Resonant Leaderhip: Post #5- Hope

Hope: While mindfulness prepares us to interact with ourselves and others, it’s not enough to protect us from the dissonance default. However, hope is a powerful reset button for us all. Hope can help a leader focus on his or her vision for the future. And vision becomes a very powerful positive attractor and takes us down a path of renewal, not negative emotion and dissonance. The authors cite examples of how positive visioning has helped great athletes win under the most stressful of situations—principally by visioning themselves winning, often in great detail. The neural paths created by such envisioning are very similar to those who have practiced such skills for a long period of time. As a positive attractor, hope becomes like an umbrella of positive protection that draws from your strengths and visions of the future. The result is slower breathing, better memory, and in general a healthy prognosis, whereas negative attractors like hate, jealousy, and envy take leaders down a very different path—one of emotional, physical and spiritual isolation and dissonance. Not fun. The authors offer three key components of hope: 1) the leader needs a vision and to be in touch with people around him/her; 2) the leader must be optimistic; and 3) the leader must see the future as feasible. In fact, their description of optimists vs. pessimists is worth the read.