Cognitive Hope versus Epic Hope

Sadly when people take their lives it's because they ran out of hope, and because of this psychologists began to try and measure hope and try and find ways to help people rekindle hope, and one of the influential models is that of Snyder and he talks about hope as being the combination of your ability to set valuable and realistic goals, see yourself as a capable agent to achieve those goals, and to find pathways to overcome the obstacles in your way to reach those goals and this kind of hope is the basis of the entire coaching industry, most of the self-help industries all based around helping people find their goals and achieve them. Yet I think we short sell hope when we reduce it to that because as Aristotle said "Hope isn't really hope until the odds are truly against you." We are longing for some kind of epic hope, the kind of hope that Frankl saw in Holocaust survivors - that enables people to endure the most extreme of circumstances, that's the kind of hope that we're all looking for. The Bible sees that kind of hope as a gift from God, and I think the more that we as a society choose to reject God, the more we're seeing a crisis of hopelessness and of drug addiction and of mental illness, especially among young people.
#Hope #CognitiveHope #SnyderModel #SelfHelp #GoalSetting #OvercomingObstacles #Endurance #EpicHope #HolocaustSurvivors #GiftFromGod #CrisisOfHopelessness #MentalHealthAwareness