Hope and the Power of Positive Thinking, Optimism

University of Kansas Psychologist, C.R. Snyder performed many studies of "hope" and its role in overcoming obstacles and predicting success on college grades and found hope to be a stronger predictor of success than scores on the SAT or IQ.  Given roughly the same range of intellectual abilities, emotional aptitudes make up the difference.  Snyder's expanation:  Students with high hope set themselves higher goals and worked hard to achieve them. 

Hope does more than offer a bit of solace amid affliction or adversity.  It plays a potent role in life.  Snyder indicates it has the potential of allowing you to accomplish your goals regardless of what they may be, giving you both the will and the creative ways to get there.  It's more than just getting out of a jam. Snyder finds hope-filled people share certain traits such that they are able to motivate themselves, feeling resourceful enough to find the ways to accomplish their objectives.  Hope-filled people can reassure themselves when in a tight spot that things will get better, being flexible enough to find different ways to get to their goals or to switch goals if one becomes impossible.  They also have the sense to break down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces. 

From the perspective of emotional intelligence, having hope means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.  People with hope are optimistic about their future.  Optimism, like hope, means having a strong expectation that in general things will turn out all right in life, despite setbacks and frustrations.  The optimist gains greater hope as he/she accomplishes small goals and realizes the positive results can be achieved through perseverance and creativity. 

A book I highly recommend to young parents is by Dr. Victor Cline entitled How to Make Your Child a Winner.  Two of those winner ground rules are (1) teach your children all kinds of skills and competencies in work, recreation, music and sports.  Give them adventures and make "doing" fun.  Model it yourself.  Help them experience success.  Stimulate their minds in many ways.  (2) Cultivate in your children the capacity to endure stress, to show grace under pressure, to have flexible, resilient psyches.  Give them responsibilities and expect them to do well in their home chores and schoolwork.  Train them in decision making and by letting them suffer reasonable penalties when they break rules.

Albert Bandura, a Stanford psychologist reknown for his research on self-efficacy stated:  "People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities.  Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variabliity in how you perform.   People who have a sense of self efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handel them rather than worrying about what can go wrong."

In summary, in our job search, we all must bring to the fore front our hope and optimism, traits we've nurtured throughout life.  However, these traits also rely on many other tools like constancy, compensation (law of the harvest), self control and complementation.  These were part of another deck of slides I presented.