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Never has there been a more important time, in my lifetime, than 2020 to cultivate hope. A pandemic, racial anxiety, quarantining… it can all be a little overwhelming, to say the least! So how do we go about pushing forward and envisioning a better future for ourselves in the midst of all this challenge? How do we go about seeing it better, so that we can make it better? It all starts… with hope. Today’s conversation is all about cultivating hope to drive our lives forward.We’ll dive deep into understanding how without hope, we feel powerless to create change in our lives. Without hope, we lack motivation to move forward, to be resilient, to push through adversity to reach our goals. When we lack hope, we stay stuck in fear, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting the worst to happen. Hope allows us to tolerate failures and disappointments to keep moving forward in creating the life, and the world, that we want. When we learn to cultivate hope, which is a learned behavior, not simply an emotion, we stay motivated in taking action towards what we want in life. We’ll not only talk about hope, but also do Tapping to cultivate hope! !!! start_highlights The definition of hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. It is about allowing yourself to dream. Hope is about having the ability to influence and direct your future in the direction you want. The opposite of feeling powerlessness. In order to be hopeful and move toward a future we want, we have to be flexible and be able to tolerate failure and disappointment, recognizing that this does not define us as who we are. Hope is a learned behavior and we need to recognize that this learned experience is one we can work through, addressing safety first to cultivate hope and create an empowering future. Real hope carries with it confidence and desire and faith and anticipation and aspiration…important emotions that allow us to drive ourselves forward. Tapping will help lower the intensity of past events and traumas that support a belief that we can’t be hopeful, and it also opens us up to create new experiences and cultivate new beliefs to overpower the negative beliefs and move you forward in a positive direction. start_timestampsEpisode Start: 00:01:17About the Tapping Solution App: 00:01:54Definition of Hope: 00:05:08Why we want to cultivate hope: 00:08:22Hope is a learned behavior: 00:13:28Hope is also about an emotion under the words: 00:16:00Can you feel hopeful and visualize an empowering future?: 00:17:30How our amygdala helps us feel safe and how tapping helps: 00:18:18Tapping Session on Hope: 00:24:55Intro Intensity Rating: 00:25:01End of Tapping Intensity Rating: 00:33:56Closing: 00:13:48 start_transcript Alex Ortner: Hey guys, Alex here with the Tapping Solution Podcast and the Tapping Solution App. I am so excited to be here with you today because for the very first time I’m not only recording this via audio, I’m actually recording the video as well, which I’m personally excited about. I’m an expressive person, I like to be able to show my emotions, I am an emotional person. And so, I’m excited to actually record it via video so we can share this on YouTube and Facebook and all the other social media platforms. So, if you’re watching me here via video, thank you, you can see my mic. And, if you’re listening to your audio like normally, thank you so much for listening in and tuning in to our tapping solution podcast. Hopefully all of you, whether you’re listening via audio or video, that you’ve gone and downloaded our tapping solution app because our tapping solution app is absolutely life-changing. We’ve had over two million listens to the tapping meditations. You can go download it for free in the App Store or Google Play. Make sure you go do that. I might actually share a little special surprise about the app at the end of this podcast so stay tuned for that. I’m excited for that. So, today’s conversation is gonna be all about hope. It’s about, how do we cultivate hope to drive our lives forward. And, hope is a really important emotion, it’s a really important practice for us to have on an ongoing basis. I actually just finished recording a master class for our tapping insiders, that’s why I decided to record this particular podcast today, because I wanted to share some of the messages that I shared with our tapping insiders club. And so, you know, I want to start off just by defining what exactly hope is and we will do tapping today, don’t worry, we always do tapping on these podcasts as well. We’ll talk about how we use tapping to actually cultivate that hope in to drive our emotions to change any underlying challenges that we have. And, I’ll talk about specifically what those things are that keep us from allowing ourselves to feel hopeful. And, I know that right now we’re in the middle of a, literally a global pandemic with Covid 19. And, I know that there’s a lot of stress around race and how our society, how our police treat different people of color whether it be black or hispanic. And so, I’m, you know, let me first off say that I’m a huge supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement. I believe that it’s an important movement. I’m so glad, I’m hopeful, right. I’m hopeful that it is going to cultivate real change in our society and it’s definitely been an eye-opener for me in terms of some of the things that I took for granted in my life. I did grow up with some very small amount of, you know, issues when it came to race because I was born in Argentina, I was hispanic, I, you know, that was, I was reminded of that numerous times growing up in middle school and high school that I was Spanish. But, I was still predominantly, you know, in a very white community here in Brookfield, Connecticut. I live in Newtown, Connecticut now but, just that small amount of experience where my race was brought up always hurt and I cannot even imagine what people of color experience on an ongoing, regular basis. So, I wanted to say that I really support this movement in a big way. And so, with all this stuff going on with Covid 19, with racial anxiety in our country, it’s more important than ever to actually be hopeful and to actually cultivate hope in our lives. Because, I know that a lot of people have thought like, where in the world is the world turning right now, right. What’s going on with our economy, with our health, with our world, with everything. And so, for me, I am extremely hopeful that all of this is for the good. And so, hopefully you are cultivating hope. But, If not, we’re going to talk about exactly how we go about doing that today on the podcast. And so, you know, let me just start off by defining what hope actually is. So, hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen, right. Let me say that again, hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. Hope is really about dreaming, right. Hope is about allowing yourself to dream, to see a future that is more empowering than the future or then your current life right now when you see a future where there is positive change, where your life is better, where those people around you’s lives are better. Where you believe that’s actually a possibility. Now, hope is not always easy and sometimes we cannot cultivate hope, we cannot feel hopeful, and I’ll talk about exactly what the reasons are for that today. And, we’ll talk about how we can release those things, you know, rewire our brain and our beliefs around some of those things and actually lower some of the emotional intensity we have around our inability to oftentimes feel hopeful. And, a lot of that has to do with safety, right. So, hope is about feeling safe, to expect good things in the future. And, if you’re not able to feel safe, to actually feel hopeful. A lot of times that can be because of past traumas, past experiences. I know I was doing my master class a little bit ago and somebody said, oh, I feel like I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop, right. It’s an expression I’ve heard a lot when coaching people on this issue is that, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Meaning, that I don’t like to be hopeful because I’m worried or I’m just expecting that something bad is going to happen. Again, that has to do with our experiences, our past experiences. And so, I don’t want to feel hopeful because we don’t want to be hurt when things don’t go our way, when there’s disappointment, when there is failure, when all those things happen. So, it doesn’t feels safe to be hopeful. So, we’ll talk about how we can actually move past that challenge of safety to be able to visualize a better future because we want to be able to visualize and see a better future for ourselves. Because, otherwise, how are we gonna create that future, right. If you can’t see it in your mind’s eye first, how are you going to create it in the world. I always love the example of Walt Disney when it comes to visualization. How Walt Disney saw Disney World in his mind before anybody else did. He was rejected hundreds of times, I don’t know what the actual number is, but a lot of times by different banks who did not believe in his vision. But, he stayed true to that. So, we’ll talk a little bit about that. So, hope is about feeling that you have the power to influence and direct your future, right. I want to say it again. It’s about having the ability or the feeling that you have the power to influence and direct your future in the direction you want. And, just as importantly, it’s important to note that it is the opposite of feeling powerlessness where you do not have the power and influence to direct your future. If you feel powerless, you will not fell hopeful, you will not be able to cultivate hope because you’ll go, well, I don’t have the power to direct myself or direct my life or direct our society or culture in the direction that you want. So, when powerlessness takes over it becomes really difficult to cultivate hope. And, again, we’ll talk about why do we want to cultivate hope, because it is really important to be able to do that. Actually, why don’t we just jump to that first to say that. So, an interesting thing that I hear a lot about online, hope is not a strategy, right. Hope is not a strategy. And, they kind of, for me, they kind of poo poo on hope a little bit. And, I get it. Hope is definitely not a strategy. But, here’s the thing, hope is not a strategy, but it is a requirement for creating a better future. You’re not going to just hope a better future into existence. But, in order for you to be able to develop the strategy that you have, and more importantly to stick to the strategy that you have, you have to have hope. You have to come from a place of hope where you have faith in that future. We have belief in that future, where you believe you can get there. So, hope is not a strategy, but it is a requirement for creating a better future. So, you know, that’s why we want to make sure that we are cultivating hope and that we are feeling hopeful as much as possible. Could I say hope any more times in, you know, in a small period of time. I think I’ve said it about a hundred times already. Hope is also about being flexible and resilient as you move forward. You have to be resilient and flexible as you move forward. And, you have to recognize that you will have to adjust on this path. It takes persistence and hard work to achieve any desired future. And, think about it like this, if you were to want to walk on a path, you know, if you’re walking through the woods and you want to get to a particular destination, if you look at that path as a straight line, you would start to walk and you’d hit a tree or you’d hit a rock or you’d hit a stump or you’d hit a low branch, you’d hit something right. And, you wouldn’t be able to move forward through the woods. We have to be able to go around a tree, under a branch, over a stump, around a rock. Sometimes you might have to go through crazy shrubbery, that’s really difficult. But you have to keep finding your way forward. You have to be resilient. You have to be flexible in finding yourway forward. Sometimes people stop themselves from moving forward because they hit obstacles in their life and they go, well, look, I failed, I picked the wrong path, I shouldn’t have done this, I’m so disappointed, I’m just gonna stand here and wallow in my disappointment and be stuck where I am. Rather than going, great, now I’ve got to pivot, I’ve got to adjust, right. In 2020, if this is not a lesson in pivoting and adjusting, I don’t know what is. Because, it is absolutely a huge impediment that we all have faced as a society, individually, with business owners, individually with people, with their finances, with their health, pivoting their health and saying, hey, you know what, I want to take care of my health, I got to do a better job because I want to be healthy in case I have to face a virus like this. So, it’s, when we face these obstacles we have to be able to be flexible and resilient to move forward. And, that goes for when you create that empowering future for yourself. When you want to be hopeful about your future you have to understand that you will face failure and disappointment, right. So, hope is about being able to tolerate failure and disappointment and being able to keep your eye on the future that you want. If you’re walking through that path in the woods or as I should say, path because you’re not walking on a path, you’re just saying, hey, I’m gonna go to that in that direction to that place where I want to go. You’re gonna have to tolerate that there’s gonna be obstacles in your way. You’re gonna have to tolerate that you might go in one direction and then face some huge bush of prickers and you got to go around and go in a different direction, right. You’d never think, oh, I’m gonna quit here, I’ve reached the tree or poison ivy, or whatever it might be. You’d go around, you’d go a different way. So, in order to be hopeful, in order to be able to move towards a future that we want, we have to be flexible and we have to tolerate failure and disappointment. And, also recognize that that failure and disappointment does not define us, right. Really important to understand, failure and disappointment does not define us as who we are. Failure and disappointment are necessities to move forward in the direction that we want to create the life that we want. And so, when you can actually have those failures and have those disappointments and understand that they are not a reflection of you or your character, but a natural part of life, of moving towards a journey, when you can tolerate those things and redirect and move your energy forward in the direction you want as quickly as possible, that is when you will actually reach your goal, right. Again, walking through the woods, the longer you take standing in front of that tree being disappointed that you ran into a tree the longer it’s gonna take you to pivot and go around that tree and keep going in the direction that you want. Same goes in life with any of the challenges that we face, we have to be able to pivot and move quickly and not get stuck in those failures and disappointments and recognize that if you walk into the woods and hit a tree it’s not because you’re a bad walker, it’s not that you’re not capable. Same goes for when you are trying to reach a destination in life. If you fail, if you are disappointed, it is not a reflection of your character, but a natural and normal part of moving forward in a journey at any point. So, the more you can tolerate that failure and disappointment, the stronger that you will be able to create the life that you want. And so, hope is, it’s a learned behavior. It’s interesting, when I was researching before I went to do my master class for tapping insiders club that, you know, hope is not a feeling, it’s…
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