What Hope Actually Is

A definition I didn’t plan to write — and why it might change how you think about everything

I didn’t sit down one day and decide to define hope.

It happened the way the best things in this journey have happened — unexpectedly, in the middle of something else. Someone asked me a question about how I stay hopeful when the world feels heavy, and before I could think about it, something came out of my mouth that surprised me.

Hope is what happens when self-discipline meets adversity and wins.

I sat with that for a while. The more I turned it over, the more I believed it.

It’s not a definition you’ll find in a dictionary. It’s not academic language — though it’s consistent with the research. Psychologist C.R. Snyder spent decades studying hope and concluded it has two engines: the belief that you can move forward, and the ability to find a route when the obvious one is blocked. For me, it came out of a year of living it, and from a question that deserved a real answer.

I want to unpack it with you — word by word — because I think each piece matters.

“What Happens”

Notice what this phrase doesn’t say. It doesn’t say hope is a feeling you have. It doesn’t say hope is a gift some people are born with. It doesn’t say hope arrives when conditions are right.

It says hope is what happens — an outcome, a result, or something that emerges from a process.

This matters more than it might seem. If hope is a feeling, you’re at the mercy of your mood, your circumstances, your neurochemistry on any given morning. If hope is what happens — a byproduct of something you do — then it’s within reach every single day, regardless of how you feel when the alarm goes off.

That shift changed everything for me. I stopped waiting for hope to show up and started doing the things that produce it.

“Self-Discipline”

This is the walk — the practice, the showing up.

Self-discipline gets a bad reputation. It sounds punishing, restrictive, joyless. But I’ve come to think of it differently — as the most generous thing you can do for your future self.

Every morning, I get up before I want to. Every workout I show up for, when part of me would rather not. Every meal I have with intention instead of convenience. Every time I choose what I’m building over what would be easy — that’s self-discipline, and it doesn’t feel like deprivation. It feels like loyalty to the person I decided to become on the day I chose to pursue better health.

Here’s the other thing about self-discipline — it’s personal. What discipline looks like for your journey won’t look like mine. For someone rebuilding after loss, discipline is getting out of bed and going outside. For someone in recovery, it is making the call. For someone caring for a sick parent, it is five minutes a day that are only theirs.

The form changes, but the function is the same. You show up for the thing that matters consistently, even when you don’t feel like it — especially when you don’t feel like it.

“Meets Adversity”

This is the part that makes hope different from optimism.

Optimism says things will work out. It’s a disposition — warm, helpful, but ultimately passive. Optimism doesn’t require adversity. It floats above it.

Hope meets adversity. It steps toward it, looks it in the eye, and says: I see you, you’re real, and I’m not stopping.

Duke women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson captured something close to this in a talk she gave her players that went viral — over 8 million views and counting. Her message was simple and eye-opening in the best way: we all wait for life to get easier, but it never does. What changes is you. You handle hard better.

That’s exactly right. Adversity doesn’t go away. You get better at meeting it. In my experience, the meeting — the act of showing up with self-discipline when the hard thing is right in front of you — is precisely where hope is made.

The adversity in my life these past few years has been real. A doctor’s visit that made things very clear. The slow loss of my father to Alzheimer’s over a decade. The recent passing of my mother. A body that had accumulated years of choices I wished I’d made differently. And there’s more. I can’t forget to acknowledge a world that — if I’m being honest — hasn’t always made it easy to feel hopeful.

I don’t think you get to real hope without real adversity. The cheap version, the kind that pretends everything is fine, isn’t hope. It’s avoidance with better branding.

The hope that holds — the kind worth building — is forged in the hard things. Not despite them. Because of them.

“And Wins”

This is where I want to be careful. Because “wins” doesn’t mean what you think.

It doesn’t mean the adversity disappears. It doesn’t mean you achieve the goal, hit the number, or cross the finish line. It doesn’t mean the hard thing stops being hard.

Winning means you didn’t stop, you came back the next morning, and you refused to let the adversity define the outcome.

Some of my biggest wins this past year looked like nothing from the outside. A morning I almost didn’t get up — and then did. A busy work week where I held the thread of the habit even though everything was different. A hard day where “Pictures” was the only thing that reset me, and it worked.

Those are wins — small ones, but they compound. They add up to a hope practice that is deeper and more durable than anything I’ve had before.

Self-discipline meets adversity and wins — not once, in some dramatic moment of triumph, but again and again, in the small, unglamorous moments that nobody else sees.

A Definition Wide Enough For Everyone

Here’s what I love most about this definition. It doesn’t tell you what your adversity must be, or what your self-discipline must look like, or what winning means for your journey.

It works in a gym, in a grief group, in a recovery program, in a faith community, in a hospital room, in a living room at 3 am when everything feels impossible.

It works because it describes a dynamic, not a prescription. You bring your life to it. The definition holds whatever you bring.

What is your adversity right now? What would self-discipline look like in the face of it? What would winning mean — not eventually, but tomorrow morning?

That’s where your hope practice starts.

Copyright © 2018 – 2026 Michaele Gardner and Brian Hackerson