By Charles Barnard
Hope. Hope is powerful. Hope can be a verb. It can be something you do. Hope is the fuel that allows people trapped in unimaginable situations to push forward. To escape. Where there is no hope there is only despair and death. Where there is hope there is joy and life. For many people the question is how do I find hope in hopelessness? How do I hope when I see no hope?
The short answer is by developing the right belief systems. As I have written in the past, beliefs are incredibly powerful at shaping behavior. Even when you believe a lie, the belief will shape your behavior. Beliefs are incredibly important, but they only impact us. They will impact our behaviors and our behaviors can start a ripple effect, but our behaviors do not automatically change our circumstances. Our beliefs can create hope and hope can be passed down from generation to generation. Actions guided by hope can change circumstances if not immediately over time. Hope and faith are deeply connected.
Hope gains in power when it connects with our rational mind. When we have evidence for our hope. Imagine a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. Just hearing the word cancer in a diagnosis can be demoralizing or even traumatic for people. Let’s assume the person is a pessimistic person who tends to dwell in hopelessness and also comes with the background that their mother and grandmother both died of breast cancer. They believed for years there was a good chance they would die of breast cancer. That belief needs to be changed.
Doing time line therapy and swish pattern work the belief “code” has been changed in their brain. To reinforce that change work the woman is given the assignment of reading about the hundreds of case studies of women who survived breast cancer. In fact, she is told the five-year survival rate for breast cancers that have not spread beyond the breast is 99%, and hers has not spread beyond the breast. She reads of many other women who have had mothers and grandmothers and aunts die of breast cancer but those individual patients survived. Her belief and hope that she too will survive becomes a firm foundation in her treatment and healing progression.
Now imagine a patient gets the news they have an inoperable brain tumor and there is no known treatment to halt its growth. Hearing that diagnosis can be traumatic to say the least. The doctors do what they need to do in terms of providing the prognosis. There is not one known case of anyone surviving this type of tumor for more than three years. Like the previous example this person had two close relatives die of the same type of tumor. They feared this would be their fate as well. Changing their belief system is encouraged and the person goes through interventions to do just that. They now believe it is possible their body could heal itself even though there is no known case where someone’s body has healed itself. Is their hope as strong as the previous example? Would yours be?
Hope is not only tied to beliefs, but it is deeply connected to faith. Faith thus can also impact your belief system. Faith is a huge topic in and of itself, but suffice it to say here your religious upbringing and beliefs associated with your religion has a large impact on your ability to hope. I will save any writings for the topic of faith to a future article, let me just say that regarding hope, there seems to be a direct correlation between the two. The stronger your faith, the more hope you have.
Belief in God is not necessarily going to make someone have stronger faith or hope in the context of the scenarios given above. Deists believe in a God who created all we see around us, but that God is not active in the creation. Theists believe God not only created all we see around us, but he actively participates within creation. It would seem reasonable, wouldn’t it, that a theist would have more faith – hope – than a deist because the theist would believe that God may intervene in their life and perform some sort of miracle while a deist would not have such a belief. For a theist, they would also readily accept the scholarly work of Craig S. Keener, PhD, in his two volume work Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. A deist would probably look at that work a bit more skeptically.
In summary, hope is one of the most important and powerful ideas we can hold onto. It creates powerful positive emotions. Hope itself is not an emotion. Hope doesn’t appear to have biochemical make-up in the body, but the emotions it triggers do. One of the dangers of fear is fear can trap hope. Hope though when properly fed and cared for cannot be contained, not even by fear. What do you feed hope? Examples. Lots and lots of examples of people who overcame hopelessness. Faith. Finding for yourself a worldview that fosters hope.
We challenge people with the worldview challenge and this question: do you really believe that what you believe is really real?” There are strong cultural influences that can shake the worldview people were raised with no matter where you live. First the Christian worldview and more recently a naturalistic worldview have had dramatic impact on the culture of all “westernized” nations and have been influencing the people who have been raised with those and other worldviews. Those cultural influences on a worldview can create incongruencies in the actions of people and can absolutely influence how much hope they have in “hopeless” situations.
To reiterate, the best way to ensure you will have hope in a “hopeless” situation is create the belief there is always hope and feed that belief by reading about people who have succeeded, overcome, or survived, watching videos of achievers, overcomers, or survivors, feed your mind with examples of miracles, and check your worldview and make sure it supports hope.
https://growthmimindsettrainingacademy.com/Success-Institutes-hope
