Stuff happens.

Just this last week a good friend shared that her cancer had returned.  Another friend has been unemployed for months and is uncertain about if or when another job will show up.  And let’s not even start talking about the people touched by the tragedy in Washington D.C. or the floods in Colorado.  And what about the rest of the world?  Unfortunately, no matter who we are, at some point stuff happens.

The question then remains—what happens next?

Fortunately, some people seem to bounce back and stay focused and positive about the future regardless of the situation.   While many words describe such a person, recent research suggests that anyone who keeps going with a positive attitude, no matter how uncertain their future might appear, is considered a high-hope individual.   So if stuff can and will happen to each of us, learning why hope matters and how we too might be one of the highly hopeful is certainly SMART information.

If you’re anything like me you probably think of hope as something related to wishful or faith-based thinking.   In that light, hope may sound nice, but never seems that practical. However, with the advent of studies during the last 50 years in the growing field of Positive Psychology a new approach called “Hope Theory” has been born.

Professor C.R. Snyder from the University of Kansas, and author of The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There From Here, was one of the leaders.  Snyder’s theory of hope emphasized goal-directed thinking along with, “the perceived capacity to find routes to desired goals…in conjunction with the motivations to use those routes.”  With hope re-defined in such a practical way, a Hope Scale was developed to track and measure the levels of hope in both adults and children.  This short test can quickly determine whether a person can be rated as either High-Hope or Low-Hope.

Continue reading this post on Kathy Gottberg’s blog, Smart Living 365