How do you know if you are being optimistic or delusional about the future? I would certainly much rather be described as optimistic than pessimistic, but at what point does hoping just become wishful thinking?
I’ve noticed a trend with people who face difficult circumstances is they have a remarkable ability to remain hopeful that things will turn around and get better. I admire those types of people who can stare death in the face and hope for a brighter future. I would much rather hang around those types of people than the chicken littles of the world.
These hope-filled people seem to fall into 2 categories…those who have a plan with clear action steps and time tables & those who don’t. Those in the last category are the delusional ones.
As many have said before, “Hope is not a strategy.” You can have hope in a plan of action, but hope is not a plan of action. You can have hope in a strategy, but hope is not a strategy. Hope doesn’t turn the ship around. Hope doesn’t magically reverse downward trends. When all you have for the future is hope you don’t have hope, you have wishful thinking.
Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, tells of Admiral Stockdale who was captured during the Vietnam War and held as a POW for 8 years.
Stockdale could always tell which soldiers weren’t going to survive being a prisoner. It was the optimists– those soldiers who thought they were going to be rescued by Christmas or by Easter. When those soldiers weren’t released by the time they had hoped for they gave up and died. The ones who survived were the ones who realized they might be prisoners for a long time, but were still able to hold out hope for an eventual rescue. Named for the Admiral, Collins coined the term “Stockdale Paradox,” which he describes as the ability to confront the cold hard brutal facts and yet still remain hopeful about the future.
Where might you currently be ignoring the brutal facts and hoping things will magically turn around? Your health? Your marriage? A child? Your career? Your business? An employee?
If you aren’t doing anything other than hoping, it’s not going to get better, because hope isn’t a strategy. On the other hand if you have a plan with solid strategies in place then your hope is well-founded and your future will look different than your present.
All the positivity in the world isn’t enough without a plan.
As the old saw says, “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to keep getting what you’re getting.” It’s irrelevant how you “feel” about the future. Just having “a good feeling” isn’t a plan. I’ve seen a lot of money and time wasted on a good feeling.
Confronting the brutal facts that things aren’t getting better and they aren’t turning around is painful…but only temporarily. Then you gain clarity and can start to formulate a plan that will turn things around.
Hope doesn’t turn things around, a plan does.
Once you make a solid plan you can have hope that your health, employee, marriage, child, career, or business WILL turn around because you have a strategy for them to get better.
The sooner you realize hope isn’t a strategy, the sooner you can have hope that things will get better.
