Do you feel like you’re never going to get any creative stuff going? 

Well, never lose hope – because hope is a prerequisite to be creative.

Without hope, taking such a task as innovating becomes difficult, if not, impossible. Hope is a powerful element in innovation at work because creativity requires challenging the status quo and the willingness to try and possibly fail. 

And if you don’t have at least some sense of hope about the outcome, why put out all that effort to try to create an idea and get others on board with it, right?

The 5 Modes of Hoping

1. Patient hope – This is the basic trust in the goodness of the world. To hope is to be patient and stand firm to place one’s trust and others facing an unforeseen future. You just feel good about the future, you’re very patient, and just feel like things are going to come through. 
2. Critical hope – It’s the kind of hope marked by passionate suffering and a restless longing for what is missing in the world. This is the bleeding heart, the person that just really wants things to be great, and is holding on to all hope that it’s going to turn out good.
3. Estimative hope – This is the belief that the once desired objective is both obtainable and that one is in control of making it happen. It’s a very goal-oriented type of hope based on evidence. 
4. Resolute hope – It’s a resolve to set aside the evidence of what’s possible and create one’s own sense of probability and degree of control. It’s characterized by optimism in the spite of odds. 
5. Utopian hope – This is hope with a sense of profound confidence in one’s destiny to create a new and better future. 

These types of hope are based on different levels of information and a sense of what is your direction and what are the odds. Once you weigh those odds and your control of the situation, it’s going to have an effect on your creative output. 

The bottom line is…

Don’t just hope for creative output or that you’d become innovative in any particular moment. You have to instill a sense of hope and really take stock of where you are in the situation. Get those engines going before you dive into the creative output.

To hear more on hope is a prerequisite to be creative, listen to the full podcast episode here: Episode 020: Where There’s Hope, There’s Creativity.