Develop Hope and Desire

 

I often see people who have given up. They do not see a better future and they do not have the desire or the will to do the work to improve things. Those, of course, are some of the main symptoms in depression: hopelessness and lack of motivation.

Let's consider hope and desire. What do those words mean?

Hope is an expectation or even a dream that something good could happen.

Desire is a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.

Hope and desire together are fuel for motivation. You take action in the belief that it could lead to something desirable.

Positive people have hope.

I never thought of myself as a positive person. I thought of myself as being realistic and practical. But one day, I realized that I went through college and grad school because of my hope that it would lead to a career that I would like and that could support me. There were no guarantees, and I invested a lot of hard work, stress, and money! I worked hard and stuck with it. I would not have done all of that without hope and desire and a belief that it could be. 

The way to develop hope and desire is to allow yourself to dream.

While I was growing up, my family didn’t have much money. Money was tight enough that I learned to not want anything because I couldn’t have it anyway. Well, not wanting means you are not dreaming. If you are not dreaming, what reason would you have to try? 

You need to dream to develop a vision and then work toward making it happen. 

As an exercise in developing hope and desire:

1. Practice daydreaming as if there were no limits, then 
2. Go beyond and dream up the ideal. From there, 
3. Identify your actual wants. 
4. Use the wants to decide on a goal. Then, 
5. Start taking steps to learn and do what it takes to reach the goal.

There is a saying:

A dream written down becomes a goal.

A goal broken down into steps becomes a plan.

And a plan backed by action becomes reality.

Hope and desire are about wanting and expecting something good. If you are lacking hope and desire, you can develop and nurture those traits. 

Allow yourself to daydream without restrictions. Let the ideas flow. Give yourself permission. 

Once you can envision it, you can go after it!