Two Hope Lessons

Most of what I know about hope, I picked up from other people. In April 1997, I learned two lessons about hope. With my coursework behind me, I was wrapping up my last few months of clinical training at the Eisenhower VA Medical Center. The staff psychiatrist popped into my office. He had a case for the soon-to-be psychologist. Dr. McNutt (real name…couldn’t make that up) threw me several softballs during my time in the clinic. The case of Paul Carlson (pseudonym to protect client confidentiality) was not what I expected.

Paul was a full-bodied 63-year old veteran who had spent his life in the farm fields of Kansas. He was a pragmatist, from his work boots to his flattop to his no nonsense approach to life. In shock from a diagnosis of kidney failure he had only one fix – suicide. See, Paul had never heard of a farmer running a farm while on dialysis, so that treatment option did not make sense. Not getting treated would leave him too sick to work the fields. Get treatment, lose the farm. Don’t get treatment, lose the farm. Lose the farm, lose all sense of meaning. Paul wanted to avoid losing the farm, by any means necessary. That day, Paul and I completed Lesson #1: hope depends on the quality of our relationship with future.

Though few of my clinical techniques worked with Paul that first day, he did get to the point where he was no longer a danger to himself. With the help of his family and friends, we made sure that Paul had a safe home to return to and plenty of support.

The next day, he came back to the clinic and started Lesson #2 with a question, “What’s my story?” After fumbling a bit, I was able to grasp the full meaning of what he was asking. Paul wanted to know how talk about being ill, going to treatment, and getting better or getting worse. He hated the question, “How are you doing?” and wanted to have a go-to answer. We spent the next two hours talking about hope as an active process that requires constant attention. At the beginning of the next session, he told me, “I got it. ‘I am working on it’ When people ask me how I am doing, I tell them, ‘I am working on it.’” Lesson #2: hope is active and it fueled by the language we use.

Now, the two lessons Paul shared with me add to my book learning about people and hope.

Hope Lesson #1: We are the only creatures on the planet that truly think about the future. The quality of our relationship with the future determines our hopefulness. Future thinking at its best gives us high hope.

Hope Lesson #2: Human language makes hope infinite. Hope is brought alive by the stories we tell to ourselves and about ourselves. These stories live on, as does our hope.

 

Hope for America's Students

Hope is a better predictor of future achievement than standardized tests and GPA. And, hope is probably as important as intelligence when taking an exam (http://tinyurl.com/pq4sd4). Hope plays a role in every person’s life, and it determines the academic trajectory of every student. Shouldn’t we know more about the hope of America’s students?

Measuring Hope with the Gallup Student Poll

Over the next 10 years, the Gallup Student Poll will measure the hope of every 5th through 12th grader in America. The inaugural poll surveyed 70,078 students from 335 schools and 59 districts located in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Here is a summary of the hope results from the poll.

Half of students are hopeful; these students possess numerous ideas and abundant energy for the future. The other half of students are stuck or discouraged, lacking the ideas and energy they need to navigate problems and reach goals. Hope varies little across grade levels.

Most students (95%) agree or strongly agree with the statement: “I know I will graduate from high school.” The belief that a student will graduate from high school is positively correlated with student responses to the following items: “There is an adult in my life who cares about my future” and “I can find lots of ways around any problem.” Unfortunately, there is a slight disconnect between this expectation for graduation and the potential outcome suggested by data on the dropout crisis. While 95% of today’s students say they will graduate, fewer than 75% of students will receive a high school diploma.

See http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/web_links/050509_student_gallup_poll_results for a brief video describing poll results.

Doubling Hope

Half of the young people in America need more help to develop skills for hopeful thinking. Doubling the number of hopeful kids will yield America’s Most Hopeful Generation. So, help a student in the pursuit of an important goal and teach her how to hope for a better future.

Hope for Today, Hope for the Future

(originally posted on gallupstudentpoll.com)

What is Hope?

Watching children on a playground tells you all you need to know about hope. A child’s vision transforms a series of obstacles (tall ladders, hard to reach monkey bars, wobbly wooden bridges) into limitless opportunities for fun. Goals become very clear (“I am going to swing across all the monkey bars.”), the plan develops (“I am going to climb the ladder, grab the bar, and swing from the first one to the second one.”), and support is requested (“Can you help me up?”) while confidence grows (“I think I got it. Yeah, I am doing it!”).
Hope happens when we focus our thoughts on clear and meaningful goals. We concentrate on the future we want, reflect on our goals, and think about all the ways we can make our vision of the future a reality. When we put our thoughts about our goals together with ideas and energy for the future, we are most hopeful. Ideas are shaped into pathways to a goal and the energy, or personal agency, is built up over time. So, the statement “These are the many ways I can get there from here” reflects the ideas or pathways of hope. And, “I am excited and confident about getting there from here!” captures the energy of agency. Contentment, pride, and joy come about when we use our hopeful thinking and overcome obstacles. Frustration, sadness, and anger bubble up when obstacles wear us down.
The essence of hope is having the drive to set and pursue goals, to take risks, to initiate action. Hope fuels problem-solving and it helps us develop personal strengths and social resources. More specifically, having hope makes us more likely to do well in school and to take good care of our health.

Why Hope is Important?

Whether your child is experiencing good times or bad times, hope can help. During a good day, when a child is thinking about a bright future, hope helps him persist on important tasks, create challenging stretch goals that foster growth, and build new resources through successful experiences. On tough days, ones that involve failure or illness, hope helps a child overcome major obstacles. For example, if a child receives a poor grade on a test, she revisits her goal for that class, adds or modifies the pathways to achieving that goal, and searches for more support and confidence. In short, she makes hope happen when she is under pressure. When facing more serious problems in life, like chronic pain and illness, hope works to make situations more bearable or makes the recuperative process more productive. Specifically, high-hope people can tolerate pain twice as long as people with low-hope. And, high-hope people are more likely to do what needs to be done to bounce back and become healthy again.

What Does a High Hoper Look Like?

A high-hope child has the ideas, the plans, and the motivation to make things happen. These youngsters are energetic in the moment and excited about the future. Hopeful children are not sitting on the sidelines. They are busy creating pathways to achieve goals and they are filled with the determination to succeed, thereby actively engaging in life and all its possibilities. Through interacting with the world, they are able to acquire the tools and resources they need to successfully navigate their lives. They may even create a hope domino effect that gets their friends and family members involved in hopeful goal pursuits.

Teaching Hope

Getting children talking about hope is as easy as asking them a few questions and discussing the answers:
1. What are your hopes and dreams? Which one is most important to you right now?
2. What are all the ways you can think about to make your most important dream come true?
3. Who makes you feel like you matter? How will their love and support help make your dream come true?
When helping your child become more hopeful, keep in mind that that you are teaching a set of skills that build on what children do naturally, thinking about the future. With a little help, children can learn how to describe important goals in terms that are clear and specific and add something to their lives. Ideas grow as children generate more and more routes that will take them from Point A to Point B in the short term and long term. Finally, with some love and caring and a short track record of personal success, children can stay energized and motivated when pursuing goals.

Personal Hope Becomes a Public Resource

Sometimes great ideas and hope lay dormant until someone transforms a personal hope into a public resource.

In 2009, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, committed to making his city greener, climbed into the cab of a new all-electric cargo hauler, capable of moving a 60,000 pound shipping container quietly and cleanly at the Port of Los Angeles. The idea and the energy for this futuristic vehicle had been carried around by its developer, Balwinder Samra, president of Balqon Corporation and was put to work during a lunch with Harbor Commission President David Freeman. Freeman, curious about the capacity of Balqon’s electric motors wanted to know if Samra could make one powerful and efficient enough to haul 30 tons of cargo.
Samra: No problem.
Freeman: Well, I know theoretically no problem, but can you actually build one?
Samra: Sure.
Freeman: Well, why haven’t you?
Samra: No one has ever asked me to.

The official request came along with $527,000 in funding from the port and an air quality organization. Two years and 47 new green collar jobs later, Mayor Villaraigosa rolled the first green hauler into use. With zero emissions, a top speed of 40 mph, and a range of 30 to 60 miles per battery charge, the hauler could make drayage a greener industry.

Got a friend with a personal hope? Sure you do. Help her turn it into a public resource...today.

Hope for Now and for the Future...Please

“I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, ‘In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.’” JFK preceded that recollection with this simple quote that sticks with me. “We must think and act not only for the moment but for our time.”

Thinking and acting in the moment takes a high-hope person who prevents bad times from getting worse. That person is a responder.

Thinking and acting for our time, for our generation, takes a high-hope person who transcends the moment and crafts a better future. That person is an initiator.

During down economic periods, we value the responders. They “put out fires” and keep people from running scared. Responders solve problems today and create a better tomorrow. And, during these times, we must value the initiators for their long-view and for their vision of the future that others cannot yet imagine.

Right now, we need to respond and initiate. We need to tend the garden and plant Lyautey’s tree.

Are you a responder or an initiator? Pick a role and get to work. We need hope for now and for the future…please.

Choose Hope over Fear

On inauguration day, “we gather because we have chosen hope over fear...” This choice between hope and fear requires us to power up our new brain and to override our ancient instincts. Hope is intentional; fear is automatic. Choosing hope is hard work that never lets up. Fear just happens, it runs amok, and we need to corral it.

Fear fuels our lives, yet strangely it keeps us right where we were, sometimes running in small circles. Fear can be used better. The days of our lives will never be without fear. We must learn to manage it.

Now, hope, as our science has demonstrated and folks have started to believe, can be chosen and converted into a fuel for change. Some might say that this energy is not as powerful and reliable. They are dead wrong. Hope is potent, plentiful, and faithful. We need to learn to master hope once we make it our default.

We choose hope and nudge the hell out of it to create better lives for ourselves and others. We must learn to make fear work for us, to keep us safe, but not too safe. In time, we will realize that hope and fear can work together and modern humans have been, and always will be, hope-fear hybrids.

Master hope. Manage fear. Go hybrid.

Hope: Taking the Blinders Off

Hope and fear are both necessary in modern life, but they operate very, very differently. Fear is associated with signals from one of the oldest parts of our brains, the amygdala. When we experience threat, the amygdala initiates a process that helps generate the physical resources we need to kick ass or make tracks. We have few other options when we are fearful; we behave as if we have blinders on.

No creativity comes out of fear; we just don't see options when we are fearful. When fear does its job, we escape that which makes us fearful. This fear response is exhausting and it comes with a host of negative emotional and physical consequences.

Hope is wired in the youngest part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex. When we attach ourselves to the future through a goal that matters to us, our new brain tells us to reach out, find more resources, get some support. Hope effectively takes the blinders off and helps us see chance and opportunity.

Innovation comes out of hope; we create something out of nothing then tweak, tweak, tweak until it works just right. Hope works because it broadens our thinking and because it fuels persistence. Big thinking without sticktoitiveness is not hoping, it is wishing.

Now, take the blinders off. Use your new brain.