Free, ten honest minutes
Hope or Evidence?
A quick, honest inventory for telling the difference.
Seven pages. No score, no verdict, no personality type at the end.
Instant download. You'll also land on my letters list, and you can leave it any time.
Free, ten honest minutes
A quick, honest inventory for telling the difference.
Seven pages. No score, no verdict, no personality type at the end.
Instant download. You'll also land on my letters list, and you can leave it any time.
What it is
Hope is a hell of a drug, and it isn't the enemy. Most relationships worth having start with some hope attached: belief in a person's potential, faith that the good parts will win out. That's not naive, that's what caring about someone looks like at the start.
The trouble starts when hope stops being a bridge to evidence and starts being a replacement for it.
This is a place to lay the two side by side and notice, in your own handwriting, which one you've actually been living on.
What you do with it
Pick one relationship or situation. On one side, what has actually and consistently happened: demonstrated, repeated, reliable. On the other, what you're waiting for, believing in, or imagining might still show up. Fill in both, even if one ends up much longer than the other.
Then three questions. Which column filled in faster. Whether anything in the evidence column is there because you were told it rather than because you saw it. And what you'd gently want a friend to know if she showed you the same two columns about her own life.
It isn't only about romance. The same question works on a job that keeps promising more than it delivers, a friendship running on old memories, or a family relationship you keep hoping will become something it hasn't shown signs of becoming.
One note before you start
A thin evidence column is not proof you were foolish. Hope isn't naivety. It's often just love doing its best with incomplete information. This isn't here to make you feel silly for hoping. It's here so you can decide, with open eyes, what you want to do with what you now see.
A tool for personal reflection, not a diagnostic instrument or a substitute for professional advice.
If it stirs something
This same question, hope against evidence, threads through Making Lemonade, especially the early chapters on truth and clarity. Hope Is a Hell of a Drug takes it further for the holding-on stage, and the companion workbook gives you a much longer runway.