Hope: it is necessary to believe in a new day

The saying goes that hope dies last. In fact, psychologically, if we don’t have hope in a new day, in a better day, the tendency will be for life to end. In other words, according to several researches in cognitive psychology, hopelessness is the main cause of suicides and suicide attempts. Therefore, it is extremely necessary to maintain the belief that better days will come.

Hope and self-fulfilling prophecies

An example of a self-fulfilling prophecy is when someone thinks that something is not going to work out. Soon, it doesn’t strive to make it work and as a consequence, it doesn’t work. In the end, he thinks: from the beginning he knew it would not work!

In other words, nobody knows what the future will be like. The future is made up of possibilities and is a projection of present expectations. A high school student who is going to take the Enem has an idea of ​​this future: he can do well in the test, he can do poorly, he can do more or less. All of these are possibilities.

What’s interesting, though, is that how you think about the expected outcome (hence the word hope) will contribute to the outcome itself. If you imagine that you are doing badly anyway, that studying is no use, you will certainly be, with your actions, contributing to finding exactly that in the future: a low grade.

Which reminds me of my high school story. He was just an average student. But while reading Tony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power, I discovered this technique of visualizing the future. The book said something like our brain cannot recognize reality from fiction. A created image could have the same value as an experienced scene. The future and the past, living in the present of our mind, could also be constructed and reconstructed. Just as we can think that something is difficult and laborious (like the entrance exam), we can think that it is easy – because the mental effort for this thought is the same.

So the technique consisted of imagining the desired future as certain. I imagined myself already in college, taking classes, in the canteen, with all the details and sensations I managed to create. And I kept that image with me throughout the third year.

Was this process effective in itself?

Well, yes. It is difficult, of course, to say that this technique alone gave an extraordinary result. But at least it helped me in two points:

– to study more when tired or unmotivated;

– not to be apprehensive, nervous or afraid at the time of the test.

Read also – Is the power of positive thinking a lie?

So it’s curious to look back and see how this NLP technique ended up functioning as a self-fulfilling prophecy, only on the positive side, of fulfillment. Instead of thinking that it wouldn’t work, that it would be difficult and complicated for an average student to pass in an excellent college, I thought that I had already passed and that the test would just be a necessary and standard element, like taking the documents for enrollment . This motivated me to study more and helped me to be calmer.

I cite this example from the entrance exam and Enem again because it is quite didactic and simple to understand (we could point to tangible results in terms of grades). But if we stop to think about it, the way we imagine the future, whether there is hope or despair, will determine our behavior right now.

Think of a loving relationship. If one of the two starts to imagine that it won’t work, that it has no future, the relationship will start to go from bad to worse until it eventually ends.

In economics, if a businessman thinks he is not going to sell, he may stop advertising and, consequently, sell less. If he is overly pessimistic, he may close the door and kill the deal.

Of course, this does not mean that just thinking that it will work will make it work. Sometimes giving up too and moving on to another possibility is also part of the development and growth process.

See also – And when is it better to give up?

However, we must always be aware of what we are projecting for the future. After all, the future doesn’t exist (yet) and it’s what we do today that will create it.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to leave you with some questions to think about:

– What do you think about the future?

– How do you expect to be in 3, 5, 10, 20 years from now? In this imagined future, are your dreams coming true? (If not, why not? What can you do differently?)

– Remembering that the future does not exist yet, have you ever stopped to think how you can make a completely different, better and happier journey from now on? That you have this power? Of helping life to build its own life?

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