This holiday season we encourage you to BINGE HOPE.
What does this mean – “binge hope?”
For us, it’s reading, listening and doing. The reading and listening includes articles, podcasts, books, music and cheesy holiday movies. In the space of doing, we consider human connection and community connection. Hope can be as easy as the excitement for an upcoming event with your community or calling a friend for a walk, and it can get as involved as volunteering for a local charity or putting on an event for something you care about.
Our kids are encouraged to partake in inspired actions throughout the holiday season. With an added twist, the goal is the perform them without being detected: shovel a driveway for an aging neighbor or sick friend or new mom, drop a plate of cookies on someone’s door step, leave a $10 at the coffee shop to pay for the next order + tip.
We’ve been reading and (now) listening to the Hope Matrix, the science behind hope. In the initial podcast this really stuck out for us:
“What we find is across many different life domains, hope is a pretty strong predictor of individuals doing better. And so we’ve looked at some context of mental health. We looked at this in the context of academic outcomes, whether the younger kids, high school, college or across a wide variety of age ranges, individuals or kids who are higher and hope do better in school. And we’ve looked at that in the context of the workplace, in terms of what employees are more effective and productive. The whether it’s mental health, the workplace, school across most contexts we find individuals that are higher in hope seem to do better. And it’s not just the case that because individuals are having success, that they’re then more hopeful. Hope also predicts future outcomes above and beyond kind of past outcomes. And we find that there’s mechanisms that we can understand that help us to know why that is. And so the ability to cope with stress, as we were just talking about, the ability to persevere in the face of obstacles, these are some of the reasons that we find that across many different life domains, hope is not just associated with success. It tends to predict and promote future success. “
Back to BINGE HOPE… What is Hope? There are many definitions of hope, but at Hopeful Minds they have reverse-engineered hopelessness to create their definition of hope. As hopelessness is both emotional despair and motivational helplessness, they used these two constructs to define hope, and their definition aligns with experts in the science of hope.
“We define hope as a vision for the future fueled by positive feelings and inspired actions. Positive feelings are those feelings that help us to stay hopeful as we work towards our goals. Inspired actions are steps that propel us toward our goals. Both feelings and actions are critical to hope, differentiating hope from a ‘wish.’ “
We wish you a season of Hope.
(PS – Please share your binge-worthy books, podcasts, movies, music and actions. )
