Hope is more than wishful thinking. It’s a quiet energy — and it’s something we can actually practise.
A client said something to me recently that’s stayed with me. We’d been working together for a while through some heavy ground of loneliness and loss of identity, and one day he realised that he was making plans for the future and stepping into the unknown with a new sense of drive and hopefulness.
He wasn’t sure everything would be fine. There were no guarantees. But something had shifted. He had caught a glimpse of possibility. And with that glimpse came something he hadn’t felt in a long time: energy.
That’s hope. And it’s more powerful than we often give it credit for.
Hope isn’t optimism
It’s easy to confuse hope with optimism — the sunny, everything-will-be-fine kind of thinking. But they’re quite different things. Optimism is a belief that good outcomes are likely. Hope doesn’t need that.
Looking online, I discovered the psychologist Charles Snyder, who spent much of his career studying hope. He described hope as a combination of two things: believing that goals are possible, and believing that you have the capacity to move towards them.
So his findings tell us that hope doesn’t need certainty. Just the sense that a path exists, and that you can walk it.
Here’s another quote I found which I think is helpful:
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense — regardless of how it turns out.”
— Václav Havel
That framing is one I resonate with. It fits well with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The aim is to move in the direction of your valued goals. The emphasis is on aligning with values and taking action. The outcome isn’t the focus.
Hope doesn’t require a happy ending. It requires meaning. The sense that effort is worthwhile, that connection matters, that showing up counts for something.
Why hope gives us energy
One of the markers of depression is a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
When we feel hopeless, everything becomes an effort. Getting out of bed. Replying to a message. Making a plan. Not because we’re lazy, but because our whole being has concluded: What’s the point? Without a sense of possible progress, motivation drains away.
Hope reverses that.
When we catch even a small glimpse of possibility — a tiny opening in what felt like a closed wall — something shifts physiologically. We lean in. We start to think about how rather than whether. We find the energy that had seemed to disappear.
This is why hope is so central to so much therapeutic work. It’s not about telling people “things will be fine.” It’s about gently, carefully, helping someone see that a different future is possible — even imaginable. That’s often enough to get things moving again.
So how do we cultivate more of it?
The good news is that hope isn’t just something that either arrives or doesn’t. It’s something we can practise.
Here are a few things that genuinely help:
Five ways to tend to hope
- Notice glimmers, not just big wins. Hope grows from small moments — the conversation that went better than expected, the morning you woke up feeling lighter. Train your attention towards these, even when they feel minor. Keep a daily journal and write down the small things that go well each day. Look back in a week and see what is already present.
- Connect with people who carry hope. Hope can be contagious. Spending time with someone who believes in you, or who can see possibility in the future when you can’t, can quietly shift your own internal viewpoint. It has to be genuine and not false hope — we’re all pretty good at noticing the difference. Spend time with people who offer this perspective and give us the chance to change our own inner dialogue.
- Break the path into steps. Hopelessness often comes from the gap between where we are and where we want to be feeling unbridgeable. It can feel overwhelming. Shrink the horizon. Focus on one step at a time so that you get that hit of dopamine. The next small step is enough.
- Revisit evidence from your own life. You’ve been through hard things before and found your way through. That history is real evidence. We often forget to use it. Look for the clues from the past and write them down. Putting pen to paper helps connect the dots and makes them feel more tangible.
- Create something. Making something — with your hands, your words, or your voice — is one of the most direct routes to a felt sense of agency. Agency and hope are close cousins.
That last one is close to my heart — and it’s part of why our workshops feel like more than just craft afternoons.
When you sit down, focus mindfully on the present moment and begin to create something, you’re not just learning a stitch or a new technique. You’re practising the quiet belief that broken or disconnected things can become beautiful again.
That, I think, is hope in its most tangible form.
