How to Stay Hopeful (Five Tips)

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and this week’s video is all about hope. Let’s face it, hope is sometimes pretty hard to come by right now. It’s been a long, long 2020, and ’21 has not started with a whole lot more inherent hope, although there is obviously some with respect to the end of the pandemic. But, it seems a ways off yet. Yet, I want to show you a little clip here. I am going and getting a vaccination, and the reason why I got the vaccination is not because I ranked up the lists in Las Vegas to be a high priority person to vaccinate. I’m a healthy, relatively young man, I didn’t qualify. But, I had heard stories in the community, and from friends, new acquaintances I’ve made here in Vegas, that if you’re just standing around a pharmacy at the right time of day, the pharmacies have to use up the supply vaccine that they took out for the day, and as a consequence, they’ll just give it to somebody if they have left over. So, because I’m hopeful, I made preparation by inquiring, and phoning, and showing up, not a long literally 24 hours from when I first inquired at the local pharmacy to when I got a vaccination in my arm, simply because I was in the right place at the right time, and I was hopeful that it would come to pass for me. Yeah, that’s the power of hope. And of course, now that I’ve been vaccinated, I need a second shot in a few weeks, but now that I’ve been vaccinated, I literally see it as some kind of passport to normalcy, to greater freedoms, and it really does represent that for me. And that’s an example of how hope can be powerful in our lives, and this video is going to provide you some very simple, practical tips to grow hope. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, hope is this powerful, wonderful positive emotion, one of the kind of unique ones that in this range of positive emotions that psychologists study. Hope is this one that has this tinge of negativity. There’s something to overcome, something that can be more than a tinge, it can be downright frightful, or loathsome, that we need some hope to be able to see or who I pass this monster, real or perceived, that’s upcoming. And when we do have hope, we know it’s this tremendous source of motivation. It’s what keeps us going, it comforts us, it provides resiliency from the down moods we can have when we’re confronting these monsters. And it also very uniquely provides us a capacity to be present for others, to help them in their journey. Because when we’re hopeless, we’re not exactly being supportive to other people who are facing similar problems in their lives. So, I have very, very practical tips to get more of this very unique and wonderful positive emotions. The first one is, be purposeful, know what you’re about, and even if what you’re about is not the main thing, it’s not confronting the monster, by being purposeful and keeping busy, we distract ourselves from the worry, from the monster. So for example, if you’re really worried about COVID, or you’re really worried about your the economic consequences of what’s happening in the world right now, or you’ve got a loved one in trouble, or your own health isn’t in jeopardy, obviously you want to pay attention rationally to the things that you should be doing to confront the thing that you’re afraid of. But in addition, you should stick to task with things that keep you busy, keep you distracted, give you a purpose in the day. So it’s your work, caring for your family, cleaning up your house, getting exercise, whatever it is, do something that’s purposeful, so that you’re not grinding down in that contemplation of the things that you’re afraid of. Okay, second tip, calm your self down. You know, we get excited, we literally get activated physically by the things that scare us, and it’s basic fight or flight responses, and we need to get a hold of that because it’s exhausting if we’re constantly in that fight-or-flight mode. So learn to meditate, you’ve heard them before from me, do some yoga or get a good cardiovascular exercise in. These are all things that bring about a balance in our emotional systems, and just calming ourselves down can give a lot more space for us to be able to see options and feel that there’s some way we can get through this. And thirdly, and this one may be hard advice to take, but learn the lesson of suffering. It’s my experience that suffering is always the best teacher, and that doesn’t mean I ever want it, not for me, and I don’t want it for the people I love either. But whether I want it or not, suffering comes. We’re all entitled to this human experience, and we’re all going to get it, whether we want it or not. And there’s always something to learn in suffering. Sometimes it’s how to be with suffering, how do I be with the negative emotions that I don’t really want. There is a lesson in suffering, and sometimes it’s much more profound. It’s about developing new relationship patterns, having better boundaries, it’s strategizing, it’s leaning on your resources. And so maybe that leads to my fourth tip, spend time and invest in your friends and family. We know that to have people that we love near and close to us inoculates us against hardship. And if it doesn’t entirely prevent it, then it insulates to a degree that the full some impact of things that are hard become just a little bit lighter when people are helping us carry the load. That can just be their company, simple as that. And my fifth tip is, believe in a higher power. And for many of you that are listening, that’s going to be easy. It’s already built into your lifestyle and your spiritual beliefs. But if you don’t have a higher power, I strongly encourage you to consider deeply your own connectedness to the world around you.

The connectedness you feel in nature, the connection you feel with people that you love, or the innocent child that you watch play – there’s something more in life than just your mechanistic walking through this journey from birth to death. And those people who have a higher power, the research is abundantly clear that they are more hopeful as a result. They get meaning and support from their faith system. So, with those five tips, I’m encouraging you to invest in your hope in what are some tough times for us personally and as a globe. And with that, I ask you to click the like button if you liked the video, and subscribe to my channel if you want a new video just like this every Sunday morning. Thanks for watching, bye for now.