Instead of just wishing that good things come our way, we are working on adopting hope as a mindset.

Hope is vital for our overall well being, as it gives us the will and resolve to move forward through adversity. For most of us, the default mode of the brain is to think about the future.

Meta Analysis show that 89% of people think that the future is going to be better than the past. That’s a pretty powerful statistic considering higher hope is consistently correlated to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, and psychological adjustment.

High hope individuals do not react in the same way to barriers as low hope individuals, instead they view barriers as challenges to overcome and use their pathway thoughts to plan an alternative route to their goals. This theory has been studied and tested for over two decades.

The key to the “Hope Theory” is that hopeful thinking leads to the ability to generate different routes to a goal, as well as the capacity and intention to use those routes.

Dr. Shane Lopez was a well respected psychologist and pioneered many of the studies done on hope as a mindset. Check out his thought provoking talk here on hope’s integral role in our lives.