How Hope Actually Works

The three working parts of hope—and the evidence that they predict who succeeds.

A friend of ours grew up with a deeply superstitious grandmother. Whenever our friend said something like “I hope I get a part in the school play,” the old woman would spit on the floor and trace a cross over her chest. In her world, stating a desire out loud was tempting fate. In my co-author’s family, the defense against the evil eye—“the maloiks”—was an Italian horn charm worn on a necklace. Curse prevention and fashion statement, all in one.

Most of us carry a milder version of the same armor. We say it to each other constantly: don’t get your hopes up. The logic is self-protection—if you never let yourself hope, disappointment can’t find you. But notice the premise buried inside that advice: that hope is something that happens to you. A wish you release into the universe, which fate then grants or denies.

And the grammar of everyday English is in on the camouflage. Notice that when we use hope as a verb, we are usually wishing about things beyond our control: I hope it doesn’t rain. I hope they pick me. But when we use it as a noun, it suddenly carries weight: he lost hope. She found hope again. We instinctively treat hope as something a person can possess—and losing it as a serious event. Our instincts are right.

What the noun names is a real capacity—one with nothing owed to luck, fate, or jinxes. Over the last three decades, science has taken that capacity apart and identified its working parts. And once you can see the parts, you can start to build them.

The framework hiding in plain sight

In 1994, University of Kansas psychologist Charles “Rick” Snyder published The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here, in which he pulled hope apart and introduced a framework he called Hope Theory.¹ The book never received the attention it deserved in its day. But its central insight may matter more today than the day it was printed: hope is not a feeling, a wish, or a desire. It is a way of thinking that drives action.

Last week I wrote that hope is not something we wait for, it is something we do. Hope Theory is the machinery behind that sentence. Specifically, hope is a cognitive process with three distinct, identifiable components. I call them the three powers.

The three powers

Goalpower (aka futurecasting): Wishful thinking pictures the destination—the garage full of Ferraris, the infinity pool. No judgment here; there is nothing wrong with a imagining life better than it is today. But hope does something more: it converts desire into a concrete goal. The goal can be aspirational (something good you want to happen) or aversive (something bad you want to avoid). Either way, what matters is that it is meaningful enough to inspire commitment—and the more specific and vivid the goal, the more effectively it motivates action.

Waypower (aka pathways thinking): the ability to generate viable routes (note: plural!) to reach that goal. From the outside, success looks like a straight line. It almost never is. It is a zig-zag of snags, detours, and trips back to the drawing board. Waypower means expecting that. You might have to get off the train and take the bus; you might have to get off the bus and walk. If you expect an easy path, the first roadblock can end the pursuit. If you expect roadblocks, rerouting around them is simply part of the plan.

Willpower (aka agency): the sustained motivation to stay on the path. People often equate willpower with self-denial, like skipping dessert. That is not what this is. Willpower here is the commitment to stay on the path, keep marching toward a desired outcome, and to bounce back from failure, over and over. It is the energy that converts the map into miles. And its absence has a name. Researcher Chan Hellman points out that the opposite of hope is not pessimism, and it is not even hopelessness—it is apathy: the absence of goal-directed energy.²

Snyder called the last two components “the Will and the Ways” of hope. You need both. A goal without a route is a wish. A route without the will to follow it is just a plan.

The four beliefs

Put into practice, high-hope individuals share four key beliefs:³

1. The future will be better than the present (optimism).

2. I play a role in how my future unfolds (agency).

3. There are multiple ways to get there (pathfinding).

4. There will be obstacles (anticipating).

Notice two things about that list. First, optimism is on it—as one ingredient of four. That is the relationship I described last week: hope begins where optimism stops, but it begins with it. Second, look at belief number four. Expecting obstacles is not pessimism creeping in at the edges—it is part of hope itself. Realistic acknowledgment of the challenges ahead, and the expectation of having to navigate around (or over) them, is precisely what separates authentic hope from blind optimism.

Not just taxonomy

A fair question at this point: is this framework just tidy relabeling? Three boxes with clever names? The test of a scientific construct is whether measuring it predicts something real. Hope passes that test, and here is the part that makes the chain airtight: Snyder did not stop at theory. He and his colleagues built validated instruments directly from these components—the Adult Hope Scale, the State Hope Scale, and the Children’s Hope Scale—whose items map onto pathways and agency. So when the studies below measured “hope,” they were measuring the triad of Hope Theory, not a vague feeling of positivity.

In a 2012 Johns Hopkins study, 174 adults admitted for inpatient rehabilitation—after spinal cord injury, stroke, amputation, or major orthopedic surgery—completed Snyder’s Hope Scale and a standard measure of positive mood during the first days of their stay. Three months after discharge, hope at admission was an independent predictor of functional recovery—mobility, occupational engagement, reintegration into the social community. General cheerfulness was not. After adjustment for age, sociodemographics, and length of stay, a 3 percent increase in the hope measure predicted a 4 percent increase in social reintegration.⁴ The machinery predicted recovery; the mood did not.

In the workplace, a meta-analysis co-authored by Shane Lopez—a psychologist who trained under Snyder and became a senior scientist at Gallup—combined 133 effect sizes from 45 studies totaling more than 11,000 employees, nearly all using Snyder-framework measures. Its title is borrowed from Snyder himself: “Having the will and finding the way.” Translated into plain terms, high-hope employees were about 28 percent more likely to be successful at work, and about 44 percent more likely to report good health and well-being, compared to their low-hope peers.⁵

And in education, a meta-analysis of 45 studies encompassing more than 9,000 students—roughly 85 percent of which used Snyder’s domain-general hope scales—found that higher hope was associated with higher grade point averages, with the link strongest among elementary, middle, and high school students, when belief in oneself may be most foundational.⁶

Across these three domains—physical recovery, work, school—one framework, one family of instruments. The honest caveat, as promised: these are observational studies that report associations, statistically adjusted but not randomized. What they license is the word predicts, not the word causes. But a construct that predicts who recovers, who thrives at work, and who succeeds in school is not just taxonomy. It is a signal.

When every path closes

There is a hard case the framework has to face, and I want to name it now even though it deserves its own essay. Sometimes waypower fails honestly: every once-viable route to the goal closes down and is truly gone. The dream requires a set of circumstances that no longer exist. The answer in that moment is not more willpower thrown against a wall. It is re-goaling—the deliberate, often painful choice of a new and different goal still worth walking toward. It can require radical acceptance, and a period of grieving the original vision is normal. Shane Lopez put it in six words: “Re-goaling is where hope meets courage.”⁷ We will spend a full essay there in the weeks ahead.

Keep chiseling

One last thing about 1994. The same year Snyder’s book quietly appeared, a movie about hope quietly flopped at the box office before becoming one of the most beloved films ever made. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne has a vivid, concrete goal—freedom, “a warm place with no memory.” He has a pathway no one else can see, and a chisel. And he has agency measured in decades: he chisels at the wall of his cell, at night, for nineteen years. His friend Red, meanwhile, speaks for the other side of the ledger: “Hope is a dangerous thing; it can drive a man insane.” Goalless, pathless, Red sabotages his own parole hearings—until Andy’s escape activates something in him. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Stephen King sets his stories in prisons for a reason, and the metaphor lands squarely on the science: low hope is a prison of the mind. High hope is how we set ourselves free. The three powers are not personality traits issued at birth. They are skills—and in the essays ahead, I am going to show you the evidence for exactly how they are built.

Keep chiseling.

— Dr. T

1. Snyder CR. The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here. New York, NY: Free Press; 1994.

2. Gwinn C, Hellman C. Hope Rising: How the Science of HOPE Can Change Your Life. Morgan James Publishing; 2018.

3. Lopez SJ. Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others. New York, NY: Atria Books; 2013.

4. Kortte KB, Stevenson JE, Hosey MM, Castillo R, Wegener ST. Hope predicts positive functional role outcomes in acute rehabilitation populations. Rehabilitation Psychology. 2012;57(3):248–255.

5. Reichard RJ, Avey JB, Lopez S, Dollwet M. Having the will and finding the way: a review and meta-analysis of hope at work. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 2013;8(4):292–304.

6. Marques SC, Gallagher MW, Lopez SJ. Hope- and academic-related outcomes: a meta-analysis. School Mental Health. 2017;9:250–262. doi:10.1007/s12310-017-9212-9.

7. Ibid Lopez 2013