532. When Hope Is Useful and When It’s Not

Is this gonna work? I hope so. Is this going to be a good podcast episode? Gosh, I sure hope so. Is this a useful thing to be thinking? Is this a useful thing to say? That’s what we’re going to dive into today, my friends. Sometimes hope is very useful and necessary, but most of the time, the way I hear people use that word, it’s not serving you.

Welcome to the podcast. This is episode 532 of Better Than Happy: When Hope Is Useful and When It’s Not. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

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What’s up, everybody? Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for sharing the podcast. Please make sure you are following or subscribed. As you know, all of us who do podcasts and have YouTube channels and all that are constantly asking you to subscribe. You know why? The algorithm wants us to prove that people want to hear what we have to say. And the best way to prove it is for you to just click follow or subscribe, depending on what platform you’re on, and it also helps you not ever miss an episode. So I’m asking you, just like everyone else, to please do that. If not for you, do it for me. And if not for me, do it for the greater good of the world because don’t we want more people to get these tools? Don’t we want more peace and joy and connection and love and happiness and success? Of course, we do.

So make sure you follow the podcast. It also helps a lot if you share it. I would absolutely be thrilled and honored and delighted if you liked this episode, if you would share it with a friend. But today we’re going to talk about hope. We’re going to talk about the emotion of hope, which we create with our thoughts, like every other emotion. And we’re going to talk about when it’s useful and especially when it’s not. When it’s not, okay?

So, there are lots of references to hope in the scriptures for those of you who are religious, especially a Christian denomination like myself. We see that word a lot in the scriptures. And in fact, it’s used somewhat interchangeably with the word faith, right? Because we’re taught that faith is to hope for things which are not seen. Things which we can’t prove, you might say, things that are somewhat unknown. If we have faith, then we hope that they are true.

I love the word hope in that situation, especially because it implies that we don’t have to know for certain. And if you do know for certain, cool. I’m happy for you. If you feel like you can walk around saying, I know for certain that God exists, I know for certain that Jesus Christ is the son of God, I know for certain that he will come again and that God’s plan will reign and that everything’s going to work out in the end. Cool. I love that for you.

If you don’t feel that way, but you hope it’s true, and you choose to believe it, and you choose to live your life believing that it’s true, and you just choose to believe it, and you hope that it’s true, cool. You’re not doing anything wrong, right? In fact, that’s the way the scriptures describe faith. So, hope implies that you don’t have to feel certain about it, and it doesn’t mean that you’re less than or that you’re not faithful, we might say, right? Faith is hope.

Okay, so this term hope. Obviously, if we take it down to our mental health and our emotional state, we might say that if I’m in a state of depression or despair or something, then moving from that up to hope is going to be useful. That’s going to be a step in the right direction, a step towards feeling better. And being not a clinical therapist, I’m not an expert on this topic, but I do know that a lot of times they describe depression as sort of a hopelessness. Sometimes it’s a learned hopelessness, but at any rate, the opposite of that would be hopefulness. And I remember hearing someone talk about learned hopefulness and how that is a thing as well, that if we can learn hopelessness, we can also learn hopefulness. And so, it can be very useful in that kind of a setting, right?

The other time I find it to be very useful is I was talking about with faith before, things that are unseen or unknown or completely out of our control because they are just much bigger than us. That’s when we want to have hope. So, let’s get real practical here for a second. I hope I win the raffle. I was going to say lottery, but some of you are going to write in and tell me how we’re not supposed to gamble. And yet I feel raffle tickets are allowed, but lottery tickets are not. So whatever, you do you. I’m just saying, I hope I win the drawing, the lottery, the raffle, whatever. That’s outside of my control. As long as I bought a ticket and entered, right? I can do that part. But beyond that, it’s outside of my control. So the best shot I have at it is just to hope. Cross my fingers, sit back, wait till they call out the raffle ticket number, and hope that I win. Pay attention if it requires being present to win, right? Otherwise, very outside of my control.

I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow when we go on our hike. Completely outside of my control whether or not it rains. Now, not outside of my control whether or not I still enjoy my hike or whether I dress appropriately, etc. But controlling the weather, not really mine to own. So hope might be an appropriate word to use when we’re talking about the weather, right?

I hope that Taylor Swift does her Life of a Showgirl tour at The Sphere in Las Vegas. I hope she decides to do a residency at The Sphere. There was an article that came out right after she announced her album saying that she was talking to The Sphere about doing it there. I don’t know how legitimate that is, but I hope she does it because if you’ve never been to a show at the sphere, you absolutely should. Go see the Wizard of Oz there or something because it’s so phenomenal. And I know that Taylor Swift would do an amazing job with it. And it just fits right in with the theme of the showgirl and why wouldn’t she? Let us all come to her this time. She’s traveled all over the world. Maybe she wants to just chill a little.

I’m just saying, I hope she does. Totally outside of my control. Taylor Swift has not asked my opinion on this matter. I don’t expect that she will. I don’t desire to try to reach out to her or influence it in any way. Maybe we would argue that there’s something you could do. You could put together a whole tribe of people to go make it happen. I don’t have any desire to do that. I just choose to hope that she does. And if she doesn’t, that’s okay. I’m sure she’ll do something else amazing, right?

These are appropriate times for the word hope. Now, I realize there are more serious things going on in the world today, and there are even times when hope is appropriate in some of those more serious, we might say, or heavier circumstances. For example, I really hope that my loved ones who are suffering get some relief from that suffering. I hope that the people I love, well, anybody really, but especially the ones that I’m aware of who are sick or who are making poor choices or who are overwhelmed with certain life things that they’re dealing with, I really hope that they find some relief.

Now, this is where we’re starting to get into some gray territory because me sitting back hoping might be useful if it keeps me out of things that I shouldn’t be interfering with. In other words, there’s times when I want to offer support and help and try to be a resource to the people that I know and love. And so hope might not be useful if that’s the case. But there’s other times when there are things just outside of my control. And other people have agency, and other people maybe need to figure some things out on their own timeline, etc, right? And so hope could be in some cases useful in that situation.

Even for our country. One of the things, I’ve actually had this topic on my list of podcast episodes for a little bit now that I wanted to do. And what sort of tipped me over the line and decided to do it was just today, Governor Spencer Cox’s press conference as they arrested Charlie Kirk’s killer. So we had a tragic incident, as you all know, at UVU recently. And I just was so impressed with Governor Cox, the way he responded right after the event and just today, his press conference after again making an arrest. I think his message is spot on. Okay? And I don’t agree with all of his politics, but I agree 100% with what I’ve heard him say surrounding this issue. And I’ll let you go look it up. You can find it. I saw it on Sharon Says So’s Instagram page if you want to go there and check it out. But at any rate, he referenced this idea and he called it optimism versus hope.

He talked about the fact that optimism is not always useful because of what I’m going to talk about next. He said that hope was useful. And the reason why I would agree with him is because he’s differentiating optimism from hope. So what he said was when we are optimistic about our country, we sort of delegate it to outside things that are beyond our control, that are bigger than us, right? I’m using the word hope here for. But instead, what we want to do is recognize that we are our country. Every single one of us. Our country is made up of individual citizens like me and like you. And it’s so easy to point to people outside of us and say, they’re the problem in this country. And what we all need to do is start taking a hard look in the mirror and go, in what way am I the problem? How am I contributing to the problem or at least not contributing to the solution? That’s what’s going to make our country heal from its brokenness, right?

So, let’s talk about when hope is a problem then and why it’s a problem. There are many things that we can show up for, where we have influence, and where if we choose to be in a more empowered position than what hope puts us in, and recognize our role in things and our ability to make a difference, then hope is going to be a completely inappropriate word to use. And I can always tell where somebody’s at. I can tell if they’re in an ownership state around a topic or they’re in a passive, we might even call it victim state around a particular topic. And I can tell because when they’re in a victim place, they will use the word hope. Hope implies powerlessness, right? And sometimes we are powerless. I just gave a whole bunch of examples of when we are powerless. But many times, we are not. Let’s talk about some of those.

Here’s one that I find myself guilty of on the regular. I have been trying now for many, many years to be a morning workout person. I mostly have given up on it because I’ve never done it consistently. But every now and then, I’ll say to my husband, does it work out with our schedule because we got a couple kids we got to get out to couple schools and things, right, happening in the morning. Does it work out for your schedule if I get up and go to a class at the gym early tomorrow morning? And my sweet husband always says, yes, of course, because I never do this, right? He’s the morning one. I usually stay in bed. So he’s, yes, if you want a day to go work out early, of course, I’ll make sure the kids are up and whatever. He’s the best. Okay? So then he’ll say to me something as we’re getting in bed, So are you still going to the gym in the morning? And I’m tempted to say, I hope so. Which is the most ridiculous response.

I hope so? What does that mean? It means I don’t have control over myself. So I don’t really know what’s going to happen. I intend to get up and go to the gym tomorrow, but the truth is, I may not, which means I’m not committed to getting up and going to the gym, which means he knows in his mind, odds are, I’m not going to the gym in the morning. I’m just saying I am. I’m setting my alarm. I’m pretending I’m going to, but I’m not really going to. If I say I hope so, you can pretty well bet on I’m not going. And it’s ridiculous when you think about it. Am I going to get up and go or not? It’s in my control. I have agency. Barring some bizarre unforeseen accident, then it’s completely up to me. This isn’t like I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow, and I hope I get up and go to the gym. Those two things are not the same. One is in my control and one is not.

Okay, so I want you to notice this. Do you ever do this me around your goals? When you think about a goal and I coach a lot of people on a lot of different goals and I’ll say to them, well, are you going to do it? And they’ll say to me, I hope so. Which tells me we don’t have our heads in the right place yet, right? We are not taking ownership. We are not committed. We are not recognizing that this is up to us. We have agency as to how much we’re going to show up for it. Just the other day, I was talking to one of my coaches about the coaching program that she’s going to create and she told me what she was going to do. And I said, do you think people will be willing to pay money for that? And she said, I hope so.

And I wanted to go, ugh! Hope is not the word we want to be using when it comes to building your business. Now, I get why we do it, right? Because there are, I should say some elements outside of our control. We’re not going to force people, we’re not going to trick people into buying something they don’t want to buy, and we got to do some testing. It’s normal to have to test some things out when we’re building a business and offering a service to people. So I get it. But the word hope just sort of rubs me the wrong way because of how passive. Hope is something you do about the weather. It’s not something I want you to do about your business. Okay? Are you going to hit that goal? Are you going to sell that program? Are you going to fill the class to the number that you want? Don’t say that you hope so.

You know why? Hope is not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow. Has zero strategy. I hope I win the drawing, the lottery, the raffle. No strategy other than sit back and cross my fingers. Right? That is not a strategy. Hope is completely disempowered and it ignores our agency. And I don’t want you ignoring your agency. I want you maximizing your agency. I want you to go all in on being who you want to be and creating what you want to create and achieving what you want to achieve. And that’s not going to happen if you’re operating from hope.

Hope sets us up for disappointment, right? Because it’s just a wait and see. So what would be better then? If there are some components that are outside of our control, this is I hope that my business works or I hope people buy my offer here is a little different than me saying, I hope I get up and go to the gym. Getting up and going to the gym, 100% in my control. Will people buy this offer? I’m going to call it 80% in your control, which is why I don’t want you using the word hope. But there is a 20% that’s not in our control because other people’s agency is involved as well, right? So what is better? I think is just something, yeah, I think they will. Maybe. Maybe they will. I’m going to do my very best to find the people who want it and show them why it would be so valuable and connect the dots for them. And if I’m wrong, if it becomes too much work or too much effort, then I’ll figure something else out instead.

But you’re allowed to believe anything you want. So why wouldn’t you start from, yeah, they totally want it. I’m pretty sure. I think they do. And if they don’t, if I discover I’m wrong, if I, I should say decide to believe I’m wrong, because it’s all a thought. Obviously if we just never gave up, we could find people that would buy it, right? But if I decide it’s not worth my time to promote it because it’s too hard to find those people, etc, then I’ll figure something else out. But I’m pretty sure people will pay for this offer. I’m pretty sure this is what people want. And if you’re not pretty sure, if you don’t feel pretty confident, then you don’t have the right idea yet. Spend a little bit more time thinking or figure out how to make it more compelling or more enticing, right? Because I want you to be, yeah, I just know they will. Do you ever have this experience where there is something that’s somewhat outside of your control and you don’t have any proof or any evidence, but you’re, I just know this is going to happen?

Here’s my favorite example. I recently found, maybe you’ve seen this, John Carpenter who went on the show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. This was, I think in 1999. And nobody at this point, by the way, had won the million dollars, okay? And he got all the way to the final question without using any of his lifelines, right? So you get, I think three lifelines on that show, at least that’s how it used to be. And he gets to the end, he’s at half a million dollars. So if he answers one more question, it doubles to a million dollars, but if he misses it, I can’t remember if he would lose everything or whatever, but it would be a big setback, right? So he gets to the last question.

They read the question, Regis Filman reads the question. And then John Carpenter says, okay, I’d like to call my dad. And Regis says, okay, he’s going to use one of his lifelines, you guys, we’re going to get his dad on the line. And they call up his dad and his dad comes on the phone, Hey son. And he goes, hey dad, I’m at millionaire. I’m at who wants to be a millionaire? His dad’s, oh, okay, what’s your question? He goes, you know what? I don’t actually need your help. I just called to tell you I’m going to win the million dollars.

It’s such a flex. It’s such what my kids would call, is it aura farming? Is that what they say? Yeah. It’s so good. Regis just laughs and the audience cheers and he just says, yeah, I’m going to win because the answer’s this. And he gives the answer and he wins. He’s the first one to win on Millionaire. Did he know for sure he was going to win that million dollars? No. But he was, I just know. I’m pretty sure I’m right about this. I know the answer to this question. And so, that’s the kind of confidence that you’re allowed to have. And hope is not that. Imagine if he would have said, I hope I’m going to win this. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just not as confident. It’s not owning it, right? And what I want you to do is to own it because you know what helps you be more successful at achieving your goals? Owning them. That’s what makes us the most successful is our confidence.

So especially with the work that coaches are doing, right, of trying to sell people on finding relief and happiness and joy and achieving their goals and trying to offer their products and services. If you’re confident, you’re so much better at helping people. Right? And this is obviously I work with a lot of coaches, but this applies in so many ways. This applies as a parent. This applies in your job, even if you don’t have your own business. The more confident you are, the more effective you are. And hope is just very lacking in confidence. It’s delegating power to outside sources.

Okay? So if you look at people who are highly successful, you don’t hear the word hope come out of their mouths about the work that they’re doing. I always think about Steve Jobs, who we would say was highly successful with his goals at Apple. We might think that he had some room to improve on some of his basic human skills, but probably wouldn’t deny that he was very successful at his business goals, right? And he didn’t walk around going, I hope people like my stuff. I hope they like the iPhone I’m creating. He said, I will show people why they need this. He literally was really famous for never doing market research because he said the market doesn’t know what they want until I show them. They don’t even know they want this.

So that’s the opposite of hope. Hope is, yeah, I’m just going to make this work. And I’m pretty sure I know how to make this work. Okay? So the word hope leads us to little or no or at least very small action. That’s the problem with it, right? I hope I go to the gym tomorrow. I hope I get up and go. Means it’s not in my control. But of course it’s in my control. Hope has no accountability. Without accountability, we’re not as effective. We’re not taking accountability, which means we don’t get to own the success or the failure. I want you to own both because then you’re empowered.

Because I think this is the fear is people are, if I just own it, if I go all in and, yeah, this is going to work, I’m going to achieve this thing, I’m going to achieve my goal, whatever it is, isn’t it going to be extra disappointing if I don’t? And then people are tempted to make it mean something negative about themselves because they tried so hard. They put in so much effort, right? Because there is still always the chance that it won’t. But here’s what I say to that.

I had this thought last night because I’ll tell you, not every day is this for me by any means. But yesterday I worked so hard. I put in a lot of hours, not only a lot of hours, I accessed a bunch of my best ideas and I really channeled my best genius because I’m prepping for some workshops I’m going to be teaching next week and I just want them to be amazing and I want to have a amazing experience with all the people there. And so I know that this preparation is required for me to create that environment. And it was a lot of work. I was tempted to shortcut it. I was tempted to keep putting it off, but I didn’t. I really pushed myself and finished it. And I laid down on the pillow at the end of the day and I realized this is the best feeling.

This kind of exhaustion because I’ve shown up fully for what I want to create and offer to the world is the best feeling. That’s how I want to live my life. Not every day do I need to be that exhausted. But if I set big goals that require that of me, then I get to feel that feeling of thank you, self. Thank you for showing up and doing what you can. Thank you for exhausting yourself in creation, in giving, in producing. That’s how I want to live my life.

Now, you know what? I could go to those workshops next week and something could go wrong or somebody might be unhappy with it. Somebody might not get the result they want. There could be a million things that go wrong. But I can tell you right now, I’m not going to be disappointed in myself. I’m going to be so proud of myself for doing everything that was in my control that I could think to do to make it a success. And I think what’s more disappointing than that is when we don’t give it our all and we don’t try. And we know the difference, right? We know the difference.

So, hope is useful if it’s an area where you literally have no power. Then I want you to hope all day long. But there are so many areas of your life where you have a lot of power. Do not hope because hope is without power. Thanks for joining me today, everybody. Like I said, please share this episode if you found it to be useful. And otherwise, I’ll see you next week for another one. Take care. Bye-bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.