Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.

― Jonas Salk

In this chapter, you are going to learn about the strengths that may be the most important for creating a better future: optimism and hope. In the last chapter, one of your tasks was to write about your best possible life. This is one of the go-to activities developed in positive psychology that people have found especially useful for increasing optimism and hope.

You have also started the PATH process, which began with a focus on the future in the first two steps. These involved touching your dream and sensing your most important long-term goals. This kind of looking forward to a better future and beginning to see how it is possible is what optimism and hope are all about.

While optimism and hope have been defined in several different ways, psychology has tried to define them in specific ways to make it possible to study them. In psychology, optimism is defined as generally expecting more good things than bad to happen in the future. In addition, while hope has sometimes been associated with something that may be false or unrealistic, in psychology it has been defined in a realistic and practical way that has to do with being able to reach our future goals.

The person who wrote the first textbook about positive psychology spent most of his career focusing on this kind of hope. His name is Rick Snyder and he defined hope in a way that uses the words of a saying that is probably familiar to most of you: “Where there is a will, there is a way!” In Snyder’s view of hope, there are two things that make a better future possible. The first is the “will” to make it happen and the second is a “way” or several ways to make it happen. So, hope is having both the will and the way to reach your goals for a better future.

This “will” and this “way” draw on some things that you have already learned about. The “will” to make it happen involves both the grit and the self-efficacy we covered during the second part of the challenge. You may remember that grit is perseverance plus having a purpose you are passionate about and that self-efficacy is the belief that you can do what it takes to reach a goal or fulfill that purpose. The “way” or ways of hope draw on the wisdom and creativity that you learned about at the end of the first part of this challenge. You may remember that wisdom is the practical knowledge we need for everyday life and creativity involves finding new ways to do something that is useful or beneficial for us.

In order to make hope happen and achieve what we hope for, we need to have a goal or purpose we want to achieve like what you envisioned in the best possible life activity and did for the first two steps of the PATH process. Once you have a goal or purpose that you are passionate about, you can work on increasing your will to create the pathways to it. In addition to having that consistent goal, the other thing you can do is simply to persevere, to just keep taking that next single step, which will also increase your self-efficacy.

Let’s say that a goal you are passionate about is to become a black belt in karate. The single step that begins this long journey might be looking for a beginner’s class that you can take. But let’s say that you aren’t able to find a karate class after a week of exercising your perseverance in looking through the local newspaper. This is where the “way” part comes into play and where exercising wisdom and creativity, along with a dose of self-efficacy, may help. For example, in the wisdom that comes from your personal experience, you remember that you have an old friend who took a karate classes a couple years ago.

You contact her and get the phone number of her old instructor who is currently not teaching but who happens to know three other instructors you can contact. So you are on your way to finding the class you need to start with. At this and every step of the way – especially when you are facing the biggest challenges – like the first test for your first belt – you may need to exercise and build two strengths we talked about. You may need to increase your belief that you can do it – what we defined as self-efficacy – as well as the discipline or self-control that it may take to practice. In Chapters 11 and 12 you learned about several proven ways to increase each.

The problem that many people have in trying using optimism and hope to reach their goals is that they often leave out that “way” part or what they need to do to get there! There is a common view about positive thinking that equates it with the kind of magical thinking that says if we only think about something it will suddenly appear in our driveway. One reason people may like to think about it this way is that if it is true, they won’t have to do a lot of work! It may also be that when we see someone else get something we know they have been thinking about, we may assume they got it just by thinking about it and don’t realize how much they may have actually done to work for it.

There was a study conducted by the psychologist Shelley Taylor that sheds light on this problem. She randomly assigned college students who were going to take a big test to two different groups. The first group was asked to imagine themselves getting back a big test with an A on it and the second group was asked to imagine doing what they thought it might take for them to get an A on the test. The second group not only did better on the test and got more As, they also spent more time studying and the time that they spent studying was strongly related to how well they did on the test.

During the first part of this challenge you were asked to write down three good things that happened every day as one of the tasks for many of the chapters. While this may not have always directly caused more good things to happen around you, just being aware and looking for them probably made it more likely you would find some of them and eventually do things to make some of them happen more often in the future. Similarly, thinking about getting an A on a test might not directly cause you to do better, but it may make it more likely by increasing your motivation to study.

This is how it may be with writing about your best possible life and envisioning a better future in first steps of the PATH process. This may increase your motivation and belief that you may get there. But the way to really make Snyder’s kind of hope happen is to use that motivation to begin to create the path you need to get there, and then of course begin to walk it. That what the rest of this challenge is all about.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

Here are tasks to enable you to increase and benefit more from optimism and hope:

First, there is a special video about a young boy who does something that he always wanted to do and his whole community celebrates with him. This an example of what is possible when we continue to work towards our most important goals even when sometimes they may seem out of reach.

Second, the next task is to complete the 3rd and 4th steps of the PATH process as described the Appendix, Guidelines for the PATH Process and videos that the appendix provides links for. The 3rd step is called Ground in the Now and involves identifying where you are now in relation to your long-term goals and the 4th step is called Invite Enrollment and involves inviting those you would like to have on your “dream team” to encourage and support you in working towards your goals and best possible life.

Third, this task is to do something to increase your pathways for “making hope happen” for you. It involves going back through this workbook and making a list of the lessons, exercises, videos, and questions that you think might most help you on your path to your best possible life. This will help you make the best use of what you have learned and done as a part of this challenge.

Fourth, there are reflection questions about what you can best use from what you have learned in this challenge, or anywhere else in your life, to enable you to achieve the goals of that best possible life. This will help you be more specific and go into more detail about what you can actually do to use what you have learned to reach your goals.