29 Oct 6 Ways to Read Your Hope Barometer and Find Happiness
via Psychology Today by Susan Krauss Whitbourne
The ability to feel hopeful would seem to be key to your overall happiness and well-being. When you feel hopeful, you feel that good things will come your way. Conversely, one of the hallmark features of depression is a feeling of hopelessness about the future.
Some psychological theories of hope argue this quality is hardwired into your personality, as you will learn shortly. The alternate view is that you can modify how hopeful you tend to feel about the future.
Perhaps you’ve had a tough couple of days during which you’ve lost out on a key job opportunity you were sure you’d nailed. Possibly, you’ve just encountered a temporary setback in a DIY home remodeling project, and instead of the new carpeting laying out smooth and unwrinkled, there are several distinct lumps that no amount of patting will make disappear. In both cases, you started out with the most optimistic of expectations, only to have reality get in the way of your visions of success. Yet, you remain, in your mind, a “hopeful person.” If someone asked you to describe yourself, having high hopes would be at the top of your list of self-rated qualities.
According to a new study by Andreas Krafft et al. (2019), of the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), there are many definitions of hope that attempt to distinguish it from related concepts, such as optimism, mastery, and self-efficacy. As the authors note, there is a widely-accepted theory that regards hope as a dispositional or hard-wired quality, “a trait-like cognitive mind-set.” As such, your baked-in hopefulness incorporates the two basic components of agency or willpower and “pathways,” or “the belief in your own capabilities to create alternative routes in case of facing obstacles and setbacks,” otherwise known as “way-power.”
If you are a hopeful person, in this dispositional model…
…keep reading the full & original model HERE