What is hope? Why does it matter? What does YOUR hope look like, and how can it help you grow? This week’s self-belief challenge is all about hope and YOU.
Here’s why HOPE is a part of self-belief.
Self-belief is a Young Professional skill that’s a powerful mix of motivation, resilience and a positive attitude. It will get you far in life… but it’s like a muscle you have to train.
HOPE is a part of resilience, and resilience is a part of self-belief.
What is resilience?
Resilience is about how well you can recover from setbacks. Struggling to get job interviews? Didn’t get the exam results you wanted? Trying to get things done when you’ve got a cold? These are all examples where flexibility, hope and belief in yourself can help you look after yourself and get to a place where you want to be.
Growing your self-belief skills – let’s talk about hope.
This week’s challenge will help you explore what your hope looks like, feels like, and how you can help it grow.
Hope is about having something to look forward to. Believing good things can still happen. It’s about seeing all your best qualities and looking forwards.
Now take a moment to think about what hope means to YOU. In YOUR life.
You might surprise yourself with the answers.
Important questions to ask yourself
- The poet Emily Dickinson said, “hope is the thing with feathers.” What does this mean to you?
- Can you think of a time when you stopped hoping?
- Where do your sources of hope come from? Other people? Your skills and personal qualities? Things you can’t control, or things you can?
- How has your environment shaped how much hope you have?
- How has hope (or lack of it) shaped decisions you’ve made in life?
- How have your hopes changed as you’ve grown older?
- What are three things you hope for?
- What needs to happen so you can have more hope in your life?
Only you know the answers to these questions. And there is no wrong answer.
It might help to think about ways to put power in your hands as much as you can. Because hope is about how you see life as well as about opportunity. You can hope to win the lottery, but there’s not much you can do about it!
- Perhaps you can boost your hope when you accept a tricky situation, like exams coming up, and choose to change your attitude towards it.
- You might choose to explore information and resources that could help you achieve what you want.
- Perhaps you will find hope by pushing on through bad times until you feel like you’re finally at the top of the mountain.
- Maybe you’ll boost your hope levels by choosing to mix with people who will help you, not hold you back.
We cannot control everything in life. But we can control ourselves. And we can choose to see hope as something important that needs to be looked after and made strong. With hope we can achieve more and enjoy the journey.
Hope matters. So do you.
Become friends with your own hope.
This article was first published on 18th February 2019.
This article was updated on 21st December 2021.
