The UN has, for the first time, named 12 July the International Day of Hope. This feels like a good moment to share answers to the questions I most often hear in hope-based workshops.
→ As a fairly negative person myself, I never expected to be the one fielding questions about hope. But in the six years since I ironically accepted the “hope guy” title, I have noticed a common set of questions people ask as they shift their own mindset from fear-based to hope-based.
Please share any questions you have that I don’t cover!
The Questions People Ask While Changing Their Mind About Hope
The first question about hope I had to answer was the question I asked myself.
Q. “How can we be hopeful in dark times?”
A. This was my aha moment. I realised that hope is like a candle. You need it in the dark, not when things are okay. And the same goes for human rights. And human rights work needs to be about lighting candles, not telling people it is dark. We have to show people a way out of the dark.
At Amnesty International there was a poster on the wall quoting a Chinese proverb that says “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”. I never used to pay attention to it until one day in 2016 my new boss, Osama Bhutta, said “We curse the darkness a lot, but we don’t light enough candles.”
That is when I realised that human rights cannot only be about fear, anger and sadness at the terrible suffering and abuses in the world. It has to give hope, by showing how we can work together to make things better.
Q. “Does hope tell us to be optimistic and positive?”
A. It is helpful to define what is hope:
Hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, if we make it happen.
Psychologist Charles R. Snyder talks about hope as a cognitive function based on approaching life in a goal-oriented way, based on three pillars: goal, pathways and agency.
I think this is a pretty good idea for activism: we should be focused on the change we want to see happen, which means making life better for the people we aim to serve. Snyder is clear: hopeful thinking requires action.
Hope can only exist as an alternative to something negative. It is a tool for dealing with the hard stuff in our lives, that focuses us on identifying a way forward and out of the dark.
The difference between hope and optimism / positivity
Hope is different from positivity and optimism. It is goal-oriented thinking.
Hope is active, while optimism and pessimism are passive. Optimism is believing things will turn out ok. Pessimism is believing they will turn out badly. Hope is believing we can do something to make things turn out for the better, by taking action.
When we are positive, we see the good side of things. When we are negative, we look at what is wrong with them. When we hope, we look at what we can improve, what we can get done.
“Hope is the only one of the positive emotions that is activated by uncertainty or negativity.” - Dan Tomasulo
The question people ask before changing their mind from fear to hope
My very first workshop for a group of human rights activists about hope felt like a disaster. People asked a lot of these questions and I thought they hated me and these ideas. But since then, I have learned that the people who ask the hardest questions about hope are the ones most likely to change their minds.
Q. “How can we talk about hope when there is so much racism, injustice and suffering in the world? Don’t we need to respond with anger and outrage?”
And also…
Q. “Is there a risk that we offer too much hope and people get complacent and don’t take the problem seriously enough? Will hope take away from the urgency of the situation?”
A. The point of hope is to show an alternative, so that we encourage people to think and act differently.
It is up to change-makers to channel anger into sustained action that actually changes society. We need to ask what emotions at a societal level will help us make progress. If we want a society built on empathy, someone has to start by showing empathy.
Anger is important for change. A civil rights activist once said that anger is the spark that starts the car, but hope is the fuel that keeps it moving.
You can’t light a candle without striking a match. Like anger, the match flares brightly at first but burns out quickly. Anger can power us for a moment, but on its own, it can become paralysing and divisive. If we want the light to last through the night, we need that match to light a candle. Hope is the candle that keeps the flame alive.
That is the hope that is needed to sustain an organised movement for change. To use the language of social change movements: Anger mobilises, hope organises.
“Hope swells outward, fear shrinks back.” - Martha Nussbaum
Q. Hope is all very well for some, but do people in the midst of war and crisis have time for it?
Hope is a tool for finding our way out of the dark. In dark times - in war, crisis, in the face of atrocities - hope is an essential survival mechanism. We all need it to keep going, while fear makes people feel despair and give up.
Feeling hope does three essential things for us. It makes us care about others, open to changing our mind and more likely to take action, because we believe change is possible.
If we all give into fear, self-interest and mistrust of the other takes over, and the crisis spirals into something far worse.
That is why we say “The point is not to find hopeful stories, but to find the hope in every story.”
“Hope is a function of struggle - we develop hope not during the easy or comfortable times, but through adversity and discomfort. Hope is forged when our goals, pathways, and agency are tested and when change is actually possible.” - Brené Brown
Q. “Is hope just for privileged people? How can we think about hope when we are poor, hungry or fleeing war and persecution?”
and also, a very important and valid question:
Q. “Can we tell a hopeful story that still does justice to people’s pain and suffering?”
A. The goal of shifting “from victim to human” is to ensure stories allow people to authentically share their experience, and do not reduce people to their fear and suffering alone. Even in the midst of crises, people care about higher, intrinsic values.
That’s why survivors speak to human rights researchers, who are not bringing food or shelter, but are just listening to and documenting their experience. It gives people hope that their story will be heard, and maybe as a result others won’t suffer a similar fate.
“The story changed when Amnesty came in. I regained hope and this hope now keeps me moving.” - Moses Akatugba
Every human has hopes and aspirations. To bring about radical change, we need to listen to the visions of people who have not been given a role in shaping today's world.
Q. If fear is such a powerful instinctive tool in the hands of populists, shouldn’t we use it too?
A. It was
who first made me aware of the danger of fear-based messaging, that is where the idea of hope-based communication comes from!She warns us that fear-based messaging works for the right but not for progressives. Fear serves to “enrage and engage” the right-wing base towards supporting destructive actions, but if you want to change and create things, as progressives do, that requires motivation. We need change so we cannot afford to paralyse people.
We need to ask ourselves whether fear is the emotion best suited to the outcome we want.
Q. “How do we hope without falling into toxic positivity?”
A. Toxic positivity happens when we repress or suppress fear, anger, sadness or other emotions and experience related to injustice. In hope-based communication, we start by naming the fear and understanding it. We want to be mindful of fear without it controlling us. Only then are we able to also look for alternatives that might bring change, resolution or healing.
Both negativity and positivity can be toxic. The best way for you to avoid that is to articulate what makes them toxic. For example, it might be failing to really listen to others. So you can try to shift from toxic engagement to healthy, nourishing ways of engaging with people with a sharp focus on deep listening.
“Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.” - Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark
Q. How can hope compete with fear? How do we grab attention with positive messages?
We know that outrage and crisis performs well on social media. But so does joy, belonging, affirmation, admiration and gratitude. What human emotion is more powerful than love? People like feeling positive, control emotions - a pleasant feeling that keeps people coming back for more. We also know that people are compassion-fatigued, sick of doom-scrolling and increasingly tuning out bad news and crisis messaging.
Do you know what else works? Surprise! Our brains are wired for it. I recommend a messaging house formula of surprise-story-solution.
Change isn’t easy. We just have been doing fear-based communication for a long time. We are going to have to try new things, and do lots of testing!
It’s also important to note that hope-based storytelling is not all “positive emotions” - its usually about getting through pain and suffering, and involves a lot of sadness.
Just watch this hope-filled, joyful ad from Dublin Bus and tell me its not good storytelling!
The question I actually get asked most
While I still go into every workshop expecting some negativity or push-back, what I most often get is people asking for practical advice about “how to hope”.
Q: “Where do we find hope?”
Hope is in us. In hope-based workshops, our goal is to help you find the hope in your story.
Hope is a muscle and a mindset that we need to train (collectively).
Hope doesn’t just “happen”. It isn’t just there. We have to care for it, tend it, cultivate it, and practise it, through the articulation of goals, the identification of pathways, and the activation of agency.
In the hope-based approach, we check whether something is missing from our story. This helps us think differently about our activism (cognitive flexibility).
How you use it is up to you. The goal is to be focused on the change we want to see.
I have gathered the best books to read about hope in this post.
Any more questions about hope or the hope-based approach? Leave them here:
If you want to learn the hope-based approach and train your hope muscle, sign up for the Rogue Union waiting list to be the first to access new hope-based training courses coming this September.
Upcoming event: Thriving Communities
Very excited to launch the first “real” hope-based messaging guide next week. We co-created it activists from the Global Initiative for Corporate Accountability. Doesn’t it look great? Sign-up here to find out how we plan to grow a new vocabulary for talking about this work.
Hopey, changey stuff
A Candle in a Dark Room: Hope-based expert Mika Ortega has talked about the need for hope to keep doing the work in this Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) podcast. It is an incredibly powerful and personal story. Listen here (starts at 30 minutes in, with a great explanation of hope-based at 55 minutes).
“Things are shit now, but they were a lot shittier before” - I spoke to the Good Geist podcast about the origins of hope-based. Listen here.
“Taking care of ourselves and our families and communities is the essential activity of being human.” Check out the “Take Good Care” framework. More here.
Radical Hope: rich, inspiring guide to hope for the UK charity sector written by Daisy O’Reilly-Weinstock and Eef Leurs from Good Innovation with lots of great case studies and full of great concepts: polyphonic hope, post-colonial hope, narrative hope!
Progressives need to chill the fuck out by Jasmin Scharrer. (H/T Ishtar Lakhani)
People keep telling me about ‘From What If to What Next’ by Rob Hopkins: a call to reawaken our collective imagination, full of community-powered visions of what’s possible. See the announcement.
More about hope in this article about hope and connection by hope-based leader extraordinaire Monica Roa.
If you want me to share something here in future issues, get in touch:
Brain Science Corner - The Hope Circuit & Positive Psychology
The field of positive psychology aims to provide tools to cope with trauma, accepting that it will always be with us (rather than traditional approach that aims to “get rid of it”). It focuses on what we can do in the future, rather than only looking back at the past.
Positive psychologists discovered that helplessness (freezing up in the face of threat or pain) is an instinctive response. It is built into all of us. However, we can learn to respond, activating hope circuitry in our brain that is used for thinking about the future. Doing so, we teach the brain to view things differently: we can change the pathways in our brain.
Psychologist Dan Tomasulo calls this “learned hopefulness”:
“Focusing on what can be done in the future rather than on what happened in the past creates hope.”
“Hope requires negativity or uncertainty to flourish. It is the obstacles, the setbacks, and the disappointments that hold the emotional nutrients for growth.”
In other words, hope is action by definition. Hope is literally the circuitry in our brain that makes plans for a different future and incorporates them into our action.
What’s giving us hope right now
The joy that imbues Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York mayor. This video in which he walks the length of Manhattan is a great example of what we call “being your narrative” - bringing it to life through your action.
New York magazine says: “Mamdani exuded a gee-whiz joy about New York in his buzzy social-media videos featuring slice joints and bodegas and guys hanging out on the street playing dominoes.”
Mamdani’s campaign is a huge example of how progressives need to bring their values to life through visual storytelling, not just jargon. As Mamdani himself said: “From the beginning of the race, we said that we wanted to espouse a politics that required no translation, one that spoke directly to people’s lives, one that people could see their struggles in.”
In Ezra Klein’s analysis, this was about getting attention and producing content in which he is actually listening to people.