Life is hard. Even when things are going your way, life is still hard.
And there is always going to be a disconnection between your current situation and what you believe your current situation should be. I describe that as stress or anxiety.
I don’t have a job versus I should have a job, or I don’t have a girlfriend versus I should have a girlfriend, are two straightforward examples of this.
And it is this disconnect or stress that drives our levels of unhappiness.
And whilst there are some actionable things that we can be doing to bridge that stress, hope and optimism are the things that will eventually close the gap.
Hope is an interesting thing. Is it an emotion, is it a belief, or is it something we do?
I have always thought of hope as a belief or feeling, but we need to start thinking of hope as an act and something we do.
I listened to a recent podcast by Simon Sinek featuring Brian Collins and was struck by these quotes.
“To hope is to give yourself to the future. And that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable”.
“Optimism is a strategy for making a better world because if you assume that there is no hope, you can guarantee there is no hope.”
What I have been learning over the last few months is that hope is more than just belief, and hope is more than just a feeling.
Hope is made up of belief and our feelings. Still, more importantly, hope is the actions we take as we move towards better, and hope is the things we do to bridge the gap between what is and what we want.
When we stop “feeling” hopeful, we need to start “doing” hope.
We need to choose to believe and commit our thoughts and actions towards hope so that our hope can be fully realised.
Yes - hope is a belief, but it is also a doing word.
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