I highly recommend Brené Brown’s book Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. Full of complex ideas and stunning revelation, it spoke to me specifically about hope. Hope is not (as I previously thought) necessarily a warm, fuzzy emotion or feeling. Brown says it’s not a feeling. She says that in fact hope is simply a way of thinking. A cognitive process. This is great news to me because even if we’ve never been hopeful we can change. We can change our brains! 

We may learn the habit of hopefulness from our caregivers. I, for one, did not learn the hopefulness habit from my caregivers. In their defense, they never had anyone teach them that hope is learned. Being hopeless was a way of life for my original family. Then, after surviving my traumatic childhood I carried the belief system of hopelessness into my adult life. I absolutely had the three “p’s” of hopelessness shared in Brown’s book. The three p’s are personalization, permanence, and pervasiveness. Personalization is when a situation arises that reinforces hopelessness as personal to you. It might sound like “this always happens to me.” Permanence might sound like “it’s going to be like this forever.” Pervasiveness is when an idea defines you and your beliefs as if “my whole life is going to be like this.” 

I didn’t cause my habit of hopelessness, but it was my responsibility to change it. I started to challenge my thinking. What if what I was thinking was not true? What if I believed that life was out to serve me not hurt me? What if I wasn’t cursed? Just being willing to ask the questions loosened the vice grip that hopelessness had on my heart. That small window was enough for me to start developing new habits. I didn’t just start thinking differently but I was also able to actually reset my reticular activating system (the brains’ secretary) to be on the look out for evidence that supported my new budding belief system. I didn’t know then that I was creating neural-pathways to grow my new habits of hope. 

It wasn’t until I read Brown’s description of hope that I truly understood that hope has a formula. 

Per the research from American psychologist Charles Richard Snyder, hope is actually a trilogy of goals, pathways, and agency. All hope begins with realistic goals or knowing where you are want to go. It has pathways, which refer to having a way to achieve the goal not just one way, but with a multitude of options. Agency is knowing you have or can develop the traits needed to obtain the goal. If we truly want to be hopeful, we have to work on our perspective and on our personal characteristics but at least we now know that hope is obtainable. Life is never hopeless.

—Kristina Dennis, life coach