When Hanging on to Hope Will Hurt You

When you consider the past and come to grips with the fact that it is hopeless to expect something different in the future, then you have the kind of hopelessness that will motivate you to move from a mere wishing to real hope. How do you get this hopelessness?

You must take the past performance of the person, businesses, or whatever, and project it into the future:

• Do I want the same reality, frustration or problem six months from now?
• Do I want this same level of performance a year from now?
• Do I want to be having these same conversations two week or two months from now?

If the answer is no, then it is time to ask some other questions that get you to the real anatomy of hope.

• What reason is there to have hope that tomorrow is going to be different?
• What in the picture is changing that I can believe in?

The difference between hoping and wishing is that hope comes from real, objective reasons that the future is going to be different from the past. Anything other than that is simply a wish that comes from your desires. So what are the real objective reasons that we can use to diagnose when an ending may not be necessary, and we can hang on to hope versus when it’s time to get hopelessness? What is real hope made of? Let’s see.

Endings are necessary when there is no hope. But hope is not a virtue to throw away so easily. It can ensure the next 100 years of success for a tech company or even save a failed marriage. But to now when to have hope, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions.

Still struggling with this? Let me give you more encouragement. 

And let's talk more about how to create a necessary ending.