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How many times have you gotten your hopes up, only to be disappointed?
How many times have you shut your heart down, not because you wanted to, but because you couldn’t take that kind of letdown again?
Hope is how the heart reaches for meaning, even in the dark. It’s what pulls us toward connection, toward the idea that good things can still happen. That people can show up. That we’ll find our way through. Maybe not how we planned, but through all the same.
But where we often get into trouble is with expectation.
It’s the shift from trusting life to trying to manage it. It’s the moment you stop feeling and start bracing. The mind wants certainty. It wants control. It wants to know exactly when and how things will unfold. And when reality doesn’t match those expectations, hope starts to feel like betrayal.
I know this pattern well. For years, I kept trusting that the healthy, thriving life I wanted was just around the corner. Countless times, doctors looked me in the eye and said, “You’ll be back to normal in six months.” They told me to trust the process. To believe it was only a matter of time. And I did. Again and again. And every time, six months later, I was often worse off than before. Eventually, it wore me down.
So I stopped hoping.
I thought I was protecting myself, but I wasn’t. I was cutting myself off from the very thing that made life worth living.
Now, I’ve learned to hope without expecting anything to come to fruition.
I still let myself hope. I just don’t try to force things to look a certain way anymore. I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that the more I try to control the outcome, the more I miss what’s actually happening. So now I stay curious. I pay attention to what the experience itself is asking of me, what it’s showing me. I try to meet the moment I’m in, even when it’s not the one I wanted.
When you give yourself hope, especially when it would be easier to shut down, it allows you to enjoy life, to be an active participant instead of a distant viewer. It lets you feel instead of going numb. It helps you take that next step.
And as we practice that, we can do the same for someone else.
That’s one of the most human things we can do: to give someone hope. To remind them and ourselves that life can still surprise us. Beautiful things still happen, even if it’s not how we planned it.
Why We Need Hope
Let’s be honest. Hope can feel like a trap.
For so many years, I felt numb, dissociated, distant from my life. It wasn’t that I didn’t care; it was that I couldn’t emotionally reach anything I cared about.
I lost hope, over and over again. And when people told me to hold on to it, it just felt like one more thing I was supposed to fake. Why should I hope when everything around me and within me was falling apart?
Hope, in those moments, felt performative. Pointless. Like saying “I’m fine” when someone asks you how you’re doing on the worst day you’ve had all week.
But funny enough, now I can see: even then, something in me was still hoping, still holding on to the idea that maybe, one day, what felt performative would become real.
I’m not here to sell toxic positivity as a strategy. That’s never the answer.
Instead, I want to show you that hope is something we can rely on. Inspiration is something we can draw upon in our darkest moments and on our best days.
I’m interested in the kind of hope that sneaks up on you. It’s a line in a movie you didn’t mean to watch that inspires you, a song that plays on shuffle while you’re stuck in traffic that makes you think of one of your friends, or a stranger’s kindness when you’ve gone days feeling like no one cares about you. These are the moments we need to focus on. Where there is a split-second of warmth in your chest that lets you feel like part of the old you is still in there.
Back then I didn’t think these moments mattered much. I used to overlook them, but now I see them differently. They don’t fix anything. They don’t solve your pain. But they do something. They break the pattern for a second. They interrupt the story that says nothing will ever change.
And that’s what we are asked by life to do over and over again: to notice that feeling and find ways to build on it.
Here’s where it gets tricky. We’ve been led to believe that hope is about the future. About healing, resolution, an arrival at some destination down the road. The problem is, that kind of hope creates pressure. It turns hope into a demand. And when the future doesn’t cooperate, we feel foolish for ever having believed.
But real hope isn’t about outcomes. It’s about the feeling of being alive.
Because I’ve seen what happens when we give up hope. Something in us closes. We grow cynical. Disconnected. Life becomes something to survive rather than something to feel or enjoy.
I remember what that felt like. I couldn’t feel emotion, and when I did, it didn’t even feel like it was mine. I couldn’t feel love. Couldn’t feel connection. I felt so alone. It didn’t matter if I was in a room full of family or friends. Even surrounded by people, that kind of loneliness deepened because I could see how far I was from the person I used to be. And I didn’t know how to get back.
In that place, any sense of hope, whether for my body or my mind, felt futile. I’d been let down too many times before.
What I’ve learned is this. Hope matters most when it feels least available.
It’s not about denying pain or forcing optimism. It’s about honoring the dignity of still wanting to live meaningfully, even when everything hurts. Hope is not weakness. It’s not delusion. It’s one of the greatest things that makes us human.
It’s the feeling that precedes change.
But it’s also where things get confusing. Hope can look a lot like expectation. And if we don’t learn the difference, we start to feel let down by both.
The Heart vs. The Mind
For so long, we’ve been taught to get our hopes up by creating expectations. Expectations for how the future should look, how things should unfold, and how we’ll handle them when they do. But that’s not hope.
That’s just planning dressed up as certainty.
I’ve made that mistake for years. And what I’ve come to understand is that it’s actually my mind pretending to be my heart. Pretending to be hope. And all that’s ever led to is expectations and disappointment.
The mind’s job is to plan. To prepare. To calculate. To scan the horizon for threats and figure out what you’d do if one shows up. In its own way, it’s just trying to protect you.
But if left unchecked, the mind doesn’t just spot danger. It starts creating it. It invents new fears, and instead of making you feel ready, it makes you feel anxious. Tight. Claustrophobic. Stuck.
It doesn’t mean to hurt you. It means well. But the mind doesn’t know how to stop.
And when that voice says, “Let’s be realistic,” or “Don’t get your hopes up,” what it’s really doing is bracing for impact. Trying to pre-feel the pain so maybe it won’t sting as much later. But all it really does is trap you in a loop.
The mind creates rules. It says, this has to happen for you to be okay. It takes a moment of genuine hope and says, now let’s make sure this happens.
And that’s where the trouble begins.
Because now it’s not just something you hope for. It’s something you need in order to feel safe. The mind turns a feeling into a condition. And conditions turn life into a measurement, not a mystery.
You stop experiencing life, and you start monitoring it. You stop living, and you start managing.
I didn’t even realize how bad this had gotten for me. That’s how clever the mind is. It disguises itself as logic, as caution, as being smart. But really, it’s fear in a costume.
But then I started to notice the what-ifs piling up.
What if I get hurt again? What if I have a flare-up? What if this doesn’t work? What if I never heal? What if nothing ever changes? What if? What if? What if?
At first, they felt like responsible questions. Like I was being cautious, prepared. But when I really started looking, I realized these questions weren’t keeping me safe. They were keeping me scared. I wasn’t living with hope. I was living on edge. Trying to plan my way out of pain. Trying to manage what hadn’t even happened yet.
That’s the thing about the mind. It doesn’t just notice danger. It starts inventing it. It spirals. It says, “You’ll be okay if this works out, if nothing goes wrong, if you can control the outcome.” It builds a checklist of conditions and ties your peace to whether or not they get met.
I didn’t even realize how loud that voice had become, how much of my life I had spent listening to it. I’d started trusting it more than myself. The mind is clever like that. But underneath it all, I could see it was just fear masquerading as intuition.
So I began to wonder. What would it mean to stop letting that voice call the shots? Not to silence it entirely. Not to fight it. But to remind myself that I don’t have to live my life bracing for impact.
But when I finally started doing this, the peace didn’t come right away. In fact, it made things harder at first.
When the mind starts to lose control, it doesn’t go quietly. It panics. It tightens its grip. The what-ifs get louder. The urgency increases. It says, “You’re jumping without a parachute.” It tries everything it can to pull you back to the old way. The predictable way. Even if that way was filled with fear.
The mind loves the familiar. It equates repetition with safety, even if the thing you’re repeating is making you miserable. That’s why people stay in relationships they shouldn’t, why we see people around us with habits that hurt them.
The mind isn’t trying to trap us. It’s trying to protect us the only way it knows how. And that’s something worth giving our respect to.
So when I catch myself spiraling through what-ifs, I try to pause. I notice that it’s the mind talking. Not the truth, not the future, just the part of me trying to stay safe. And I give it a little mental or physical nod. Like, “Thanks for looking out for me.”
That’s a step I used to skip. But not anymore. If I try to shut the mind down or shame it, it only comes back louder. But when I acknowledge it, when I respect that it’s just doing its job, it actually softens. It lets go.
As the mind relaxes, something else can take its place. I can choose something different. A way of being the mind might resist, until it sees it’s safe. That’s when I begin to lean into the heart.
Because learning to hope without expectations takes trust. Not the kind of trust that’s built by thinking things through, but the kind that comes from somewhere deeper. From faith. From the heart.
Hope is what happens when the heart chooses to trust. Not in a specific outcome, but in your ability to face whatever comes next.
There’s a quote I heard recently that says it best. “A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not in the branch, but in its own wings.”
That’s it. That’s the difference between hope with expectations and hope without them. It all comes down to trust.
Expectations grip the branch. They scan for danger, run every scenario, and tie your peace to whether the branch holds. You tell yourself: This has to go a certain way or I won’t be okay.
And when the branch breaks, you fall. Not just because of what happened, but because your safety was tied to something outside of you.
But hope without expectations? That’s different.
It’s not about predicting the future. It’s about trusting yourself and your ability to adjust, to keep your footing, even if the branch gives way. Because your steadiness is rooted in something internal. Something no outcome can take away from you.
And you see, that’s the shift.
To stop bracing for things to go wrong, and start trusting that even if they do, you’ll still be okay. To stop outsourcing your peace by anchoring it to outcomes, and start finding it within you.
And maybe the most powerful part of letting go of expectations is that it softens you. It makes you available again… to connection, to surprise, and to the kind of help that wasn’t part of your plan but shows up when you need it most.
Sometimes, before you can fully believe in yourself, someone else does. Someone sees the spark before you do. There may not even be proof, and yet they just believe… in you.
And that simple act makes it feel like progress is possible again.
That’s what my coach, Billy Sampson, did for me.
I Just Needed One Person to Believe
Hope gives you the chance to look for opportunity. It makes you available to new paths in life you didn’t plan for. And somehow, as you walk them, they feel like they were always yours to begin with.
Doctors kept telling me, “In six months, you’ll be better.” And I kept believing them. 2018. 2019. 2020. Again and again. I built so many silent rules about what healing was supposed to look like. How quick it should come, and how linear it needed to be.
Back then, the only kind of illness I could even conceive of was the flu. You’re down for a few days, then back to normal. But this was different. Every missed milestone the doctors had set felt like another heartbreak. Months slipped by and became years, filled with disappointment after disappointment. I had lost hope.
So I started manufacturing hope for something else. A dream. Golf.
In 2018 and 2019, I met with coach after coach, trying to explain what I felt deep down. That even though I couldn’t swing a golf club at the time, I still believed I had a future in professional golf. I had lost over 50 pounds. My joints were swollen. I was spending nearly every hour of the day in bed. But something in me still believed. I just needed someone else who could believe with me.
Most of them didn’t. They looked at me. Thin, tired, sick. And heard the words “chronic illness,” and that was enough. They shut the door to the belief I needed.
They didn’t get it.
To be honest, I didn’t even fully believe it yet.
But in 2020, I met Billy Sampson. We set up a meeting one afternoon, just to talk. No lessons. No swing changes. Just a conversation. We ended up talking for two hours. And for the first time, someone really listened. He didn’t try to fix me or talk over me. He wanted to understand why golf still mattered. Why, even after everything I’d lost, this dream still meant so much to me.
I told him I didn’t just want to play golf. I felt like my health challenges were clearing a path to something more. And golf was part of that.
So even though Billy saw my broken-down body, unable to swing a club, he asked me what I could do.
I said I could chip. I could putt.
So he built games around those things. He reached out to other coaches around the country, asking for ideas to support someone in my position.
On the days when I couldn’t move, it felt like he did the hoping for me. He helped me see the progress I was making. Not in my body, but in my mindset.
And slowly, I started to believe these dreams could come true.
That belief didn’t fix my body. But it did something more important at the time. It gave me something to hold onto. Something I could come back to on the days when I felt lost.
What I’ve learned is that hope rarely arrives all at once. We get flashes of inspiration. And by the next day, they can feel out of reach again. When symptoms were brutal and I found myself starting over on yet another treatment plan, I began asking: How will this help me with golf? What could this teach me?
That shift didn’t erase the pain, but it gave it meaning.
That’s when I started to understand. Hope wasn’t just a feeling. It became a compass. A way to keep moving forward, even when I felt completely stuck.
It’s the moment after someone forgives me. When the tension from the argument lifts, and somehow the relationship feels even stronger than it did before. It’s the first NFL Sunday of the year. I’m sitting down to watch the Bears, and for a second, I actually let myself wonder, “What if this is the year?” It’s that strange 2 a.m. burst of energy when I start rearranging my whole life. My closet, my routines, my mindset. And for some reason, I genuinely believe I can pull it off.
That’s what hope feels like to me.
And over time, I started being able to draw upon my memory of that feeling. Instead of asking, When will I be better? or Why isn’t this fair? I started asking: What can I work on today? What can I move toward? Who can I become?
It gave me a way to work with what I had. Not just what I wished for.
But here’s what got in the way. For years, I only let myself hope under certain conditions. I told myself I’d believe once my body started changing. Once I was strong enough to train. Healthy enough to compete. I clung to timelines like lifelines. And when they passed, when nothing changed, I felt crushed. I stopped hoping, an d worse, I stopped looking forward to life.
Eventually, I realized I couldn’t keep living like that. Always waiting for proof before I let myself believe. Hope wasn’t something to earn. It had to be something I chose.
Some days that choice feels easier than others. But I’ve learned it’s not about forcing belief. It’s about noticing where it shows up. In my daily life, in the moments that make me feel hopeful again.
Hope doesn’t just come from people. It comes from the world. It comes from the world around you, if you know how to look.
I’ll notice now that I cry during movies. And for years, I felt nothing but apathy. But when that emotion comes, it reminds me there’s still something alive in me. That I’m not numb anymore. That I’m finding my way back.
It’s the friend who calls when I’m overwhelmed. I almost don’t answer. But I pick up, and thirty minutes later, I’m laughing. I feel like myself again.
It’s walking to the ice cream shop at the end of my block and just watching how happy everyone is. Getting that sweet treat with their family, their friends, their loved ones.
These glimmers exist everywhere in life. Cathedrals are everywhere, for those with eyes to see.
You don’t always have to generate hope from scratch. Sometimes you just need to borrow a little from a place that inspires it. From a friend, a song, a memory, a moment that makes you feel something again. The point is: keep looking. Stay open to being moved.
I know what it meant when Billy showed up in my life. I know what it feels like when someone believes in you before you’re ready to believe in yourself. And I’ve realized, the person I want to be, the character I want to embody, is someone who gives that kind of hope to others.
You can hope. You can let go of how you thought things were supposed to go. And when you do, life might surprise you. The right people show up. New doors crack open. You remember there’s more good things to come. And you’re just scratching the surface of who you can become.
A candle loses nothing by lighting another.
Look for that hope. Look for that light. And as you find it, be the person who brings that hope to others. You don’t have to change the world. You just have to start with yourself.
Thank you for reading — if you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and share it with someone you care about. (A huge thanks to Billy Sampson. You have no idea how much of an impact you have had on my life)
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