Supercoach - Michael Neill [67]
She was right, of course, although in my defense it had never occurred to me that this might be perceived as a bad thing.
Where did hope get such a bad name? Criticism of both religion and New Age thinking is filled with accusations of giving people “false hope.” But what makes hope false?
The Oxford American Dictionary defines hope as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen” and as “grounds for believing that something good may happen.” False hope, then, doesn’t have to do with my feeling of expectation and desire for my relationships to be successful, my business to make money, and my body to be healthy, but with my grounds for believing that these things are possible.
If I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because I have “secret” knowledge of the future that reveals that as long as you do X, Y, and Z, you’ll ultimately succeed, that is unfortunately false grounds for hope—I have no such knowledge. However, if I ask you to believe in yourself and your dreams because there are hundreds if not thousands of stories of people who have succeeded in spite of the evidence, that is indeed grounds for legitimate hope, regardless of how things ultimately turn out.
(A quick word on “evidence”: in days gone by, the evidence has clearly “proven” that the sun revolves around the earth, which is in fact flat; that bumblebees can’t fly; and that humankind will not only never reach the moon, but can’t run a mile in less than four minutes or find true and lasting happiness in a world filled with suffering—oh, wait, is that one still a fact?)
Here’s my definition of hope and our tenth secret:
Hope is the magic elixir that energizes dreams,
fuels possibilities, and lets you live beyond the
limits of your historical thinking. It is not a promise
that something you want will happen—it is an
invitation to enjoy the possibility of what you want
while you and life negotiate the eventual outcome.
There is never a good reason not to hope.
Why not try the following exercise?
Waking Up Your Dream
There are three kinds of dreams we harbor for our lives:
a. Those we outgrow
b. Those we fulfill
c. Those we give up on
A useful inventory to take from time to time is to reflect on the many dreams you’ve held for yourself and your life.
1. Make three columns on a piece of paper.
2. Column A is for those dreams for your life that you’ve outgrown—for example:
• “To be a firefighter.”
• “To drive the red and white car from Starsky and Hutch. ”
• “To take over the Playboy empire from Hugh Hefner.”
3. Column B is for those dreams you have lived or are living now—for example:
• “I always wanted to live abroad, and I did.”
• “I used to dream of having a big soppy dog, and now I live with two of them.”
• “I wanted to work alongside my mentors, and now I do.”
4. Column C is for those dreams you’ve given up on, either because you’ve tried and “failed,” because they seem impossible, or because they just seem like too much work—for example:
• “Becoming President of the United States.”
• “Recovering from an illness.”
• “Becoming a billionaire.”
• “Meeting the man or woman of my dreams.”
5. Choose to reignite at least one dream from Column C by giving yourself hope. The way you do so is the same way you “make believe” in what you want—simply begin to look for as many “reality”- based reasons as you can find why what you want is indeed possible.
If you want to recover from an illness, for example, you could say:
“I can give myself hope by focusing on the ‘exceptions’ to the rule—those people who accepted their diagnosis but rejected the prognosis and lived healthy, productive lives. I can focus on the ‘alternative’ evidence that shows that every cell in the body is completely replaced every seven years, that what we do with our minds has a significant and measurable effect on what goes on in our bodies, and that seemingly ‘mystical’ activities like meditation and prayer have consistently brought about healing