We all need hope to improve

We all need to have hope that things can be better. We have to have some sense of optimism over the future. Without hope, everything becomes a struggle but with hope that struggle becomes manageable.

I have been on both sides of this. I have felt hopeless. This translated into being lazy and blaming others for my own disappointments in life. I have been hopeful. This tends to be when I fought through adversity. During these periods I didn’t let things get me down or stop me from making progress.

Because of this, it might seem that the easy answer is to remain optimistic and hopeful that things will get better. But if you tell someone in a hopeless state that they simply need to think happy thoughts, they won’t be able to flip a switch and change.

It seems like it should be easy, but it is not. Why can’t we tell our self to be hopeful if that is all it takes to keep working through challenges?

The reason comes from systems. Systems in our life our powerful. They are underlying elements that control our lives. We may or may not have any real awareness of them on a daily basis. But they show themselves through patterns in our life.

We can start to see patterns of thought. We can identify when we get mentally defeated from a problem. We can notice the little changes in our attitude when things don’t go our way.

The paradoxical nature of this phenomenon means that we have to change our thoughts to keep improving. But we have to keep improving to change our thoughts.

The best approach is to work on changing the systems and habits in your life. This includes the mental aspects and the recurring behaviors.

By addressing both aspects, we can shift our thinking and behaviors during challenging times. Neither one will be there waiting to sabotage any improvement we make in the other area.

Changing ingrained thought patterns is difficult. Changing our habits and behaviors is difficult. To truly improve and make progress we have to learn how to address these areas. If we focus solely on one, we will likely fall short.

By improving we start to regain hope. We start to believe things can be better. We start to see that things are better. This allows us to use improvement to boost our hope.

While it would be great if we could just think happy thoughts to improve, the reality is that this isn’t enough. We have to tackle the behaviors and the thoughts. We have to see improvement to gain hope. With more hope we can continue to grow and improve.

Systems thinkers likely spot the feedback loop present here. Feedback loops are structures where the output feeds back into the input of a system. This, then, grows the output over time.

By working on changing your thoughts and actions, you will start to gain more hope. By gaining more hope you will find it easier to improve your thoughts and actions, which will give you even more hope.

This is why we all need hope to improve. It doesn’t have to be there at the beginning. But we need to work to change and improve and through that we will get the hope necessary to keep improving.