Hopeful Choices: A School Counselor's Guide to Hope Theory

Abstract

Throughout their school years, students are faced with array of increasingly important and difficult choices. These range from deciding what to do for the elementary school science fair and whom to ask to the eighth grade dance, if and where to go to college, and the best occupation to pursue, to name but few. Particularly in adolescence, students are called upon to make monumental choices that may affect their lives well into the future. Beginning in the primary school years, school counselors prepare students to make adaptive choices by instilling in them what we call `hope.' Hope, as discussed in this article, is that which enables people to set valued goals, to see the means to achieve those goals, and to find the drive to make those goals happen. We have three purposes in writing this article. First, we detail relatively new theory of hopeful thinking and discuss its implications for determining important life choices. Second, we propose developmental model regarding the formation of hope in children. And third, we discuss counseling techniques for engendering hope and enabling older children and adolescents to make adaptive choices. Hope Theory: A Model of Goal-Directed Thinking Most lay people consider hope to be an affective phenomenon--an emotion experienced when all practical ways of achieving desired end have been exhausted. This notion is evident in phrases such as, `cross your fingers and hope for the best,' and `at least we still have hope,' both of which one might utter when feeling particularly incapable of achieving important goals through one's own efforts. In contrast, just over decade ago, C. R. Snyder and members of his University of Kansas Hope Laboratory (1991) reconceptualized hope, not as passive emotional phenomenon that occurs only in the darkest moments, but as process through which individuals actively pursue their goals. In this context, hope is conceptualized as goal-directed cognitive process. Specifically, Snyder, Harris et al. (1991) defined hope as, a cognitive set that is based on reciprocally derived sense of successful agency (goal-directed determination) and pathways (planning to meet goals) (p. 572). As such, hopeful thinking always includes three components: goals, pathways thinking, and agency thinking. Goals are hoped-for ends. According to the wide definition adopted within the hope-theory framework, goal is anything that an individual desires to get, do, be, experience, or create. Such goals may be extremely large (taking months or even years to achieve) or extremely small (requiring only minutes or seconds to accomplish); moreover, goals may vary in attainment probability, ranging from very high to very low. In hope theory, goals are the targets of mental action-sequences, and they anchor purposive behavior (Snyder, 1989, 1994, 2000a, 2000b; Snyder, Michael, & Cheavens, 1999). In other words, when an individual initiates an intentional behavior sequence, it must be directed toward achieving some specific outcome. Prior to initiating that behavior sequence, however, one must engage in two other types of cognitions: pathways and agency thinking. Pathways thoughts reflect person's perceived capacity to produce cognitive routes to desired goals (Snyder, 1994). Thus, individuals engage in pathways thinking when they actively construct routes or plans for achieving goals. Because some of these plans may not succeed when set in motion, hopeful persons produce many such plans in order to circumvent possible obstacles to goal accomplishment. Such pathways will not lead to goal attainment, however, without the last cognitive component in the hope-theory model: agency thinking. Agency cognitions are `the thoughts that people have regarding their ability to begin and continue movement on selected pathways toward those goals' (Snyder, Michael et al., 1999, p. 180). As in Piper's (1978) The Little Engine That Could, agency thoughts such as think I can are the fuel that powers the goal-pursuit engine (for empirical support, see Snyder, Lapointe, Crowson, & Early, 1998). …