Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others by Shane J. Lopez Read Free Book Online

sharp. My mother and I drove over to Jared’s house. His mom answered the door and I bounced into the living room looking for my buddy. The moms sat down and started talking in low voices. I walked over to Jared’s room and found a closed door. His mom told me he was too tired to come out. Even at six, I knew that was bad and sat quietly in a corner with Jared’s toys. After a short while, my mom hugged Jared’s mom and we left. I never got to play with Jared again.
    My understanding of Jared’s illness and death was limited, but his passing told me that I might not necessarily live to be an old man. For a while, I lost my superpower to see into the future. Why bother visiting the future if I was going to die? But weeks or months later—I can’t remember how long—something shifted, and those thoughts of big-kid fun began to draw me again. And I began to chase them a little faster, just in case I was running out of time.
    As our time horizons shrink, most people become increasingly selective about the goals they pursue. Dinners with close friends replace late nights at the office. Vacation with the grandchildren takes priority over a business conference. My patient John certainly knew he was mortal, but he faced his mortality only when his kidneys began to fail. When he learned that treatment could mean losing his farm, he was ready to foreclose on his future, but when he realized that he had some life left to spend, he rebuilt his relationship with his son, and the farm became a legacy they could share. When we perceive that time is short, we invest in people and in our most meaningful goals.
    Facing death seems to bring us more to life.
This Is Your Brain on Hope
    Before I give you a glimpse of how your brain on hope works, I’d like you to try a thought experiment: I want you to hope for something. Specifically, I want you to think of the really good job you will have about a year from now. (If you like your current job, make the new one even better—your dream job.) What would be the best way to spend your time during the week? Picture where you would be and what you would be doing. Now add details. Who is working with you? How do you feel at the beginning of the day? At the end? Give yourself a minute or two to make that image as vivid as possible. (Need help? Go to the makinghopehappennow.com website for a guided imagery that walks you through this exercise.)
    I have no way of knowing what story you told yourself about your dream job, but I do know that you drew on your past experiences to imagine your future. Repeatedly and rapidly, you compared and combined pieces of your past to create something better. You pictured likable people around you (leaving behind the jerks at your old job). You thought about the resources that would make the job better (for most people, these include more pay, more freedom, and a greater sense of meaning).
    You no doubt felt positive emotions when you saw yourself in your new role: maybe excitement and pride, serenity and joy, or a feeling of security. These emotions aren’t just a feel-good by-product. They actually work as cognitive guides that lead you to invest in certain lines of thought and to avoid others. They help you convert general information about “good jobs” into an image of the job that would be the best fit for you. And they begin to arouse the motivation you’ll need to make your dream job real.
    I know all this about your thought processes, because, like all other card-carrying psychologists, I studied natural experiments of sorts that revealed how the brain worked.For example, accounts of the injuries and complicated recovery of a patient known as “KC” taught us much about how prospection, the act of looking forward, works. KC becamean amnesiac after a motorcycle crash. Deprived of his past, he remained stuck in time, unable to mentally travel into the future.
    Today, neuroscientists go well beyond their own observations to give us a real-time report