What is Hope?

I recently attended a training session on the science of hope, and it helped me to reflect on growth, resilience, and human potential. Hope is not a vague emotion or a motivational concept. Hope is cognitive process that has been studied thoroughly with more than 2,500 peer-reviewed publications showing how hope works and the measurable, positive effects it has on people’s lives including well-being, achievement, and life satisfactionHope is not a feeling; it is a process or cognitive strategy that improves well-being. Well-being is the outcome. Hope is the process that drives it by helping us attain our goals through will power and pathways to get there. Across all age groups and life contexts, hope consistently results in higher levels of well-being.

Hope operates on two levels.

There is individual hope, the personal ability to define goals, map pathways, and sustain motivation.

There is also collective hope, which emerges in communities and institutions. Increased voter turnout, for example, is often a sign that collective hope is rising.

Both forms matter. Both can be strengthened.

Hope Can Be Taught

Because being hope-centered in life is a mindset and using hope is process, it can be taught. Children as young as three can learn the process and even teach it to their parents. That speaks to how practical and transferable the framework of hope is.

At the core of hope are three essential capacities:

• Goal setting is the ability to define clear, meaningful, and attainable outcomes. Hope begins with imagination and clarity for a bigger future (which was my very first email in this series). Vague desires will not work; only specific goals do.

• Will power is the mental energy to pursue and endure the journey toward those goals. This is the agency component of hope. You need the mental energy to take action, influence outcomes, and continue even when the work becomes difficult. Note here that the sleep, eating, and exercise increase this mental energy (read about this more here).

• Way power is the capacity to identify multiple routes toward a goal and to find new ways when barriers arise. This pathways component to hope is the ability to problem solve, reroute, and stay flexible when the original plan no longer works.

Hoping and Wishing Are Not the Same.

A wish is a goal with will power and no way power. Hope is both will and way, and it pairs internal drive with external direction. Wishing is passive. Hope is active.

And the outcomes speak for themselves.

• In mental health, higher hope is linked to greater emotional regulation, lower anxiety and depression, and stronger adaptive coping.

• In relationships, hopeful individuals show stronger social connectedness, lower parenting stress, and better parent-child dynamics.

• In education, hope improves attendance, classroom engagement, GPA, graduation rates, and is a better predictor of college success than standardized test scores.

Hope begets more hope.

Even one hour a month of structured hope mentoring can increase a person’s sense of direction and belief. Most of this training focuses on working backward from a goal to map out multiple pathways, reinforcing both strategy and motivation. With continued practice and mentorship, progress accelerates.

Business Impact is Real

In organizational settings, the effect is measurable. Moving an employee from no hope to slightly hopeful can:

1) Double their well-being

2) Reduce burnout by 20 percent, and

3) Increase retention by 25 percent.

Moving someone into a high-hope zone produces even greater gains.

When employees share collective hope in their organization and its leadership, the benefits expand further. Teams report lower burnout, stronger engagement, deeper commitment, and higher levels of goal attainment.

Hope is not a luxury in business. It is a system of thought. One that can be taught, practiced, and used to help people grow.

The Process of Losing Hope

Despair is not the opposite of hope. In despair, we still care deeply about our goals; we're simply grasping for a path we can no longer see. The true opposite of hope is apathy: the point where we stop reaching, stop caring, and stop believing that effort matters at all.

If hope is a process that lifts us toward our goals, then another process is quietly at work, pulling us in the opposite direction. The descent into apathy doesn't happen in a single moment. It unfolds through a progression, each step seemingly small, yet each one carrying us further from the possibility of hope:

Hope → Anger → Urgency → Despair → Apathy

This is the quiet descent. It begins with the disruption of momentum.

When hope is working, we are activated by goals, pathways, and mental energy. We believe there is a future worth striving toward and that we have influence over reaching it.

But when progress is blocked by failure, resistance, or unforeseen obstacles, then anger often emerges. Yet anger isn’t inherently negative. It means we still care deeply. We still want our goals and we are reacting to the gap between where we are and where we believe we should be.

But if we lack the tools to process anger constructively, it evolves into urgency, which drives impulsive choices and amplifies fear and anxiety. In urgency, decisions are driven by fear of loss rather than vision for gain.

And when urgent efforts fail or stall, we begin to lose faith. This is where despair enters. Despair is more than sadness; it is the quiet surrender of belief over time. The mind whispers: Maybe this isn’t possible. Maybe I’m not capable. Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.

Still, even in despair, we feel look for options including desperate measures. We still want the goal, but we are short on options. If we sit in despair too long though our spirit begins to numb and we stop looking for ways forward. We stop reaching out. We stop caring.

And that’s when we arrive at apathy.

Apathy is not a loud collapse but a silent withdrawal. When hope is the engine of purposeful action, apathy is the stall of internal disengagement and the belief that nothing will make a difference.

This progression reveals two truths worth noting:

1. Despair is not the bottom. Apathy is. When someone is in despair, they still want something better. They still have willpower, even if they losing the way power. If someone is in despair they can be reached. But if they are in apathy, it maybe too late because all desire has withered. Rebuilding hope means catching people, ourselves included, before falling that far.

2. Anger is not the enemy. It is the closet cousin to hope. Anger shows you’re still in the game, wrestling with paths, and caring about the outcome. That’s why, when helping others, or navigating your own setbacks, it’s important to see anger not as a failure of character, but as a signpost to change pathways by reframing, redirecting, and recovering both will power and way power to our goals.

Understanding this emotional progression isn’t about diagnosing weakness. It’s about regaining control. Because when you can recognize where you are in the cycle, you can reclaim the path upward.

Hope can be rebuilt.

Staying in the Game

Hope is not about perfect circumstances or uninterrupted progress. It’s about staying in motion when clarity fades and outcomes feel uncertain.

Hope can unravel, it can also be rebuilt. Rebuilding hope starts by asking better questions:

• What’s the goal that still matters to me?

• What new paths can I imagine or explore?

• Who can help me generate options when I feel stuck?

• Where am I giving up not because the goal is unreachable, but because the path got blocked?

We don’t need certainty to move forward. We need energy and strategy. We need to know that when things get hard, the move is not to quit, but to use hope to adjust.

So whether you're leading a team, setting a new goal, or helping someone find their way forward come back to this simple principle:

Hope is a process to improve our well being. Stay in the game.

Because hope isn’t a feeling we wait for. It’s the process we return to again and again.