If anxiety and negative thinking have left you feeling hopeless, you are here on purpose, and I have a message especially for you.
I Called Bullshit
As I was developing The Hart Habits, I came across a verse that said "love always hopes." I'd personally been in plenty of places where love, specifically, had left me feeling especially hopeless.
Before anything else: if you're feeling hopeless right now, I understand. I've been there. And you matter, that's why I'm here, writing this. If you need support right now, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available anytime, call or text 988. We want you here. I want you here.
Hope is a skill you can actually learn, practice, and get better at. But it turns out hope is also, scientifically, an outcome of practicing the other nine Hart Habits. I didn't know that when I started this process. It just turned out to be true.
Hart Habit Ten: Hope
The tenth and final Hart Habit is Hope. The declaration: I maintain or find hope, even when it's not easy.
It's easy to say "just find hope, just hold onto it," as if that's all there is to it. I've personally been in places where I couldn't have found hope if I wanted to. I did want to, and I couldn't find it anywhere. I had to reach for practical tools that felt safe, the same system I'm sharing with you now. They worked. They got me through those hopeless stretches. That doesn't mean I never go through hopelessness or anxiety anymore. It means I now have tools to get through it, and to actively build more hope in my life overall.
Hope Is a Thinking Process
Hope has been studied by scientists, what it is, how it works, what it actually does for people. The clearest framework for this comes from psychologist C.R. Snyder's Hope Theory, first published in 1991 and later expanded in his book The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here. What Snyder found is that hope is a thinking process made up of three parts: goals, pathways, and agency.
If it's a thinking process, that means it's something we can apply for ourselves. If we can become conscious of our thoughts, we can apply this process to them.
Goals
The first element is goals. This loops back to Hart Habit one, Self, knowing and understanding who you are, what matters to you, your boundaries, your visions. It also pulls in a bit of Habit seven, Show, putting your visions into written, audible, artistic, or any other tangible format.
The first part of hope is having goals of your own, taking the time to actually know yourself and what you want. If you're feeling hopeless, start there: what do you want? What are your goals?
Pathways
The second element is pathways, how you can actually reach those goals. What's distinct about this part of the research is that it isn't pie-in-the-sky fantasy thinking. It's about realistic pathways, the routes that genuinely exist for you to get there. Scientifically, this is about facing the truth, Hart Habit two, head-on, not blind positive thinking.
Agency
The third part is agency, your actual ability to travel those pathways and reach those goals. I break this into two pieces.
Internal agency is about your thoughts. Yes, physical agency matters too, and it varies a lot for each of us, but what doesn't vary much is our ability to access our conscious thoughts, Hart Habit four. We often blame our capacity to hope, or not, on outside circumstances. But science shows hope has more to do with how we align our thoughts toward our goals, and endure the difficulties that inevitably come up, which is Endure, Hart Habit nine. By practicing the Hart Habits consistently, you build the capacity to access hope, because you've built the tools to tap into your own manifesting agency. You can ask and answer: what's the goal? What's the realistic path? What resources are around me? How can I move toward that goal, even a little?
External agency is the final, most crucial piece, and the one that ties hope to the people around you in a way none of the other nine Habits quite do. Everything up to this point has been internal work. Hope is the Habit that reaches outward.
Hope Requires Community
Connecting to community is how we find the pathways we can't generate alone. We don't have every pathway inside ourselves. We need people, support, and resources around us to help us find and actually use them. As we understand what those pathways look like, we understand our own agency better too, because now we know what our team looks like.
I love Pamela Slim's book The Widest Net, because a wide enough net catches plenty for all of us. We each have a real net of people in our lives, and as we strengthen our connections to each other, hope rises, and it gets easier for all of us, because we can lean on each other when we need to.
All the other Hart Habits feed into this. When you practice them regularly, you build relationships with room for people to be themselves, room for you to be yourself, trusting and edifying relationships you build together, not alone.
Wrap Up
If you're struggling with Hope specifically, you'll likely feel resigned to your circumstances, pessimistic, expecting the worst. If that's where you are, there's help. See above.
If you're not quite there, and just want to build this Habit intentionally, these steps will help, and so will practicing the whole framework together.
There's one more piece: an overview of how the whole Hart Habits framework fits together, which you can find on the Hart Habits Framework page.
When you practice Hope consistently, you'll start to feel optimistically expectant, regardless of circumstances. You'll be able to hold the full truth and weight of what we're dealing with, and still know that better things are coming, and that we'll work toward that better good together.
Recommended resources:
The Widest Net by Pamela Slim
The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here by C.R. Snyder
Question of the day: What goals do you focus on that give you hope?