It’s a safe bet to say that at the heart of human experience, we want to be happy. But what does it mean to be happy?
Happiness seems an esoteric concept, tucked somewhere between deep spirituality, religiousness, and psychological theory. So what if we reframed our thinking and instead of happy, we’d say that we strive to be hopeful?
The psychology behind a hopeful mindset
Much-loved US researcher Brené Brown argues in her book The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting that hope is not a fleeting feeling, emotion, or a character trait, but an important life skill, a set of cognitive tools and a way of thinking about the world. Yet how do you find, measure, and teach people hope?
Hope as a predictor of life success
In 1991, Dr Charles R Snyder, a renowned US scientist who specialised in positive psychology, pioneered ‘The Hope Theory’. “Hope” – he announced from the front pages of The New York Times – “emerges as a key to success in life”. Snyder and his team broke hope into three pillars: goals, pathways, and agency. They argued that hopefulness in a person is a mix of the ability to set a goal, to find creative ways of getting there and, above all, to believe in its success, thereby adopting an ‘I can do it!’ attitude.
In essence, hopeful people stay positive and persistent even when facing the hurdles and storms of life: an illness, work problems, or a divorce. They are also great at coming up with alternative ways of making things happen if things are not going according to plan. Snyder found out that high hope in people correlates positively with many lifelong benefits: better academic achievement, greater wellbeing, and lower levels of depression. “Young people with high hope set themselves higher goals and know how to work to attain them. So when you compare students of equivalent intellectual aptitude and past academic achievements, what sets them apart is hope. Because to hope, is to show perseverance and tenacity,” Snyder explained.
Why struggle builds strength in children
So how do we adopt this cognitive habit of being hopeful? And how do we instil it in others? In The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting, Brené Brown gives a poignant example of how much our attitude to failure can set ourselves – and our children and grandchildren – up for success or disappointment in life. She mentions her daughter’s swimming school classes where the kids had to learn the difficult manoeuvre of a tumble turn. Many of them were failing their first attempts and were met with the teacher’s thumbs-down. Was that too harsh, or a necessary kind of lesson?
Brown argues that depriving people – particularly children – of negative feedback won’t do them good. Instead, we have to let them experience the taste of both struggle and failure, which – when joined with a hopeful attitude and a healthy self-worth – can prompt them to strive for better.
There is nothing as rewarding as failing 11 times to come out successful at the 12th attempt. “Children most often learn hope from their parents,” Brown explains. “To learn hopefulness, they need relationships that are characterised by boundaries, consistency, and support. We also develop a hopeful mindset when we understand that some worthy endeavours will be difficult and time-consuming.”
“Hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking.” – Bréné Brown
Teaching hope through everyday moments
When my toddler son was three, we explored the art of playing board games. But not in a conventional, fun-filled and happy way. Our first games were full of tears, screams and tantrums as my little boy couldn’t comprehend that in order to win, he sometimes had to lose. Many, many times over. Until he either masters the skill, or his winning luck strikes. After a while, his little hope muscle flexed and each time he lost, he would say: “Let’s play! I want to try again”.
Dr Deirdre MacIntyre, a psychologist and co-founder of the Institute of Child Education and Psychology Europe, comments that hope is a skill we should nurture early in life. “In this hectic world of ours, we come up against innumerable obstacles to our plans. Without hope and all that it encompasses, when someone’s dreams reach an impasse, he or she may simply give up. By cultivating hope in the young minds of our kids, we can help them to reach their full potential and build their resilience and wellbeing.”
Hope is a skill for all of us
But this is not only for the generations we’re guiding, it’s for ourselves to master, too. In adopting a mindset of hopefulness, we improve our wellbeing, our relationships, our life outcomes, and our ability to handle adversity. And the key? Action. More than blind or passive optimism, “to be hopeful is to realise things can work out if you work at them,” says author Eric Liu. “Hope requires responsibility and agency.”
Habits that build a hopeful life
- They are not ashamed to turn to their friends for advice on how to achieve success.
- They tell themselves out loud they can succeed at whatever they want to do – ‘I can do it!’
- Even when in trouble, they believe things will most likely change for the better, and take steps towards making them so.
- They are flexible and look for different ways to achieve their goals.
- They are open to constructive criticism.
- They break their goals into smaller, achievable targets, and if one fades or doesn’t work out, they can aim for another.
WORDS: Alex Reszelska
This article was originally published under the title The Humble Art of Hope in Issue 38 – The Humble Art of Hope. You can purchase previous issues and enjoy more enchanting content here.
