explore!
Pathways and Goal Development
Cultivating Pathways Thinking is growing your “Waypower”- it is your ability to create multiple ways to achieve a particular goal. In Hope Theory, it is essential that you create multiple pathways as a way to empower your adaptability and resilience in the process of pursuing a goal. Two pathways is good, three is better, and more than that is ideal.
Sometimes our challenge is actually crafting the best goal to pursue. If we are not connected to our goal emotionally or it is either too easy or too hard for us, we can lose motivation. We’ve collected some extra support tools to help you create, manage, and stay on track with your goals.
Pathways and Goal Development Practices, Exercises, and Printouts
Retrospective Goal Setting is the practice of imagining that the goal you are dreaming of has already occurred, and then asking specifically what had to have happened for you to be in this position. It is a handy tool that enables constructive visualization by putting guide-rails on our imaginations.
Developed by researcher Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues, WOOP is a dynamic, evidence supported approach to increasing your follow-through on goals. WOOP (Wish-Outcome-Obstacle-Plan) is the process of “mental contrasting with implementation intentions,” meaning it involves both visualizing your obstacles and planning for them.
The GROW model is a goal mapping approach typically used in coaching. But if you don’t have a coach, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it for yourself! By being specific and planning for various aspects of what you want to achieve, you can make what you want to do far more likely.
The GROW model is a goal mapping approach typically used in coaching. But if you don’t have a coach, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it for yourself! By being specific and planning for various aspects of what you want to achieve, you can make what you want to do far more likely.
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SMART Goals are a way to be strategic about goal-setting. This method allows us to clarify our goals, which makes them easier to achieve. Check out the guide and following worksheet to turn all your goals into SMART Goals and make attaining them more probable!
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-based
Kaizen means “small steps.” It is the process of breaking tasks down into tiny steps, which makes them easier to achieve. Check out our Kaizen page to learn about the history, psychology, and power of this simple tool.
Sometimes the toughest part about a goal is coming up with one. Many people know they want something better for themselves, but they don’t know exactly what. It is difficult to work towards a different outcome if you do not know what it is. This worksheet is a series of questions designed to help you figure that out.
Goal Setting Apps and Tools
Goal Buddy – This software connects you with others who have similar goals to increase your accountability.
Goalscape – Developed by an Olympian athlete, this software turns your goals into a visual pie chart that can accomodate your subgoals and keeping track of your progress.
Habitica iOS | Android – This app turns achieving your goals into a game with rewards and achievements! Fun!
Lifetick – A general goal managing and tracking software.
Milestone Planner – Software that helps you plan and track your goals.
Momentum iOS – This application helps you keep track of how many days you have completed a goal in a row. It is based on the psychology of not wanting to break your chain. Strides is similar.
Strides iOS – Like Momentum, this application helps you keep track of how many days you have completed a goal in a row. It is based on the psychology of not wanting to break your chain.
StickK – StickK helps create accountability for your goals by not only making them public, but giving you the opportunity to wager a large sum of money against not attaining them.
Todoist iOS Android – Todoist is one of the most popular To-Do list applications out there. It will help you manage your tasks to achieve those goals!
Trello – Trello is a great goal-setting and task management software for teams. It helps organize information and who is doing what.