Hope Wins: Inside the Science of Hope

“America, hope is making a comeback.” Michelle Obama’s words at last night’s Democratic National Convention captured the sentiment among Democrats right now: “A familiar feeling that has been buried too deep for far too long… the contagious power of hope.” If you talk to most Democrats these days you’ll hear a version of this: “I was feeling anxious, depressed, checked out, hopeless. I felt despair about our future, but then Kamala Harris entered the race for President, and everything changed.”?

And if you ask people to name the emotions they feel right now around the Harris Walz ticket, I’d bet they would say hope and joy. Hope is powerful and contagious, as Obama says. It works in mobilizing voters and it works when you’re leading people.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz intuitively understood that we need joy and hope to participate in civic life. Hope wins elections, because voters feel inspired and most important, they feel they have agency to accomplish a goal! Hope helps us navigate through adversity. Hope helps us achieve our goals.

And here’s the amazing thing: Hope is a skill that can be taught. Hope is measurable. And we can practice hope when life is hard; in fact, hope is one of the only emotions where we use negative emotions to get to the positive emotions.?

My guest today studies the science of hope and she teaches hope. Kathryn L. Goetzke, MBA explains that hope is about belief in a positive future, but it’s also belief that we have the skills and tools to actually get there. When we have hope we feel 'I can take steps in that direction.' And that's so important for hope. Hope science is teaching how to feel good, how to get out of despair and into positive feelings, which include joy and optimism. It’s about getting from helplessness to inspired actions. Hope is acknowledging the hard part and saying, ‘it's okay, we have a plan to get there and we can do this.’”?

Goetzke says, “We need hope because we need to be moving towards something in our future; we call it future orientation. If we don't feel any hope, we're experiencing hopelessness, despair and a sense of helplessness. And when we get to that, that's when we're violent. That's when we die by suicide, that's when we turn to addiction. And so hope is really key to moving us forward in life and fulfilling our mission here on this planet and our purpose and engaging in humanity. It's key to life.”

Hopelessness is a two part equation.?

The opposite of hope is hopelessness, but also helplessness. When you deconstruct hopelessness, it is emotional, feeling the despair of hopelessness. But crucial is that we feel unable to change things for the better. Motivational helplessness is a feeling of hopelessness that arises when someone believes they have no control over their life. People with learned helplessness feel unmotivated, low self-esteem, and can't see how they might figure things out or succeed.

Goetzke explains, “If you're just in despair, but you feel like you have power to navigate it and manage it, you can get through it. But when you feel both despair and helpless to do anything, that's when it gets really dangerous. It's a two part equation.

"It's normal to feel moments of hopelessness. What's not normal is to not know how to manage it, and then when it becomes persistent and then when it becomes a clinical diagnosis like anxiety or depression.”

Michelle Obama asked the crowd last night to take the emotion of hope and “Do something” with it to win the election. Setting goals is an essential piece of maintaining hope. Goetzke explains that “part of teaching hope is about helping people move from helplessness to actions.”

How do we get into action when we feel hopeless?

I want to share two elements of Goetzke’s SHINE hope method, and they are probably familiar to you if you follow The Anxious Achiever! In her own life, Goetzke now understands that feeling hopelessness is a signal to pay attention. If “I'm experiencing hopelessness about something and I need to manage my despair and my helplessness around it. It's just a flag for me to pay attention to this and work on your emotions and get out of your helplessness into action. Do something about it. Don't just avoid it or let it fester. The first thing I teach is you've got to learn how to identify and manage your stress response. So your fear, your sadness and anger, you've got to learn how to manage those emotions in healthy ways, understand them, stop running from them.”

Everyone experiences moments of hopelessness. Imagine you get an email from a boss, you might be angry or sad and feel helpless to do anything about it. It's just normal. You get caught off in traffic, you go to the store and they're out of something you want or I mean, you get a poor grade or even a e. That's a moment of hopelessness. Kathryn recommends the 90 second rule to pay attention to emotions without reacting harmfully.?

This is a term coined by Harvard brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She discovered that we have a 90 second physiological reaction to a stress trigger. Imagine, says Goetzke, you get an email from your boss or someone says something unkind. You have a physiological response that makes it difficult to access critical thinking or problem solving. You're reactive. And that's when you might send a nasty email back, escalating the whole issue.?

Instead, practice taking 90 seconds to do nothing when you’re triggered. Taylor suggests: ?

“Look at the second hand on a watch. As soon as you look at it, you’re now observing yourself having this physiological response instead of engaging with it. It will take less than 90 seconds, and you will feel better. Of course, you can always go back to thinking those thoughts that restimulate the loop. There’s probably a thought somewhere in your brain of somebody who did you wrong 20 years ago. Every time you think of that person it still starts that circuit. When things are getting hot and you’re getting hot-headed, look at your watch. It takes 90 seconds to dissipate that anger response.”

The practice of managing stress responses is the first step in learning hope, Goetzke's research shows.

Step Two: Manage Limiting Beliefs

When we get stuck in thought traps , we build hopelessness and helplessness. I’ve been working with a neurodivergent executive. She struggles to manage her time and deliverables and feels like her disorganization will prevent her from ever getting promoted. Her thoughts punish her every day. Goetzke notes, “Often we get stuck in automatic negative thoughts or limiting beliefs, and we've got to replace those with affirming beliefs. If you have specific things that you're constantly saying— automatic negative thoughts— they just are so invasive. There's great science that they actually can help transition what we think about."?

The next time you mess up again, become convinced you’ll never meet your goals, or see a poll that shows the wrong candidate winning, or get rejected or passed over, intentionally replace the negative thought with a neutral or positive one. Try to choose hope.?

If replacing a negative thought with a positive one feels like too much (I get it!) remind yourself it’s science, and try it. Here’s what I do (and remember that I’m an extremely anxious, pessimistic person who mostly doubts myself).

Goetzke agrees: “We have to believe that. We have to really believe that and learn that what society tells us isn't necessarily true. And so we have got to be our own strongest, biggest advocate. Every person on this planet has value, has worth, is here for a reason, needs to feel loved, like all of these things. It's really about navigating life to figure out what that is and how to best engage with others. But there's a lot of people that say a lot of things negatively, and that just really, really makes our limiting beliefs even stronger. And so we've got to be so intentional about hope.”

Measure your hope here!? https://theshinehopecompany.com/measure-your-hope/

Morra