September Basketball Newsletter - The Power of Hope

Key Word for September 2020: HOPE

Hope is the dream of a soul awake - French Proverb

Hope for centuries has been symbolized as an anchor, the strong link that keeps our boat anchored to solid ground and protects us from being tossed by a storm or lost at sea. Hope has also been symbolized as light in the darkness, a match struck in the deepest cavern pointing toward a way out. Leading researcher on the importance of hope, C. Richard Snyder, writes in his seminal study, Hope Theory, that hope is the capability to find pathways to reach desired goals and the ability to motivate ourselves to find these pathways. He has found higher hope is consistently related to athletic and academic success as well as greater physical and psychological health.

Hope makes us stronger. Hope is the foundation for our courage, patience, and will to overcome difficulties.

The good news about hope is that it can be improved and developed. Just like a great player must practice ball handling, hope is a daily pursuit. Hope is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, hope means confidence in the future. As a verb, hope means to leap forward in expectation, to trust. Take time this month to evaluate hope in your life.

Why Hope Matters So Much

Hope protects against fear. Anxiety and fear cause a person to divert meaningful thinking away from problem-solving, agency, goal setting, and action steps and instead focus that attention on hypervigilance and preoccupation with threat cues. This means the mind becomes obsessed with working to recognize anything that is a perceived danger. In this mindset, suspicion, helplessness, and lack of control increase. Also in anxiety, a person has increased concerns about the evaluation of others, because of the heightened threat perception, innocuous interactions become tenuous. A teacher, coach, parent, or friend who is trying to be helpful, under feelings of anxiety can actually be perceived as a threat.

When a person is afraid, the energy they need to overcome challenges is out of focus. The mind is constantly drawn off task by the interference of anxious or dreadful thoughts and the concern for greater vigilance and self-protection. (Scott T. Michael Hope Conquers Fear)

On the other hand, hope provides energy, focus, courage and motivation to attend to the best way forward. Hope protects us from feeling out of control and gives us tools to navigate the unpredictable.

Hope Provides the Road Map for Success
Researcher Jen Cheavers has demonstrated that there is a high correlation between hope and goal setting. Students with higher levels of hope set more goals than those with lower levels of hope. Christina Moon in her research discovered higher hope individuals found access to more pathways, resources, options, and breakthroughs than people with lower levels of hope.

Hope energizes us and is the foundation for innovation and growth. “Hope is the power to be cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.” G. K. Chesterton

Predictors of Hope - Self Check

• How easily are you distracted from your task at hand?
• How many of your relationships (home, work, school, friends) do you view as possible threats to the success of your future?
• How many goals do you have written down right now?
• If someone asked you what you hope for right now, what would you answer?
• What percentage of your thinking is spent on the recognition of threat cues and fear of the future?
• What percentage of your thinking is devoted to finding resources, options, and tools for your future success?
• What is your level of authentic cheerfulness?
• How does your cheerfulness (or lack of it) influence those around you?

Basketball Hope
Basketball is not dead and though many of us have been grieved that basketball doesn't match what we hope for it right now, our work is to find the path through for the continuation of this amazing game. Basketball is a spectacular sport...the artistic wonder of a well-timed pass, the strategy and brilliance of the game, the power of playing as a team with those we love and who make use better. Right now, you might be wrestling with:

• When will we be able to play again?
• Will I be able to get a scholarship?
• Will colleges still have teams?

All these questions emerge from our fear and uncertainty.

Basketball is a powerful tool to build greater mental toughness and resiliency. We need grit to play this game well and now is the time to make grit a hallmark of our lives.

Avoid:
Any thoughts that focus on what you don’t have. Get over it and get moving forward.
Any reservations about giving your best. Your best is always what you should give.
Any fear that your future is ruined. Your future is what you make of it and what you choose to trust God for.

Action Steps:
Find resources, people, programs that energize and inspire you to live your best. Listen, read, and learn from them.

Post clear goals. Write them out and put them where you will see them daily.

Be an initiator, not a responder. Don’t wait for your coach to set your workout, plot your basketball course, or schedule your future. Grab your calendar, get trained, get excited, get internally motivated.

Hope Coaches
Are you a Hope Coach? Does your life inspire hope in those around you?

Your level of hope is connected to your level of relationships. Despair is solitary. Your community of people who love and believe in you, who inspire and pour life into you is crucial.

How do you develop this powerful resource? Be a person who pours into others. Who do you serve? Who do you learn from? Who do you honor and assist? If you only help yourself and your program, your level of connection ends there.

Hope is a helping hand to those who need it. Sit down and make a list of people you can encourage, thank, bless, or inspire today. Write one of them a letter. Send a personal inspiring text message. Escape your preoccupation with worry and get busy spreading hope. Be known as a Hope Coach.

Criteria of a Hope Coach
-Concise goals
-Network of people you help and who help you
-Dedicated hunter of new ideas
-Seek wisdom outside your own thinking
-Your thoughts are dedicated to building a stronger future
-Your language does not damage the future for yourself or someone else but builds up
-Those around you feel more hopeful, energized, and motivated to succeed

You can’t give what you don’t have. If you need hope, your best resource is a relationship with the God of hope who promises to give you hope as a gift. “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13.

Parenting with Hope
Hope is crucial for parents to instill and protect. Our coaches who are also educators in the classroom report this time period as one of the most discouraging times they have had to face. Parents are angry, stressed out, frustrated, and discouraged in the homes. Consequently, students have emotionally distanced and basically checked out. No energy for school means a damaged relationship with their educational future.

Consider what possible relational damage your child has with his or her future? A relationship that is damaged looks like despair, grief, anger, fear, uncertainty, and helplessness. Ways people cope with damaged relationships that are unhealthy include an increase in addictive behavior, distracted thinking, aimlessness with time, and hopeless thinking and speaking.

How do you cure a damaged relationship with one’s future? The same way you cure a damaged relationship with people. John Gottman of the University of Washington gives us the four most dangerous ways we tend to try and fix damaged relationships: 1. Contempt and 2. Criticism. We speak poorly to ourselves and others about our future. We don’t like our future, we fret about our future and believe the worst about it. 3. Stonewalling and 4. Defensiveness. We block any agency towards our future, we stop goal setting, innovation, imagination, courage, or investment in our future. These are the ways we damage it further and these are the most popular unconscious tools we try to use to fix our damaged relationships.

We can heal our relationships with new and wiser tools. Encouragement is oxygen. It brings energy into any situation as does oxygen. Speaking courage into our lives comes through a daily decision. To breathe life into our words in our minds and hearts about our future. “I love my future. I am thankful for the adventure of online teaching. I am grateful to see where this leads.” Delight is another tool. Healthy children have a natural delight in life. They love the wrapping paper as much as the toy. There is a real sense of joy in the present moment. The relationship with our future becomes healed as we learn to delight in our “right here, right now” moment. Invitation and surrender. These tools bring wisdom. We invite people to provide outside counsel, new avenues of thinking, instead of doubling down and fighting everything and everyone, we listen, we learn, we lay down our need to be suspicious of every possible threat and know that we are powerful, courageous, and able to navigate our future with hope.

Part of helping a child rebuild a new vision for their future is the focus on the intrinsic rather than the external. Lives based on externals can be shattered, but life that is based on the hope of that which is eternal can never be taken away. What is eternal? Compassion, hope, integrity, resilience, and Love.

Maya Angelou writes, “My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept their love in return."

Need Daily Hope?

NBC Founder Coach Fred Crowell has a new book coming out this October called, Words of Hope. This is a daily devotional with inspiring messages to fill you with hope and wisdom. You can pre-order it now. Get yours today and read more at CrowellU.com.