Why Keeping Hope Alive Is Essential To Progressing Through A Chaotic Reality

After the dumpster fire that was 2020, it’s only natural to feel confused, worried, and even hopeless, right? Keeping hope alive sometimes seems impossible.

In light of the challenges everyone is now facing — personally, professionally, and globally — these feelings seem more than justified. What other choice do you have?

The fact is, you do have a choice. And your ability to move forward in the face of chaos is hinging on you exercising it.

There's a continuum between hopefulness and despair.

In the same way that you and you, alone, have the authority to choose the food you consume every day, you have the power to choose between hope and despair in each new moment.

And this one choice changes everything.

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Keeping hope alive is essential when chaos strikes. 

Think about it: A mindset of despair makes it so tempting to dwell on the past and catastrophize about the future. This keeps you feeling like a victim of circumstance.

Hope, on the other hand, will prepare you to emerge from this pandemic stronger, more resilient, and clearer than ever about who you want to be and what you want to create in your life.

What is hope, anyway?

In psychological terms, hope is having an expectation that something good will happen — or that something bad won’t happen — in the future.

It’s a mindset of optimism — seeing the proverbial glass as half full and anticipating a neutral, if not positive, outcome.

From a metaphysical perspective, the vibration of hope is simply less-resistant energy than fearfulness or despair. And the higher your personal vibration, the more easily you magnetize other high-vibration experiences, like love, well-being, and prosperity.

Human beings are energy transmitters and receivers.

This means that by virtue of your thoughts, beliefs, feelings, moods, and expectations, you broadcast an energy signal that the entire universe around you receives and responds to.

Cultivating a mindset of hope will yield you drastically better results than broadcasting a frequency of fear or despair.

And even though it’ll take some conscious attention on your part to make the shift, the improvement in your experience makes it well worth the effort.

In a chaotic reality, here are 3 principles that will support you in keeping hope alive.

1. Understand what hope really is.

Hope, like every emotion, is simply a reflection of your current vibration, which is in a constant state of flux.

Emotions are just energy in motion. Some emotions feel fantastic while others feel miserable to the point of being paralyzing, which has to do with the frequency of the energy you're transmitting.

Along the continuum of vibrations that human beings are capable of experiencing, the emotion of hope falls just slightly north of contentment.

It’s not as life-giving as absolute certainty, but it’s a lot more comfortable than despair.

Making the jump from pessimism to hope represents an important tipping point in terms of the quality of the experiences we attract into our lives.

The turning points in your life that you relish and adore — those moments when you feel the wind beginning to change and start to glimpse the possible gifts of an unwanted situation — are not magic. They unfold as a direct result of making a conscious shift in your perception.

The way to generate this internal shift is by deliberately looking for and celebrating every single positive aspect you can find about wherever you happen to be.

There are positive aspects in even the bleakest circumstances, but you have to be willing to look for them. This might mean withdrawing from a situation long enough to recover your balance and refocus your perspective.

In the case of the events of 2020 and beyond, it will certainly mean looking to something other than the evening newsfeed for inspiration.

In order to make the leap from despair to hope, reach for a feeling of neutrality, surrender, and relief.

No one has the power to improve a situation that they're actively railing against. You, first, have to achieve a state of acceptance for a situation, acknowledge its positive aspects, and appreciate the ways it's currently serving you.

From a solid foundation of neutrality, you can then strive to progress forward and make some positive gains.

You may not be able to find evidence of lavish prosperity in the midst of paralyzing debt or conjure the feeling of love in the middle of a sharp pang of loneliness. But you can always find something to be grateful for, if you're willing to look for it.

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2. Think of hopefulness as something you can achieve in each new moment, not as a final destination.

It’s been said that "I am" are the two most powerful words in the English language. Whatever you speak after them becomes your reality.

Whenever you personalize something in your experience — the moment you say, "It’s hopeless," or, "I’m depressed" — you're actually inviting a fleeting emotion to become a chronic emotional state.

If you remember that your emotions are just a reflection of your moment-to-moment energetic state, you’ll see that you’re always a thought or two away from gradually raising your vibration.

At any moment, through the deliberate application of your power of focus, you can shift your attention and lighten your mood on purpose.

3. Calibrate your energy field on purpose.

This is the key to powerfully move through any uncertain or chaotic situation. The choice between hope and despair is pretty simple.

You can either allow the dominant frequency of the world around you to calibrate your energy field, or you can take responsibility for deliberately cultivating the energy you wish to live in.

One choice leaves you at the mercy of world events and other people’s actions and reactions. The other choice returns you to your power to create the kind of world you desire to live in.

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Christy Whitman is a transformational leader, celebrity coach, and a New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book, “The Desire Factor: How to Embrace Your Materialistic Nature to Reclaim Your Full Spiritual Power," will be released in the spring of 2021. For more information, please visit her website.