What Hope Is and Why You Should Care
In this week’s episode of the podcast I am going to take a look at what hope is and why you should care.
I got a question on Twitter the other day that I decided to answer here on the podcast in addition to responding directly. The question was, “With all the stuff that’s going on how do you stay hopeful about everything? It feels trivial to be concerned with my stuff when there’s so much happening in the world.”
Short answer: I see you and I hear you. The weight of all the mayhem in the world gives me pause, too. However, I actively choose to focus on the things that I can control. That’s not always easy, but it is always necessary.
If there is something I can do, I need to be brave enough to do it. If not, I need to flourish in my spot so that my influence grows. If I want to be able to tackle bigger problems, I have to build a bigger platform.
At this point in my life, The only thing I fear is not doing what I’m on this earth to do. That’s it. If you are feeling hopeless, what is it you fear?
What is Hope?
If we turn to the dictionary, Merriam-Webster has multiple definitions for hope:
1: to cherish a desire with anticipation, to want something to happen or be true
2: to expect with confidence
So, hope is a good thing. How could anybody be mad at hope?
Hope is the ultimate act of defiance. When you feel like everything is giving you reason to doubt yourself or feel fear about your future, choosing to be hopeful is the height of rebellion. It’s saying “yeah, I heard all that AND I still have hope.”
Hope is important. Hope enhances your personal commitment to whatever is going on in your life right now. If you’ve been working on an obstacle for a long time, hope helps you commit to overcoming that obstacle and any others that may follow.
Hope is greater than fear. And it’s heavier. Fear is fake so hope definitely has more weight.
Hope is like car keys. It starts a powerful machine, your thoughts and confidence.
Hope is confident expectation. Hope isn’t silly, it doesn’t ignore the world, it acknowledges what’s going on and is confident about what’s to come anyway.
Why hope is under attack
Haters attack your hope because they know hope is powerful. Hope lives in your thoughts which is your most powerful zipcode.
On this podcast my guests and I talk a lot about the power of your thoughts, self awareness, self talk, self esteem, etc. The overarching theme is to stress how much impact exists in controlling how you choose to interact with the world. This affects how you show up in your personal relationships, at work and everywhere.
Why you should care about hope
One of the most incredible feelings you’ll ever experience is hope. Hope occurs when we totally focus our expectations on something. Your hope is like a wish for something to happen and there’s power in your wishes!
Hope plants seeds of belief. Whenever you really want something, having hope is an indication that it could actually occur. Hope can germinate into a whole new existence. (See what I did there with seeds and germinate?)
Your life can be enhanced simply by having hope. This personal commitment helps you sharpen your focus and find a way to create the end result you desire.
Hope pumps up your ability to be honest with yourself. Honesty is critical for self awareness and is required in order to feel hopeful. We’ve all experienced times when we were fooling ourselves about something, such as a relationship or work situation.
But to have hope, we’re forced to be honest about what we’ve done to create the obstacle we’re dealing with. Only if we tell ourselves the truth about something can we move toward changing it and experiencing hope.
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Hope energizes you. For example, if you want your work life to be better, you can draw upon the hope within you and it will energize you to show up the way you want to show up regardless of what’s happening at work.
If you want more meaningful work, better connections with the people you work with or more satisfaction out of the work you’re doing, all of that is rooted in the hope that you can have a better career, that you can have the career you dream about. If nothing else, you have hope that you can stop hating the career that you have.
The next step is then to ask yourself, “What can I do to make my dream career happen?”
Hope creates a personal sense of responsibility and ownership. This is powerful because if you feel like the things that are making you unhappy are happening to you, instead of being involved in them, you feel like a powerless victim. Hope convinces you that you can truly affect a change in your own life.
Hope connects you with inner wisdom. When you’re clueless about how to solve a difficult issue, you fall back on hoping the issue will be solved somehow. Coaching is awesome because we don’t have to have all the answers, we ask great questions and these questions help you connect with your inner wisdom.
The answer is floating around in your mind, it just got a little lost. So hope helps you gather those thoughts and re-focus them on what you’re trying to do to change your situation.
Hope fertilizes your imagination. It makes you think about things you haven’t thought of before. In the day-to-day, when you’re going along doing what’s expected of you, you don’t have to be particularly creative.
If you reach a point where you don’t know how something is going to come together, hope is what fuels your imagination and creativity. Those are critical when you’re hoping to grow or change something in a positive way. You stretch yourself by considering solutions you hadn’t considered before.
How Hope and Confidence Are Connected
Earlier I said that hope is confident expectation–to expect with confidence. Confidence is leaning into things that you have already done as evidence that you can do new things. Your confidence fuels your hope, so these two things are closely connected.
Hope and confidence both come from deep within you. The best form of strength and power in your life is absolutely within your control because it’s within you. It’s your thoughts and your desires. Hope and confidence are available to you at any time you want to tap into them.
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Hope and confidence are your green light and your ‘on’ switch. Sometimes what you want to do can only be done if everyone around you buys in, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes all that is required for change is for you to get turned on. And hope and confidence can be the on switch for you and help you discover and strengthen who you really are.
Possessing hope and confidence enable you to do incredible things and believe the unbelievable. If you want to change your life, recapture the joy in your career and do the things only you can do, hope is critical.
The good life you deserve is within reach if you choose to have hope.
Let go of self-doubt and negativity and discover all of the power that’s within you by embracing the confidence and the hope that you can have what you want.
One of the most important things about hope is that it prevents you from giving up. You may be thinking, you haven’t given up on anything. Are you sure? In next week’s podcast we’ll look at the different forms of giving up and how you can recover.
