So hope is what you get as a by-product when you practice building adaptability for yourself. The tricky thing about hope, hope is like the avocado in the resilience smoothie. I love avocado so that’s an easy one for me.

I love hope. I think it’s incredibly powerful, and it is the most emotionally-meaningful ingredient of all of the four ingredients of resilience. But hope is tempered by social experience. So it is a lot easier for some people in some communities and from some backgrounds to have an innate sense of hope. It is tempered by social and cultural norms and things like racism and discrimination, for sure.

So hope is not as easy and as natural for some folks to come by than others, and that’s something important to keep in mind. If you struggle with a sense of hope, one of the things to consider is that hope is naturally what occurs and what exists on the other side of the coin, of all the negative outcomes we usually dream up.

So when you’re worried about what might happen in the future, do you think it might be this, this or this, hope is the other it might be also this other thing that’s positive or neutral.

It doesn’t have to be optimism. It doesn’t have to be positive, but it’s the reality of what might also happen that’s a good thing and not a negative thing.