Word Of the Week #49: Hope
April 22, 2009 by Susan Clarke
Hope: desire accompanied with expectation and a belief that it is obtainable.
Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible. -William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
Is this not a great quote? My great friend Gaye sent this to me and I believe that we need to keep ourselves open to the possibilities in our life.
Do you hope that your personal and/or professional life will improve? If so, you need to define exactly what that improvement is. Then you need to make sure you have the desire and the expectation to achieve it. And lastly, you have to know that it is obtainable!
Make sure that you only share your hopes with people that will support you rather than sabotage your thoughts! I have found that friends and family members can be negative about our pursuits and deflate our hopes. It’s not that they don’t want you to achieve, I believe they verbalize their own self doubt. It’s a form of projecting. They project their fears onto you.
This week focus on your hopes and desires. What will it take for you to obtain them? Picture how you will feel when you do obtain them and hold the passion for the possible!
Reader Responses
“Hope and fear seem to be opposite sides of the same coin. In many cases I hear people talking about their hopes, but with little confidence in their voices. I am a positive person and have always believed that the best is yet to come. However, when I hear people say, “Gee, I hope I can get it done,” it does not sound like they believe they can. It is actually depressing. What I have learned to do is tell some of those people to take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves that whatever it is they HOPE to accomplish can come to fruition. Unfortunately, many people put up arbitrary ceilings that only allow them to achieve just so much. Whatever our hopes and desires, I have always been a big believer that we must be able to see that hope, dream, desire in our mind’s eye first before we can hope to do it. As I remind my three-year-old daughter of the four magic words: “I CAN DO IT!” The word can’t is struck from the vocabulary. I say a magazine advertisement recently, I think it was for NIKE that stated: “Impossible is nothing.” Our minds can be a great asset in achieving our hopes, dreams and desires. It truly is mind over matter.” — Joe Moran