Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (21 page)

One of Gollwitzer’s more recent studies explores using another kind of when/where plan to protect ourselves from our Sirens. These plans are designed to shield us from unwanted thoughts and feelings that undermine our intentions. In one experiment, people were more
capable of fighting off junk food cravings if they acknowledged how cravings threatened their diets and created an if/then statement that they repeated three times. (An example: “And if I think about my chosen food, then I will ignore that thought.”) In another experiment, tennis players formed the intention to play each ball with concentration, and then were asked to identify four inner states that might get in their way from shot to shot (such as “feeling exhausted” or “feeling angry”). They then crafted individualized if/then statements, such as “If I feel angry, then I will calm myself and tell myself ‘I will win.’ ” Again, tennis players who acknowledged their performance anxiety in the context of specific if/then plans played much better than in their previous matches. The new discovery here is that not only do when/where plans spur action based on external cues, but they can also be matched with internal cues that distract us and sap our emotional energy.

When/where plans work because, by and large, people have good intentions. We want to meet our obligations; we want to pursue the goals that are in our best interest. Nevertheless, our good intentions often fall victim to difficulties in initiating action and maintaining focus. We are prone to sluggish starts, fatigue, and distraction. To overcome these difficulties, we have to make our goal pursuits more automatic. First, we connect an opportunity for goal attainment with a goal-directed behavior. Having a concrete plan to execute in a well-defined situation brings hope to life. Identifying that critical situation, that opportunity to pursue a goal, helps you to marshal all of your resources at a particular point and time. Your attention and willpower become automatically focused on the goal-directed behavior, with a huge gain in effectiveness.

If you were old enough to watch TV in 1984, time travel back to when MTV aired music videos twenty-four hours a day and Van Halen was played in heavy rotation. I still remember their hit “Panama,” when
frontman David Lee Roth and guitarist and keyboardist Eddie Van Halen let loose their wild side. The video captured both men swinging across the stage on a wire connected to waist harnesses. At one point, Van Halen dangles upside down five feet in the air while his band mates push him across the stage.

Back then, the band was at the height of its popularity and power and had developed a reputation as, well, a rock-and-roll band. They drank too much, trashed hotel rooms, and then moved on to the next town and did it all over again. Watching over the whole production was the job of tour manager Harvey Schaps, who was responsible for making sure the band showed up at their next concert safe, sound, and sober enough to perform. He was also responsible for making sure the venue organizers held up their end of the deal.

Schaps’s key tool was a fifty-three-page contract, which included a backstage concert rider that was recently rediscovered by
thesmokinggun.com
. The rider spelled out Van Halen’s offstage needs and wants in microscopic detail. The following item appeared in a list of required snacks, headed “munchies”:

M&M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)

That’s right. The band had to have their M&M’s, and the brown ones “absolutely” had to be picked out.

When the backstage rider became public, the Internet erupted in debate. Prima donnas, the critics cried. A classic example of music industry excess. A sympathetic fan speculated that a band member was allergic to something in the brown dye. Many fans believed that a single brown M&M would trigger a backstage riot and that Van Halen would leave the venue without putting on a show.

In reality, the “no brown M&M’s” clause was not a sign of the band’s excess (though other contractual demands upheld that image) and it did not trigger any bad-boy rock-and-roll behavior. What it did do is keep the band safe. It was their canary in the coal mine.

Tour manager Schaps needed a way to spot-check whether the staff at each venue took the contract seriously. Many clauses focused on specifications for structural aspects of the stage, gauge of electrical wiring and amperage of outlets, and the trapeze-like rigging that enabled band members to fly at climatic moments. Schaps used a checklist when conducting a pre-concert walk-through on stage, but he also wanted an early tell that signaled how safe the setup would be. Hours before the concert, he would go to the band’s suite, reach into the bowl of M&M’s, and look for the brown ones. Seeing none, he would start his regular walk-through. Seeing even one, he would ask the venue manager to redo and/or double-check the stage setup.

The brown M&M’s clause is an example of a defensive action trigger. We may not be swinging from wires, but we still need an alarm that tells us when the environment is not ready or our support system is failing. The trigger puts the goal pursuit process on pause until we can address serious obstacles and/or create new pathways. Which of the following triggers might apply to your situation?

The Critical Collaborator:
Someone you thought was a supporter or collaborator relentlessly criticizes your goals and/or plans, predicts failure, substitutes his/her own goals for yours, and fails to offer constructive suggestions. Spending time with them makes you feel depleted and discouraged. This is a put-down artist, not a supporter, and you need to distance yourself any way you can.

The Excuse Maker:
A backer or collaborator doesn’t meet deadlines or deliver agreed-on money or materials. When you confront them, they are passive-aggressive and make excuses and promise to do better. Give them one more chance if you must, but start making plans to move on without them.

The Slow Responder:
You haven’t heard anything from the loan officer, the contractor, the HR department, the real estate agent. Waiting endlessly to hear back is not “hope,” it’s avoidance. Follow up politely but relentlessly. If there’s a legitimate delay, most people will give you a specific date on which they’ll reply.

Do you have a Siren pulling your life off course or a canary in a coal mine warning you that something is amiss? Identify the Sirens and canaries that visit you most often. Defend yourself from the Sirens and listen to the canaries. This will help you maintain the energy you need to pursue your goals.

A
LISHA
M
C
C
LUNG
was a returning senior at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college, when life threw her a serious curve. Like most students today, Alisha counted on student loans to pay her tuition. But in the run-up to the Great Recession, banks and loan companies were getting out of the student loan business. In January 2008 Alisha discovered that her lender, the College Loan Corporation, would not renew her loan for the fall semester. Blindsided, she called the Spelman registrar’s office to find out exactly what she needed to pay to enroll. The response stunned her: “They told me my balance was zero. I thought it was a mistake.”

No mistake. By late 2007, Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College, had anticipated how the nation’s growing financial crisis would affect her young women. She and her staff estimated that there would be a gap in the millions of dollars between what students would owe in tuition and room and board and what parents and loans would cover. The worse possible outcome was for an academically solid upperclass-woman
with tens of thousands of dollars of school debt to leave college for a middling job that might not even pay enough to keep up with student loan payments and/or to cover her tuition for a return to school—an investment gone bad.

Tatum’s answer was to establish the Spelman President’s Safety Net Fund, also known as the Starfish Initiative (named after a fable in which a little girl throws beached starfish back into the ocean one by one). She and her staff approached hundreds of donors, offering each the opportunity to help one student in a unique, personal way. Putting a face and a future to a donation was powerful enticement. In one year, alumnae, parents, and friends contributed more than half a million dollars to help Alisha McClung and more than one hundred other students complete their studies at Spelman.

The Starfish Initiative enabled Alisha, a child development major who was about to begin student teaching, to increase her credit hours while cutting her work schedule from thirty-five hours per week to a more manageable fifteen. “I’m taking 22 hours this semester, so me trying to work like in previous years . . . wouldn’t have worked this year at all,” McClung said. “Honestly, if I hadn’t got this scholarship, I don’t know how the money would have been paid.”

World-famous boxer and armchair philosopher Mike Tyson once observed, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” No matter how good we are at futurecasting, life throws punches. A key skill of high-hope people (like Spelman’s Beverly Tatum) is the ability to plan for ifs, the ability to anticipate obstacles and create multiple pathways to each and every goal. This skill is rooted in two core beliefs of hopeful people: there are many paths to goals and none of them is free of obstacles.

Futurecasting creates momentum, the energy of hope. This energy builds on the positive emotions around our goals, our sense of personal
confidence (or agency), and our willpower, or ability to persevere. But when things don’t go according to plan, our energy can be quickly depleted. Maybe we try harder, earning credit for our grit. But if we stick with the same strategy, using it over and over, we’ll eventually crash. Instead, we need to develop the street smarts of hope. Creating a new way gives you the will you need to press on, a boost of will that keeps you going.

In this chapter, I’m going to show you how to build hope by identifying multiple pathways from Point A to Point B and using them to navigate real and perceived obstacles. These tactics (including generating alternatives, facing down fears, filling resource gaps, building on strengths, and borrowing hope) enlist the rational mind—the planner in all of us.

In his early research on hope, Rick Snyder found that thinking about multiple pathways to a goal is a core skill of hopeful people. It is also one that can be taught.

Consider a group of Kansas City high school students taking part in what I call the Hope Camera Project (more on this project in
chapter 13
). Most of the one hundred high school students used donated disposable cameras to achieve the objective of telling their personal hope stories. In small groups, each armed with a camera, the students worked together and devised good plans for sharing the camera, assembling the photos, and arranging them to tell a story about hope in their lives. Only one group struggled—they lost the camera on the first day.

Many kids would have bailed at that point. But this group was excited about the project and wanted a chance to complete it. “Hey, Doc Shane, what do we do?” they asked. I told them, “Figure it out. That is what hopeful people do.” That’s when they started generating alternative pathways. They considered buying a new camera, but they didn’t have the money. They talked about making a collage of photos cut from
magazines and school newsletters but realized they didn’t have enough depicting hope. Finally, they decided to check out a video camera from the school library and shoot a video telling their hope stories. The clip they produced was shared across the school and the district, creating some great discussions among the adults about how students can solve real-world problems when we give them the chance and a little nudge.

My work with the high schoolers taught me that sometimes the best hope intervention for people who are stuck is letting them figure out ways to get unstuck. As parents or teachers, what happens when a child or student hits a snag and comes to you for help? Your experience gives you the edge in problem-solving, so it’s tempting to step right in with a solution, but it is not always necessary. Whenever you can, stand back and ask: “What do you think you should do? Can you think of more than one possibility? Which one would work best?” Even quite young children may surprise you with their creative ideas.

Manager and executives also need to let their new employees figure out how to solve some of the problems inherent to business. Entry-level workers need freedom to fail and enough rope to pull themselves out of trouble. Good lessons in problem-solving could make the difference between an employee developing into a contributor or a liability.

When you face your own challenges, try to devise as many coping strategies as possible. Having a surplus of pathways can help you escape a bad situation quicker or tolerate an inescapable situation better.
Psychology professor Carla Berg of Emory University demonstrated the power of alternatives in an experiment where she helped people with low hope learn how to tolerate pain. All participants in her lab study were introduced to the cold pressor task and told that their goal was to hold their hand in the bucket of ice water until they could no longer stand the pain. (This is the same test Rick Snyder demonstrated on
Good Morning America
in
chapter 4
.) Then they were randomly assigned to one of two groups. Prior to the task, control group members were given a bland magazine article to read. The treatment group listened to guided imagery that focused on increasing the quantity and
quality of strategies for coping with pain. Here are some general hope prompts that followed the pain management imagery: