Hope Matters
by Rebecca Crichton
Happy New Year?
Perhaps we need a new greeting for 2025. Something that acknowledges the losses and stresses of 2024. For many, this year is starting with heightened fears, based on both realities and imaginings. There are reasons aplenty to be anxious. Whether we consider the political or personal, we can anticipate challenges and events that undermine and upset our sense of safety and equilibrium.
Martin Seligman, ‘Father of Positive Psychology,’ wrote his ground-breaking book Learned Optimism in 1990. A cognitive psychologist, Seligman has trained athletes and salespeople to recognize how the way they think and speak about events in their lives can play a meaningful and even a decisive role in their successes.
Studies of how brains work support the fact that we are hard-wired to see the negative so we can avoid dangers we perceive in our environments. That inward wiring protects us and can also trip us with a kind of hypersensitivity, a super vigilant stance triggered by situations that seem dangerous.
Adversity and how we respond to it, is where Seligman and his fellow researchers offer help. It is not the event itself that is the problem, it is the way we respond to it. Our default reactions to things going wrong are where learning how to manage our reactions can make a difference.
Seligman describes the explanatory style that differentiates how pessimists and optimists encounter the world. Seligman refers to them as the Three-P’s.
- Personalization: Optimists blame bad events on causes outside of themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves when bad things happen.
- Permanence: Optimistic people believe bad events to be temporary happenings rather than permanent failures; pessimists point to permanent causes.
- Pervasiveness: Optimistic people compartmentalize, while pessimistic people assume that failure in one area of life represents failure in life as a whole.
Summarized simply, the optimist’s outlook on failure might be described as: “What happened was an unlucky situation (not personal), and really just a setback (not permanent) for this one, of many, goals (not pervasive).”
Whether one is an optimist or a pessimist, there is another, perhaps more critical attribute that can make a significant difference in how we enter this new year: Hope.
I’m defining Hope as the deep recognition of life’s capacity to see ahead and imagine something different and better. Don’t let others dismiss your hope as false. We don’t know what the future holds. We can plan, dream, imagine, and strategize. And then…
A friend reminds people when they start the downward spiral of things that can go wrong, that there are also happy surprises, new experiences, and discoveries we don’t anticipate. There might be new friends and colleagues, new positive interactions with the world.
Many years ago, another friend offered to pray for a me as I awaited a minor surgery. She didn’t know what, exactly, to ask for, given the inherent uncertainty of the situation. We both decided that wishing me ‘the best possible outcome,’ seemed like a good intention to send into the universe.
That seems like a good thing to lead with this January:
May the New Year provide the best possible outcomes for the challenges that face us. May there be opportunities for learning, laughter, and connection. May we nurture and be nurtured by Hope.