It’s a new year. 2021. A new year offers possibilities. Some people use the start of a new year as a time to make plans, set goals, or make “resolutions.” A new year can feel like a “fresh start.” The start of a new year invites us to look ahead. Looking ahead with positive anticipation about the possibilities is hopeful. I expect most of us have never been more ready for a new year and a fresh start than 2021. While nothing is magically better or different with the change of one day from 2020 to 2021 on the calendar, a new year does offer us an opportunity to cultivate hope.

What is hope? The American Psychological Association defines hope as follows:

hope

n. the expectation that one will have positive experiences or that a potentially threatening or negative situation will not materialize or will ultimately result in a favorable state of affairs. Hope has been characterized in the psychological literature in various ways, including as a character strength; an emotion; a component of motivation that is critical to goal attainment; a mechanism that facilitates coping with loss, illness, and other significant stresses; or an integrated combination of these features. See also optimism. —hopeful adj.

Based on this definition, hope can be a powerful tool for your resilience and stress management. Here are some ways you can build more positive expectancy and hope into your attitude about the future.

  1. Hope is always a choice. Hope is about your perception of the future. Since the future hasn’t happened yet, you can choose where you focus your attention. You can choose to imagine possibility, potential, positive changes and outcomes. Given that the future exists in the present only in our imaginations, you can choose to imagine from a place of your best and the collective best of human potential. You can also choose to consider the collective tendency for the natural world to evolve and adapt. Focusing your attention on noticing signs in the world that are hopeful is a choice you can make daily.
  2. “Suffering, however terrible, is temporary”  Edith Eger, The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life. Recognizing that life challenges don’t tend to last forever opens a space to realize that, at some point in the future, “this too shall pass” (2 Corinthians 4: 17-18). When life gets hard, you can consider a time in your future where things will be different and not this hard. This thought is hopeful.
  3. Own your power to create circumstances that give you hope. Take actions that embody hope. When you plant bulbs in the Fall, you are taking an act of hope that spring will come and those bulbs will bloom. Some bulbs may not bloom, but many will. What is true concretely with bulbs is also true metaphorically about so many of your actions. You can choose small actions that you believe will produce positive outcomes for you and for others. You can choose growth as your pathway through challenge and you can choose to contribute to positive change in whatever way you can.
  4. Entertain possibilities, innovation, and creativity. Creating something new and considering new solutions contributes positively to your situation and the world. Creation is hopeful. Use your natural human abilities to create and problem solve to experience potential, possibility, and newness.
  5. Connect with something beyond yourself. When you connect in a positive way to yourself, others, and the world around you in alignment with your values, this feels hopeful. When you engage in acts that offer you meaning and purpose, this feels hopeful. When you engage in being part of a collective, a solution, a connection of mutual support, this feels hopeful. Connection in any of these ways fosters being a part of something, it fends off loneliness, and in this way, offers hope.

So when life is hard and times seem dark, you can choose hope by:

  • believing the hard times are temporary and shall pass
  • choosing to learn and grow from challenge so that you create something positive from it
  • take care of yourself and others with love and compassion
  • work creatively toward solutions and something larger than yourself
  • contribute to the positive future that you want to see

So here’s to hope in 2021! To you seeking out light when it is dark and if you can’t see light, to you becoming the light that you need to guide yourself forward.