Shane J. Lopez > Quotes

“Hope matters. Hope is a choice. Hope can be learned. Hope can be shared with others.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Rick talked about hope as a life-sustaining force that is rooted in our relationship with the future. He wrote, “Just as our ancestors did, today we think about getting from where we are now, let’s call it Point A, to where we want to be, say Point B.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Second, not all thoughts about the future are created equal.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“The future will be better than the present. I have the power to make it so. The first belief comes naturally to us.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“And sometimes my thoughts balanced fantasizing and dwelling, which were exciting thoughts about my future even while I acknowledged the challenges before me. That’s when I was hoping. Hoping felt different than the other types of future thinking. When hoping, I felt compelled to act.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Hope also walks hand in hand with fear, one of the most universal and most painful emotions. When fear is working for us, it reminds us of realistic limits or alerts us when we’re straying from our path to a meaningful future. But fear can also hijack us. Fear gives us only three behavioral options: fight, flight, or freeze.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Sometimes I was fantasizing: I had big thoughts that were pure fun and entertainment about a fast convertible, next summer’s vacation, or retirement on the beach. These gave me a quick high—sometimes followed by a bit of a low. At other times I was dwelling: I hyperfocused my future thoughts on the bad things that might happen, such as struggling to get a job, taking thirty years to pay off my student loans, or never being able to retire. These made me anxious.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Well, John’s IQ didn’t—and couldn’t—help him bounce back. For all his intelligence, he didn’t have a clue about how to cope with the threat of losing life’s meaning—his reason to get up every morning. And nothing I’d learned from my research on intelligence could actually help John—or my other clients or anyone else I knew—when he needed help the most. So I decided that intelligence is overrated. It is much discussed and celebrated, and it is somewhat important at school and in the workplace, but a high IQ is not essential to a good life. However, hope is like oxygen. As I saw then and continue to see every day, we can’t live without hope.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“how we hope—determines how well we live our lives. John’s transformations, from thriving to suffering and back”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“Through my work with John, I realized that how we think about the future—how we hope—determines how well we live our lives. John’s transformations, from thriving to suffering and back to thriving, were simple and compelling. When he had clear hopes for the future, his life was good. When John had a sudden break with his future, he felt his life was not worth living. As John reconnected to a meaningful future, his life became good again, and he was excited by it. And his health mysteriously stabilized.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“You can get there from here.” That favorite saying of Rick’s has become one of mine, too. It’s shorthand for a potent way of thinking about the future. “Here” is the present, which is in some way less desirable than our imagined future. “There” is the target of our longing. And “you” are the one moving yourself from here to there. We expect something from the future, and also from ourselves.”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others

“John had lost his way, his Point B. He needed new strategies for getting to his old goals, or he needed a new Point B. The next”
― Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others