Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (22 page)

Use these steps to increase your ability to think of multiple strategies and alternative ways to reach your goals. First, think about the steps involved in reaching your goal. Second, think about the different strategies that you have for reaching the goal. And third, in your mind, rehearse what you will need to do during the pursuit of your goal to be successful in reaching it. Also, anticipate the problems you might have in reaching your goal and the alternatives you can use to overcome the problems.

Then, one by one and in private, people were asked to dunk their hands in the bucket of ice water. Participants in the guided-imagery group tolerated pain almost twice as long on average as people in the control group. Notably, they generated more strategies for dealing with pain than the control group. Some engaged in distraction techniques, like focusing intensely on objects in the room or meditating on warm thoughts or beach scenes. Others tried to flex their hand, forearm, and bicep in ways that stimulated blood flow and conceivably moved the pain around. Although both groups were low-hope at the beginning of the experiment, pathways thinking made the difference.

When I received a postcard with a beautiful beach scene from my psychotherapy client, Ellie, I couldn’t help but smile. She had made it to Hawaii. This was a real victory of hope over fear, because Ellie was terrified of flying.

Ellie came to me because her husband had been promoted to a great new position at a military base in Honolulu. He had already moved out there and the government had paid for the family’s possessions to be loaded onto a container ship. Ellie’s job was to fly herself and the
kids, ages five and seven, from the Midwest to their new home—in less than three weeks. “I’ve got to do this, but I don’t know if I can,” she told me. “I haven’t flown in ten years and I promised myself I would never do it again.” Her last flight had been the kind that could turn normal fears into a full-blown phobia—multiple boarding delays, turbulence from takeoff to touchdown, a long wait on the tarmac before being released from the cabin. But Ellie was determined. She saw the move as a big adventure for the family, and she didn’t want her children to suffer from her fears, or worse, to learn them for themselves. “I picked up this anxiety from my mom,” she said. “I don’t want the kids to get it from me.”

Ellie and I drew up a plan based on a preferred treatment for phobias called systematic desensitization. We would start with a good dose of relaxation training and then expose her to imagined fears of flying, first introducing the least threatening and escalating gradually. At each stage, her fearful images would be countered by relaxation techniques until her anxiety went away or at least became more tolerable.

A good plan—until we hit a snag. The relaxation training gave Ellie a new set of skills, but she couldn’t make the simulated threats feel real enough for the desensitization to work. I thought hypnotherapy might help, but since I wasn’t trained in the technique, I referred her to a colleague. Ellie agreed to attend the session if I would join her. At the end of a marathon meeting with the other therapist, we still did not know if the treatment had worked. Ellie’s postcard was proof that she had succeeded in getting from Point A to Point B.

On the evening of April 29, 1992, much of America was watching television, taking in the violent images from the Los Angeles riots. That night, John, living in Southern California, was closer to the action than most but still safe in his home. A young black man himself, John related somewhat to Rodney King and the rioters. He understood why people
were angry: King’s beating by a band of cops had been captured on video, swift justice was promised, and then the court let King’s assailants skate. But John knew violence wasn’t the answer.

That Wednesday night in California, the rioters chose fear and then they chose rage. Millions of TV viewers across the nation chose fear and retreated into their homes, only to watch nonstop news coverage of looting and beat-downs. John chose hope over fear. And he has done so again and again, every day for the last two decades.

Just a few days after the riot, on May 5, 1992, John, a twenty-six-year-old from Compton who had experienced the highs of acting alongside child stars and the lows of living in his Mitsubishi Montero for six months, became an activist and a social entrepreneur. His desire to help kids was grounded in an important post-riot discovery that shaped his philosophy about growing people and changing communities: “Three thousand buildings were burned or vandalized during the riots. None of them were homes. You don’t burn what you own.” What if kids learned how to
own
their futures?

John wanted to give young people a voice and create pathways to a secure financial future through a start-up community organization. John Hope Bryant’s small community center, Operation HOPE, struggled in the beginning. But in twenty years, it has grown into three-hundred-plus city centers serving youth, helping them learn the skills and language of money and believe in the promise of the future. To date, thanks to John’s hands-on hope, more than one million young people have learned the ways of personal finance. Nearly $1.5 billion has been raised to address urban poverty, and nineteen thousand Hope Corps volunteers have been mobilized into service. Now John takes his message on the road. He says he teaches people how to build “hope capital” through the “magic of compounded hustle.” He advocates for the financial futures of American kids and young people around the world. At the heart of every service and speech that John and his colleagues provide is that if you are financially literate you have more pathways in life. If you do not use a bank and instead frequent check-cashing centers,
the financial system works against you, limiting your options with high interest rates and no opportunities to accrue wealth. If you have some knowledge about how to manage your own finances and work with a local bank, you can usually find ways to save for the future and make ends meet today.

School report cards, annual reviews at work, and investment portfolios typically are mixed, providing some good news and some bad. We gravitate to the bad news and tend to skim over the good. What happens when we study what we do best before we focus on our deficits? That approach opens up more pathways to success.

At the beginning of my teaching career, reading student evaluations was torturous. Students must have figured the new guy needed plenty of feedback. I can still quote the comments that really rocked me. In 1993, it was “You have poor diction.” That’s exactly what a south Louisiana transplant didn’t want to hear. In 1998, another student wrote, “Sometimes I can’t follow you.” That came after I spent months trying to make course material accessible and easy to follow. In 2005, “You seemed to play favorites in class” made me question how inclusive an educator I was.

Working on diction, giving lectures in a more lockstep fashion, and including more students in class discussions made me a less flawed average teacher. But the fix-it mentality took only me so far. When I began to pay attention to what students saw as my strengths, my growth accelerated, and I became an award-winning teacher at my university. For example, students noted that I was able to bring material to life with case studies and stories. That feedback led me to write down more accounts of my clinical and consulting work so that I had more ready-to-share stories that illustrated points. I also chose supplemental readings from nonfiction books and magazines to show students how concepts played out in the real world. Finally, when I couldn’t find a
textbook that brought positive psychology to life for students, I wrote my own and filled it with vignettes and exercises.

Thinking about how to do more of what you do best can lead you to many pathways to growth. Focusing on your strengths first also keeps your mind open to fixes for your weaknesses. Say your child comes home with a report card with four A’s, a B, a C, and an F. Leading with a discussion of the A’s and B will help you and your child come up with lots of ideas for making sure the F doesn’t show up again. Jumping on the F first will shut your child down emotionally, and that will undermine her pathways thinking.

Writer Dave Eggers is best known for his book
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
and his screenplay for
Where the Wild Things Are
. He’s also known for his untiring and creative support of other writers. But if you enter the Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, you won’t see any writers at work—at least not right away. You have to walk to the back of the store, to the big room behind the shelves filled with items like beard extensions, dolphin tears, eye patches, skull-and-crossbones dice, remedies for scurvy, and wooden planks by the foot. Then you will understand why pirates also need the many colorful books on display.

What you find at
826 Valencia is a tutoring center that mentors young writers—or perhaps a mentoring center that provides help with writing. It makes a caring adult available to every child who walks in. Its mission is “supporting students ages 6–18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the literary arts.” The 826 mentors accept students at all levels of skill and work with them shoulder to shoulder on school assignments, college essays, and creative projects. The students’ final creative work is then published in the books, magazines, and newspapers on sale in the store and online. All programs are free of charge.

Eggers was a struggling writer living in Brooklyn when he first spotted the resource gap that led to the founding of 826. As he recalls, “So many of my friends who were teaching in city schools were having trouble working with their students, keeping them at grade level, in reading and writing in particular.” Eggers asked his friends what they needed to help the kids. Their answer: “More people, more bodies, more attention, more hours, more expertise from people who have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one.”

Eggers knew many writers with flexible daytime hours who could share their love of words and storytelling. What was needed was a way to connect writers, students, and teachers. He took the idea with him when he moved to San Francisco, and there, with a dozen or so friends, he found a storefront at 826 Valencia Street, where they planned to set up a tutoring center. One big problem: the space was zoned for retail; the landlord said they had to sell something. Eggers and his buddies were stumped until someone pointed to the old wooden beams overhead: “It really kind of looks like the hull of a ship.” Which became the spark that ignited inspiration: San Francisco’s “only independent pirate supply store” opened its doors in April 2002.

Despite the weeks of setting up the center and the sign out front offering “help with all your English needs,” no students showed up. Not one. Eggers filled this new resource gap by persuading seasoned educator Ninive Calegari to join the team. Calegari knew how to spread the word to local schools, teachers, and parents, and soon, with the pirate supply shop paying the rent, Eggers and his band of merry tutors were sitting shoulder to shoulder with kids, listening to their ideas and helping them put those ideas on paper.

The next big leap came when the writer-volunteers realized that the students were just like them: they got more excited about writing if their work ended up in a published book rather than in a bin of forgotten essays. The 826 team learned in a couple of months what it took me years to discover: not a single kid in America wakes up excited about the opportunity to raise his school’s reading, writing, and math scores.
Children want to learn skills that matter. They will learn what we have to teach them if those skills are attached to a meaningful product or outcome. The staff started designing projects that would teach groups of students, whether at the 826 storefront or at their neighborhood school, how to write essays and stories worthy of being bound in a book and sold. “Now we’re sort of addicted to the book thing,” Eggers said in 2008. “The kids will work harder than they’ve ever worked in their life if they know it’s going to be permanent, know it’s going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they’ve thought and said, that we’ve honored their words, honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts—this attention that we give to their thoughts.”

Eggers and Calegari cofounded 826 National, which now includes eight affiliated centers in cities across the country. On a recent work trip to Washington, D.C., I visited the Museum of Unnatural History. Dana Carlson, the museum curator, greeted me. She is responsible for artifacts that include saber-tooth dental floss, mega-sand, and primordial soup, all of which are for sale to visitors. Dana then introduced me to Joe Callahan, the executive director of 826 DC, who told me that 1,039 local volunteers had provided more than 11,500 hours during the 2010–2011 school year, serving some 1,547 students in the D.C. metro area. On the day of my visit, twenty mentors were sitting alongside students—helping with homework, discussing drafts of new short stories, or just chatting. I was struck by the buzz in the tutoring room, a sound of happy engagement that we don’t often associate with school classrooms.

My next stop is the 826 Los Angeles location. The Echo Park Time Travel Mart is a convenience store for time travelers. Their motto: “Whenever you are, we’re already then.” Seems like a hope researcher ought to visit that one.

You’ve explored one alternative after another. You’ve filled every gap you can identify. But you still don’t have the resources you need to get
from Point A to Point B. There’s one more secret weapon used by hopeful people: borrowing the hope of others.

When I was twenty years old I was determined to go to a good graduate school (out of Louisiana) and get a Ph.D. in psychology, followed by a great job. I had good grades, adequate test scores, and strong letters of recommendation. Trouble was, I did not know how to type (which made filling out fifteen applications challenging), I was a poor writer (my essays were atrocious), I had rarely been out of Louisiana, and I had never been on a plane. To make my dream come true, I had to risk letting lots of people know about my goal—and then ask them to invest in it by sharing their resources with me. My girlfriend and her mom stepped up by typing my applications (while I was learning to type). My older brother helped me answer questions about myself and my future and then proofed and reproofed my essays. Friends at work who had taken to calling me “college boy” gave me the confidence to apply far and wide. A family friend who had accumulated hundreds of thousands of miles on sales trips donated the airline ticket so I could visit my top-choice school. And my mom put “Shane getting into graduate school” on her prayer list at church.