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Hope is a capacity, built through presence.

Goal-setting alone isn't enough when facing compound complexity.

Feeling the full weight of what one is carrying is where real hope begins.

A colleague I hold with deep regard lost his father last year. While he was still navigating the raw, ragged edges of that grief, the estate, the belongings, the impossible paperwork of closing down a life, his health began to falter. It was the kind of diagnosis that rearranges your relationship with your own body in a heartbeat. And then, three months later, his family's house burned down.

I have spent more than 20 years sitting with people in their most uncertain moments as a business psychologist. And somehow watching this unfold, the sheer accumulation of it, rocked me to my core.

Rather than trying to reframe it or find a silver lining, I sat with it. I tried to feel the weight of what he and his family were holding and noticed where it landed, in my chest, in the tightness of my breath, in the question it kept asking me: What do you actually believe about hope when the hits don't stop coming?

The psychology of hope, 1.0

Five years ago, I wrote about the psychology of hope during the pandemic. I believed hope was essentially a strategy: Set goals, find pathways, and stay focused on what you can control. That piece resonated because it gave people something to do with their fear.

It was also incomplete.

The pandemic was devastating. In hindsight, it was a single disruption. What followed has been something different. Political polarization that shifts by the week. Economic uncertainty that won't resolve. The ambient hum of AI anxiety: the sense that the expertise you spent decades building is losing value by the month. Tension around the globe that seeps into nearly every boardroom, dinner conversation, and sleepless 2 a.m. spiral. Rather than a single, unifying crisis, it is multiple pressures, colliding simultaneously, from multiple directions, often with no resolution in sight.

It's the physician leading her department through another round of cuts while her mother is dying. The leader who appears to be handling it "all so well" while privately wondering when the ground will stop shifting.

Under that kind of complexity, the standard hope playbook—set goals, stay positive, focus on what you can control—starts to feel hollow.

Revisiting hope as capacity, not strategy

Here is what I have come to understand, through both the research and through sitting with real people navigating real devastation: Hope is not a cognitive exercise. It is a capacity.

C.R. Snyder's original hope theory framed it as goal-directed thinking, willpower plus pathways. That model works beautifully when you are facing a single obstacle. But researchers building on Snyder's work, including Scioli and Biller, now describe hope as something more emergent: A property that arises from the dynamic interplay between individual will, meaningful connection with others, and a deeper sense of why. Not a plan. A way of being.

This aligns with what I see in practice. The leaders who sustain themselves through this kind of accumulated difficulty are not the ones with the best five-year plans. They are the ones who have developed the ability to feel the full range of what is happening, the grief, the fear, the uncertainty, without collapsing under it. They hold the weight and still find their footing.

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I think of this as the difference between activation and aliveness. Activation is cortisol-driven, the white-knuckling, the "just keep moving" energy that feels vital to navigating work. It might look like coping, but it is actually burning fuel you do not have. Aliveness is fundamentally different. It is the capacity to be genuinely present to your own experience, head, heart, and body, especially when that experience is painful.

When my colleague's house burned down, I did not go into activation mode. I sat with it. I was curious about all that it stirred up in me, what it asked of me. The tension was deeply uncomfortable. And from that raw, more honest place, something that felt like hope began to surface. Not the bright, goal-directed hope I wrote about five years ago (plans, goals, and forward-focused energy). Something quieter. More like a willingness to stay open to what comes next, even without knowing what that is.

The most hopeful thing you can do right now might not look like hope at all.

It might look like pausing before you react and asking yourself, honestly: How am I actually feeling right now? Not the polished answer. The real one.

Hope in 2026 does not live in the five-year plan. It lives in much smaller, more deliberate moments where you choose presence over performance, where you feel the full weight of what you are carrying and, in that same breath, notice that you are still standing.

I don't have this figured out. I am still sitting with the weight of what my colleague is navigating, and what it is teaching me about my own relationship to uncertainty and loss. I don't think hope is something you arrive at but rather something you practice, imperfectly, repeatedly, with more questions than answers.

The leaders I work with who are navigating this well are not the ones who have mastered optimism. They are the ones who have given themselves permission to feel the full range of being human and then, from that honest place, to look for what comes next.

That is not the hope I wrote about five years ago. It is quieter. Less tidy. And I think it might be the only kind that holds.

Snyder, C. R. (2002). Hope theory: Rainbows in the mind. Psychological Inquiry, 13(4), 249–275.

Scioli, A., & Biller, H. B. (2009). Hope in the age of anxiety. Oxford University Press.

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840, 33–44.

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