Read Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others Online
Authors: Shane J. Lopez
No creativity comes out of fear; we just don’t see possibility when we
are afraid, and fear can keep us running in small circles. We have more pathways to the future when hope edges out fear. Innovation comes out of hope; we create something out of nothing, then tweak, tweak, tweak until it works just right. Hope works because it broadens our thinking
and
because it fuels persistence. Big thinking without stick-to-itiveness is not hoping, it’s wishing.
Messages That Deny Hope
Everyone has been rejected. “No” stings for a long time, especially when you believe you truly were the right person for the team, club, school, job, or significant other.
“What makes you think you can do this job?” Some people open an interview with this question because they are genuinely curious about your self-assessment.
When Jane Brody, then twenty-four years old, and with only two years of newspaper experience, applied for a job as a science writer for the
New York Times
, an interviewer told her she was “foolhardy.” She replied, “If I didn’t think I could do the job, I wouldn’t be here.” It was just what he wanted to hear, and she has flourished in the role for many years.
When others don’t see our upside, it may be because they are stuck on our past or because their own fears keep them from taking a chance on us. Less open interviewers focus on a fixed set of criteria: “Maybe you’ve set the bar too high,” or “Most of our associates are Ivy League graduates.” Such statements suggest a fearful search for the sure thing. What interviewers forget is that sure things
just don’t exist.
The most damaging messages are those that creep into our own thinking, sabotaging us from the start: “I am scared to ask her out. She’s out of my league” or “If he didn’t get into that program, why would I?” or “No one will invest money in my business.”
Bottom line: Critiques and self-talk like these block your entry into schools, jobs, and relationships. They alter your life course. These path-changing messages steal our self-determination.
When we think about the future (in therapy or in any other change process), our emotional experiences are crucial to what we believe is possible. They can help us broaden or narrow our views; they can help us build new and durable resources or chip away at the resources we already have.
This is the message of research by Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina who calls her work “the broaden-and-build” theory of positive emotions.
Frederickson has shown that feelings like hope, happiness, and freedom are not just a welcome break from the serious stuff of life; they also have long-term survival value. Positive emotions broaden attention and cognition—when we feel safe and happy, we learn more easily and think about problems more creatively. We also become more goal-oriented and resilient.
In one experiment, Frederickson asked groups of participants to watch a film clip that induced one of four emotions—joy, contentment, anger, fear—or a control film inducing a neutral state. Afterward, the viewers were asked to list everything they would like to do at that moment. Those who had experienced joy or contentment came up with more possibilities than participants who’d watched the negative or neutral clips. When thinking about the future, they had kept open minds. They were ready to act. Those who experienced fear and anger tended to shut down their thinking.
The open-mindedness brought about by positive emotions helps us create resources, including new social bonds. It helps us maintain a sense of vital energy and then generates even more resources and pathways. Fredrickson calls this sequence the upward spiral of positive emotions. This upward spiral fuels our pursuit of the future.
One of my most challenging psychotherapy clients, Christina had a troubled past. On the surface, she seemed to be doing fine. She was accomplished, beautiful, and intelligent. As she summed it up, “On paper I look great, but when you get to know me you realize that I’m a total mess.”
When I started to work with Christina, she was doing well in a demanding MBA program, but she had no social life. Zero. The hour she spent with me was her most prolonged human contact each week. She didn’t know how to introduce herself, or make small talk, or pick up on jokes, much less navigate friendships. She was oddly “off” in almost every exchange.
She had grown up as the only child of an elder in a very strict church. Religion, family, and rules dominated her childhood, along with her father’s explosive rage at the slightest infraction. (I suspected more than emotional abuse, but Christina kept that door firmly closed during the entire five years I saw her.)
“What about your past can you let go, and what do you want to keep?” I asked her. Answering that question took months. Each week Christina would try to shed some of her damaged self, but it often frightened her even to think about new ways of doing things.
When she got her degree, her stellar record landed her a job with a tech firm that she’d really wanted. Her new goal for therapy was to become the person who could keep that job. She had made it through a formal interview, but ordinary give-and-take with colleagues was a daily obstacle course. If she sensed rejection, she would go into a weeks-long retreat. But over the next two years, she made slow but steady progress, and I saw her grow more confident about who she was becoming. She described feeling less burdened: “I feel more free, more open.” On that note, we started the next phase of therapy.
Many psychologists, consultants, and coaches help people detach
themselves from a heavy past and then stop. That fix-it approach doesn’t capitalize on the growth and change generated by helping the client reach for the future. (In Martin Seligman’s words, “
The best therapists do not merely heal damage; they help people identify and build their strengths and their virtues.”) Once Christina learned how to handle the social dynamics at her office, she set another goal. She told me she wanted to be “at the front of the room” as a trainer for her tech team. This would mean visiting the firm’s branch offices to work with new groups of MBAs and engineers—a huge social challenge for her. She also wanted to start dating, because, at age twenty-eight, she had never been on a date.
Christina signed up for a course in management training, but I thought she could also recruit her skills and strengths on her own behalf. “Imagine that you’re your own client,” I suggested. “You’re a fine strategic thinker who can sort through all the moving parts of a business. Maybe you can do the same thing with people and emotions.”
Open to my suggestions for participating in a carefully selected therapy group and for experimenting with unfamiliar situations, like having dinner alone in a restaurant, Christina also started to identify her own pathways. She joined several community groups, including a more progressive church with lively younger members, and signed up for an online match service. Soon she went on her first date, and then another.
I saw her less frequently, meeting only when she needed a psychotherapeutic booster shot. When she was transferred to a training job out of state, I gave her a couple of referrals, but it was clear she was ready to try life on her own.
Making sense of our past and facing our fears frees up the psychological resources we need to invest in the future. We start to tell the story of our lives in a new way—one that includes hope.
In the sweet spot of hope we have a healthy respect for the past and a passion for the future. We use the lessons (many derived from failures) and successes of the past to refine our goals, preview obstacles, and ward off hope killers.
In this sweet spot, the mind is open to what is next. Excitement and energy abound and fear becomes manageable. Pathways are plentiful when we right-size the risks in our lives.
We are naturally risk-averse creatures living in a world where risk is inescapable. Much of our risk management happens outside our awareness. For example, behavioral economists have repeatedly shown that loss aversion subconsciously motivates people even more strongly than an opportunity for gain. In other words, we are reluctant to give up a sure thing even if doing so gives us a good chance at something better.
We gain more conscious control when we become aware of our threshold for hope and our tolerance for stress associated with fear and risk. The emotional calculus done to buffer stress with hope in a risky situation is second nature to some people. For the rest of us, risk tolerance grows as we increase our pathways and resources in the face of challenges.
Risk that seems overwhelming triggers stress that can decrease mental flexibility. With fewer pathways we are more likely to become stuck or fail. To be successful in business and life, we must right-size our risk, realizing that one person’s exciting hope-filled enterprise might be another person’s dangerously high-risk gamble. When we take on right-risk opportunities—those that we have the requisite psychological resources to manage—we keep moving
futureward.
One Friday night in 1978 my mom stopped by our favorite restaurant, Joe’s Drive-In, to pick up fried chicken and sides. As usual, the chicken was delicious. So we were all surprised when my brother, sister, and I got a gut-wrenching case of food poisoning. My dad called Sonny, the owner of the drive-in, to tell him about the bad food (which both Sonny and the health department said was a first). He invited my dad over for an apology and a few beers and told my dad that he was ready to sell Joe’s and open up a new business. Dad saw this as a chance to be his own boss and leave oil field construction, which is how we came to own a low-slung cinder-block building and a few recipes.
Most businesses in America are similar to Joe’s, what economists call lifestyle businesses. These restaurants, retailers, and service companies are built to provide a sustainable living for a family or two and wage work for maybe a dozen employees. Hope is vital to the day-to-day operations. Every month you have fixed expenses to cover. Anything left over is for your family. Every month you come up with new ways to make ends meet.
First-time entrepreneurs like my family have no track record. There is no past business-owning experience that would make the bank and other funders more confident about loaning money. So the investors keep the purse strings tight. As a result, first-timers have to look for a low barrier to entry into business. And that low barrier plus Americans’ desire for better fast food explains the current food truck phenomenon.
With the proper license, recipes, talents, and $10,000 to $150,000, you can own your own modern-day chuckwagon. Taco trucks, which have been staples in some cities for decades, predated the food on wheels explosion.
Roy Choi’s opening of one of the first modern food trucks in Los Angeles, Kogi BBQ, featuring Korean short-rib tacos, started an American trend that now has caught on in Paris, one of the culinary capitals of the world.
Kristin Frederick, a California native
and culinary school grad, rolled out the first food truck in Paris, the hugely popular Le Camion Qui Fume (The Smoking Truck). Before she launched her burger truck, people said she would face insurmountable challenges, including the risk of trying to sell food that no one would buy. “
I got every kind of push-back,” said Frederick, who refers to herself as the Chief Executive Problem Solver. “People said ‘The French will never eat on the street. The French will never eat with their hands. They will never pay good money for food from a truck.’ ” And “You will never get permission from the authorities.” The naysayers were right about the Paris bureaucracies but Frederick rose to the occasion. “When someone tells me something is impossible I find it challenging.” She had to navigate four agencies before she was assigned her spot and days (no roaming around allowed for French food trucks). Like most entrepreneurs, Frederick proved she could tolerate the risks of the unknown and find ways around any problems. And, from opening day, she has sold every burger on every shift.
Pop-up stores also have become a popular alternative for new entrepreneurs looking for a right-risk opportunity. Trading a full-year lease for a rental of unused space for a month or two, they offer cheap ways to generate buzz for new companies.
Nate Demars became a business owner by launching a pop-up store specializing in high-quality men’s suits. Demars’s Pursuit targets men who need a suit for graduation, job interviews, and other special occasions with a streamlined inventory of fashionable and affordable suits. The store is near Ohio State University, where Demars hatched the idea in a business school entrepreneurship class. “
It’s a fresh idea in a boring old business.”
To date, Pursuit has been a success. It recently moved to its second pop-up location in Columbus and Demars is open to the idea of taking the shop on the road. What other business could you conceivably move from campus to campus on a week’s notice? Pop-ups are portable because risks and sunk costs are kept so low.
Food trucks and pop-up stores are start-ups that require little capital to sustain themselves. Larger start-ups, especially those that are producing
or manufacturing goods, have a higher barrier to entry. Along with hope, they need a great idea, some cash on hand, sound R&D, and a little luck. Sonos had all of these when formed in 2002.
Sonos founders had one big idea: to send music from the Internet to every room in a home, wirelessly. With a small amount of capital and no track record in tech hardware design and production, they were believed to be destined for the fate of almost every other gadget tech start-up: failure. Three years after its launch, its first product, the Zone-Player 100, was delivered and well received. Sonos had a chance.
As they began to capitalize on their initial success, the recession hit and risk of failure skyrocketed. When I asked how a then-smallish company survived the downturn, Sonos CEO and cofounder John MacFarlane said that it was having a “singular vision to fill every home with music.” It was that “focus that pulled us forward.” With that vision and the “great energy” it inspires in its leadership and employees, Sonos continues to come up with new routes to discovery and more ways to overcome obstacles. That singular vision also kept Sonos from trying to make quick money by putting out a line of products that would sell but not necessarily fulfill the mission.