Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
The sun was setting. The ocean breeze was gently blowing. The waves were breaking.
Henry was lying on a towel, hands clasped behind his head. After a long day of jumping in the waves, building sandcastles, and playing hard, he was finally slowing down and just taking in the changing colors of the evening sky.
I lay next to him, putting my hands behind my head to copy his posture. Together, side by side, we looked out at the stunning sunset.
After more than a minute, which in kid years is close to an hour, I looked over at him, and said, “Buddy, isn’t it great to be alive?”
Henry looked back at me, swept his blond bangs away from his eyes, and responded, “I don’t know, Dad. I’ve never been dead.”
I laughed and turned back to the sky. He had a point.
But his comment stunned me.
I’d never considered that death wasn’t something to avoid at all costs. We’re taught to assume that death is the final frontier—something to dread and to put off as long as we possibly can. Even those who believe in an afterlife would rather stay put here on earth as long as possible with what is familiar, what we know.
And yet Henry had no negative expectations about death. For all he knew, it was the best party ever! He was reserving judgment. Sure, it was great to be alive. But death? Heaven? Heck, it might be even better than lying on a beach watching a sunset.
Oh, to have that much unbridled optimism and hope again.
Hope is in short supply in the adult world. Too many of us are mired in despair, despondency, and gloom. That’s fertile ground for the opposite of hope: learned helplessness.
University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman first coined this term as a result of his pioneering research. Learned helplessness is the state that we find ourselves in when we have been conditioned to expect that there is nothing we can do to change our circumstances. He first studied the phenomenon in dogs and rats. But he found it occurred in humans as well. Instead of resisting negative circumstances after repeated exposure to hardship, some people embrace a passive resignation to what is happening.
They will not even try to extricate themselves from a difficult situation because their past has taught them that nothing they do will help. When confronted with pain, suffering, and struggle, they don’t try to avoid it because they believe their actions don’t make a difference. Rather than fighting forward, or trying to change things, they just give up.
Unsurprisingly, learned helplessness is connected to higher rates of depression. Because when you no longer believe your actions matter, you feel like a perennial victim of circumstances, doomed to a life that is less than you desire. And you truly believe that there is nothing you can do.
My friend, guess what?
There is always something you can do.
The very best example of pivoting away from learned helplessness and toward possibility is the life story of a man named Andre. People call him “the Ambassador for Hope.” Here’s why.
Andre didn’t know his father growing up. His mother worked a number of jobs, so when she was home, she was too tired to really engage with him.
The one light in his life was music. Andre loved to sing. When he was introduced to the trumpet in fifth grade, Andre fell in love. He could not get enough of practicing, playing, and performing. But one day after he started sixth grade, the other kids began making fun of his trumpet case. It may seem insignificant, but Andre longed to fit in. So he put away his trumpet. For good.
That dream was extinguished.
Andre found a sense of belonging through joining a gang. Soon he was selling drugs on the street. The next few years, he was in and out of juvenile detention for selling drugs, robbery, and assault.
When he turned eighteen, the actions that used to send him to juvie for a few months landed him in jail. The crimes he committed led to a prison sentence of eighteen to twenty-five years.
While Andre knew what it was like to be tough out on the streets, being sent to a maximum-security prison at age eighteen required a whole new level of toughness. If he didn’t establish his place in the prison pecking order, he would be beaten and abused. So he became the violent one among the inmates.
Andre was so violent, so angry, so difficult to handle that he was moved to nine different state prisons over the years.
He was convicted of instigating a prison riot. He was convicted of attempted murder. Twice. These actions extended his prison sentence to one hundred years.
After the second conviction for attempted murder, he was sent to solitary confinement for two and a half years. He had just turned twenty-four years old, and was going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Andre lay in the dimness of his small cell and contemplated the darkness of his life.
He was alone.
Locked up.
Cut off.
Hopeless.
But without the distraction of trying to look tough in front of others, Andre had time to reflect. Unless he changed the way he was acting, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars. And he didn’t want to die in jail.
Andre continued to replay all the wrongs done to him over the years in his head. But in solitude, he got tired of that recording. So he dug back into his memories. He reviewed them, searching for a new song: the words of people who had once believed in him, people who had reached out a hand and had promised encouragement and hope. At the time, he’d been too wrapped up in his own pain to listen.
But then he remembered a third-grade teacher telling him he was a good person.
He recalled the music teacher saying he had a gift.
And a sixth-grade math teacher describing him as a fine young man.
An English teacher and a guidance counselor in high school encouraging him and seeing promise in his life even though he’d already made so many mistakes.
For the first time in more than a decade, he felt the glimmer of hope. If those people had seen something in him, maybe he wasn’t too far gone. In the seclusion of that jail cell, Andre imagined getting out of prison, envisioned becoming a contributing member of society, and even pictured himself graduating from Harvard. Ambitious dreams for a guy who never graduated from high school.
Once out of solitary, he spent the next eight years transforming who he was into who he knew he could be. He taught himself to read. He earned his GED. He walked into a counselor’s office and acknowledged that he had an anger management problem.
He met with a rabbi, who taught him the power of forgiveness. “I’d been taught how to make a knife out of a chair, how to not eat for three days, but no one ever taught me how to say I’m sorry.”1
He met with two nuns he credits with not only igniting his faith but sparking his love for others, his love of learning, and his love of life. They taught him about redemption, and assured him that it remained possible for him.
The violent young man, angry at the world, was transforming into a forgiving sojourner, committed to ensuring that his future would be radically different from his past. While he was the one in metamorphosis, others were noticing the changes.
And at age thirty-two, Andre Norman, once sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison, was released.
How do I know this story? Because Andre Norman is my dear friend.
The last time we connected we got in a fight, but it was a fight over who would pick up the lunch bill. Today he is a law-abiding citizen. He travels the world sharing his story. He’s a devoted father, a published author, and an adjunct professor at a college you may have heard of: Harvard.
How does someone go from facing a hundred-year prison sentence and solitary confinement for attempted murder to teaching at Harvard? How did Andre pivot so drastically from a painful past to a bright future?
In a word: hope.
Hope is the fuel that powers us forward, no matter where life has us today.
Hope is the sacred light that allows a cancer patient to endure yet another round of radiation, chemotherapy, or surgery and the burdensome uncertainty of whether all the suffering and pain will be worth it.
Hope is the glimmer of possibility that encourages those between jobs to send out another résumé, to go to another coffee meeting, or to join another networking group.
Hope is what empowers every recovering addict, every achiever, every leader who’s ever risked, attempted, failed, and fallen to stand back up, dust themselves off, and step forward again.
Hope just might be the most important renewable asset available to each of us in our lives.
So how do you move from learned helplessness toward a life filled with hope? “Whether you are sitting in a boardroom or a jail cell doesn’t matter,” says Andre. “What matters is the moment you realize: I don’t want to live this life anymore. The question is, are you going to find the courage to change?”2
Dr. C. R. Snyder, who studied hope for years and wrote six books on the subject, came up with Hope Theory. He believes hope is composed of three simple things:
Goals. You’ve got to have a dream.
Pathways thinking. You’ve got to realize there are a number of ways to pursue that dream, and to be ready and willing to navigate the twisting terrain.
Agentic thinking. Last, but certainly not least, you’ve got to accept that you have the power, the agency, to navigate through the obstacles that will inevitably get in your way.
Hope doesn’t ignore the difficulties you’ll face. It just doesn’t let you give up in the face of them. Hope doesn’t overlook that things get tough. It just doesn’t permit the struggle to dissolve the dream.
In fact, according to Snyder’s research, hopeful people can tolerate pain almost twice as long as those lacking hope.3
Hope sustained Andre through the years of study and therapy he needed to change who he was. It was hope that inspired his many appeals to the parole board. That allowed Andre to keep pushing, fighting, and growing as a person, believing that there was a way out of the jail he had built for himself.
Hope is fuel.
Christopher Reeve, who was the first actor to portray Superman on film, and was paralyzed from the neck down following an accident many years later, famously said: “Once you choose hope, anything is possible.”
At the center of hope is the concept of self-determination: the belief that your actions can influence your future. In fact, it is the very opposite of learned helplessness. Agentic thinking declares that what I do matters. I own my life and my actions. Although I can’t change what’s happened in the past, I have the power to make things better.
Researchers at Indiana University discovered that hope was in fact a better indicator of success for incoming law students in their first semester of law school than their LSAT score.4
And if that doesn’t impress you about the power of hope, try this: Dr. Stephen Stern, professor of psychiatry at University of Texas Health Science Center, performed a longitudinal study on hopefulness on elderly Americans between the ages of sixty-four and seventy-nine. Those who scored low on hopefulness were twice as likely to die during the follow-up period than those who reported strong feelings of hope.5
So, are you ready to get on the hope bandwagon?
The light and fuel of hope are necessary for a life lived In Awe.
We all have a choice. We can surrender to what is.
Or we can celebrate what might be.
Because the door to your cell is open. The guards have gone home. You are free to walk out.
But you’ve got to get up, move forward, and determine that where you are going next is better than where you’ve been.
Because our expectations determine not only the life we live today, but the one we’re preparing for tomorrow.