Q: How Can You Move Forward With Hope and Approach Your Challenges a Little More Today?
A: Don’t Avoid Challenges; Approach Them with Hope! (1) Build your Confidence (2) Have a Goal (3) Brainstorm Many Pathways to Achieve your Goal
To prosper we need to trust that our future will be better than our present. We can build this trust by living well in this current moment. That is how you build confidence. You need to trust that you’re the type of man or woman who can get things done. This intense trust in yourself can only be forged by doing the right thing within every micro-decision throughout the day. Little by little you will build your identity, “repeated beingness”, to accomplish anything you decide to do.
Leading Hope psychologist, Shane Lopez calls this sort of resilient, antifragile confidence, “Agency”. He says along with with this (1) agency, to build hope we need (2) a big goal that fires us up and (3) to have brainstormed many pathways to approach that goal.
2. Choose a Goal: So not that we know the only way to build our agency/confidence, the next step to building our hope is to find a goal that is worthy of our energy and effort. Do you have a goal that gives you goosebumps just thinking about it?
If not, let’s take a moment to find one, something so important to you that you jump out of bed every morning with a burning desire to make that goal a reality. When picking a goal, Piers Steele’s Motivation equation is a great tool to help us discern if the goal you choose is really what you should be focusing our energy upon.
The equation: M = E x V / I x D
Motivation = Agency (confidence that you have the ability to achieve it) * Value (How badly do you really want to achieve it?) / Impulsivity (Can you focus your attention on what’s most important?) *Delay (Don’t choose a goal super far down the road. That delay doesn’t help)
So What do you want to achieve in your life? Like really really want? Plugin the variables into the motivation equation to test it! You will want to have a really high numerator and a really small denominator. If you lack focus, train your mind via mantras and meditation. Is the goal too far down the road? Well then, create micro goals (that you can accomplish today!)
