Hope as an Agent of Change

The power of hope as a motivating force has been discussed throughout modern time and, for the past century, has been examined by medical and psychological scholars. Over the past 40 years, Jerome Frank's (1968, 1975) work has conceptualized hope as a process that is common to all psychotherapy approaches. Karl Menninger (1959), in his academic lecture on hope when he was president of the American Psychiatric Association, issued a call for more rigorous examination of the role of hope in change. As a response to Menninger's request, Snyder's operationalization of this robust construct has facilitated, over the past three decades, the scholarly inquiry into hope as a change agent. Indeed, whatever the system of psychotherapy, beneficial change may be attributable, in part, to hope. According to Snyder, Ilardi, Cheavens, et al. (2000), change occurs because people learn more effective agentic and pathways goal-directed thinking. In particular, the agency component is reflected in the placebo effect (i.e., the natural mental energies for change that clients bring to psychotherapy). The particular psychotherapy approaches that are used to provide the client with a route or process for moving forward to attain positive therapeutic goals reflect the pathways component. Furthermore, Snyder and his colleagues (Snyder, Ilardi, Cheavens, et al., 2000; Snyder, Ilardi, Michael, & Cheavens, 2000) have offered detailed hypotheses about how hope, and agency and pathways in particular, might help to explain the role of common and specific treatment factors in psychotherapy. Before any specific treatment strategies are applied, the primary source of change is the client's expectancy that therapy will make a positive difference in his or her life. These initial improvements are analogous to increases in the agency component of hope—determination that an individual can make improvements in his or her life. Therefore, it is believed that increases in agency, as opposed to increases in pathways thinking, are related to positive change in the first stages of therapy. The positive changes that occur in these early stages of therapy have been described elsewhere as “remoralization” (Howard, Krause, Saunders, & Koptka, 1997), and they are characterized by enhanced subjective well-being. More specifically, clients begin to experience relief from distress and have renewed hope that their situation can and will improve. Increased well-being even may take place before the client steps into the therapy room; that is, an initial phone call to set up the appointment may engender feelings of relief from distress.

From this perspective on hope, it is conceivable that hope is malleable and that it can be the spark for and pathway to change. Likewise, beneficial change may lead to more hope for creating a good life. Because most people have the capacity to hope (they possess the basic components of the cognitive skills needed to generate a hopeful line of thought), accentuating this change agent requires naming and nurturing this personal strength in the context of supportive helping relationships.

We propose that hope finding, bonding, enhancing, and reminding are the essential strategies for accentuating hope and taken together form the foundation of hope therapy. Therapists who practice hope therapy help clients to conceptualize clearer goals, to learn how to produce multiple pathways to reach goals, and to generate the mental energy needed to sustain goal pursuits in order to positively change client self-perceptions regarding their abilities to engage in goal-directed and agentic thinking (Lopez, Floyd, Ulven, & Snyder, 2000). Hope therapy is designed to be a brief, semistructured form of therapy in which the primary focus is upon current goals with emphasis upon exploration of possibilities and past successes rather than on problems or past failures (Lopez, Floyd, et al., 2000).

During hope therapy, hope finding is enacted in order to strengthen clients' expectations that the therapists can and will help them. Bolstering clients' expectations for assistance simultaneously may instill hope for change and enhance the therapeutic bond between client and therapist. Hope bonding entails the formation of a sound hopeful therapeutic alliance; it grounds the client in a hopeful therapeutic context. Therapists possessing high levels of hope may be most facile at meeting the important therapeutic goal of establishing an emotionally charged connection. They also may be best at collaborating on mutually agreed-on goals by engaging in productive tasks. Hope-enhancing strategies typically involve enlisting clients in tasks that are designed to

• Conceptualize reasonable goals more clearly
• Produce numerous pathways to attainment
• Summon the energy to maintain pursuit
• Reframe obstacles as challenges to be overcome

Hope reminding is the promotion of effortful daily use of hopeful cognitions. Goal thoughts and barrier thoughts are identified as cognitive cues that stimulate the client to incorporate therapeutic techniques that have previously enhanced hopeful thought.

In the following sections, we identify formal and informal strategies for accentuating hope via finding, bonding, enhancing, and reminding.

Formal Hope-Finding Strategies

Brief, valid measures of hope can be used during initial phases of therapy to assess an individual's level of hope. Snyder et al. (1997) developed the Children's Hope Scale (CHS) as a trait hope measure for children ages 7 through 14 years (see Exhibit 29.1). The CHS is composed of three agency and three pathways items, and it has demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties: (a) internal consistency reliabilities (overall alphas from 0.72 to 0.86); (b) test–retest reliabilities of 0.71 to 0.73 over 1 month; and (c) convergent and discriminant validities. Furthermore, this scale has been used with physically and psychologically healthy children from public schools, boys diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, children with various medical problems, children under treatment for cancer or asthma, child burn victims, adolescents with sickle-cell disease, and early adolescents exposed to violence (Snyder et al., 1997).

To measure the trait aspect of hope in adolescents and adults, ages 15 and higher, Snyder et al. (1991) developed the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale (see Exhibit 29.2). This scale consists of four items measuring agency, four items measuring pathways, and four distracter items. Having been used with a wide range of samples, the Adult Dispositional Hope Scale has exhibited acceptable reliability and validity: (a) internal consistency reliabilities (overall alphas from 0.74 to 0.88, agency alphas of 0.70 to 0.84, and pathways alphas of 0.63 to 0.86); (b) test–retest reliabilities ranging from 0.85 for 3 weeks to 0.82 for 10 weeks; and (c) concurrent and discriminant validity (Snyder et al., 1991). (Lopez, Ciarlelli, Coffman, Stone, and Wyatt [2000] provide an in-depth coverage of these formal measures, including the development and validation of additional self-report, observational, and narrative measures of hope. In addition, a number of translations of Snyder's hope scales have been developed and validated for use with those who speak Slovak [Halama, 1999], Japanese [Kato & Snyder, 2005], Arabic [Abdel-Khalek & Snyder, 2007], French (Gana, Daigre, & Ledrich, 2013), and Portuguese [Marques, Pais-Ribeiro, & Lopez, 2009]).

Informal Hope-Finding Strategies

Narrative approaches often have been used to illustrate the theory of hope to children, adolescents, and adults in individual therapy and psychoeducational programs. By telling stories of fictitious and real characters, therapists engage clients in thinking about goals, agency, and pathways. Furthermore, with time, clients tell stories about their goal pursuits, thereby making hope more personally relevant. Hope-related themes are captured when clinicians explore the following 14 aspects of clients' stories:

1. How did the client generate goals?
2. What was the motivation?
3. How attainable or realistic were the goals?
4. How were the goals perceived?
5. What was the client's mood/attitude during the process?
6. How was movement toward goals initiated?
7. How was movement maintained?
8. What were the biggest barriers to reaching the goals?
9. What emotions did these barriers elicit?
10. How were barriers overcome, and what steps were taken to reach the goals?
11. Were the goals attained?
12. How does the client feel about the outcome?
13. If the client were to attempt the same goal today, what would he or she do differently?
14. Can the client recast the experience in more hopeful terms (i.e., by identifying lessons learned that can facilitate future efforts)?

It may be necessary to offer some suggestions to direct the client's attention to hopeful elements in their stories. These narratives should support a sense of movement rather than stagnant rumination. The benefits of narrative techniques come from the integration of these cognitive and emotional elements of the client's stories.

Another informal strategy, hope profiling, is a semistructured intervention in which the therapist requests that the client write (or audiotape) brief stories about past and current goal pursuits to uncover the hope that is part of a person's psychological makeup. Typically, five stories (two to five pages) detailing goal pursuits in various life domains reveal the requisite pathways and agency involved in hopeful pursuits. Review of these stories in the therapeutic context can help clients to realize that they have the resources necessary to make positive changes. In addition, clients learn the language of hope by identifying the goal thoughts, pathway thinking, and agency sources referred to in their narrative.

Formal Hope-Bonding Strategies

Working alliance and hope researchers have outlined what it takes to form a productive therapeutic relationship and have described how a sound relationship is associated with beneficial change. Indeed, Bordin (1994) stated that negotiation between the client and therapist about the change goal that is most relevant to the client's struggle is essential. Such negotiation depends largely on the bonding component, defined as the positive personal attachment between the client and the therapist that results from working together on a shared activity. Bonding in therapy usually is expressed in terms of liking, trusting, and respecting one another, in addition to a feeling of mutual commitment and understanding in the activity (Bordin, 1994). Such a relationship mirrors that required for begetting hope. According to Snyder et al. (1997), hope flourishes when people develop a strong bond to one or more caregivers, allowing the person to perceive himself or herself as having some sense of control in the world. “As social creatures, we need to confide in someone about our dreams and goals” (Rodriguez-Hanley & Snyder, 2000, p. 46). Thus, it seems that for both the therapeutic alliance and for hope to develop, a supportive environment is needed in which people receive basic instruction in goal pursuits from a positive model (Snyder, 2000b).

Taken together, the working alliance and hope literature suggests that building a hopeful alliance involves

• Respectfully negotiating flexible therapeutic goals.
• Generating numerous and varied pathways to goal attainment.
• Translating the sense of connectedness between therapist and client into the mental energy necessary to sustain pursuit toward therapeutic goals.

Informal Hope-Bonding Strategies

Based on the assumption that hope begets more hope, hopeful familial relationships and friendships could serve as hope-enhancing agents. Clients could benefit from evaluating their relationships and determining which generate mental energy that facilitates coping and those that drain this energy. Though data about hope in friendships, siblingships, and marriages have not been collected, the infectious nature of hope in such contexts has been assumed (Snyder, 1994). Therefore, therapists should encourage the development of new relationships that increase the hope in an individual's life. Associating with individuals who are supportive of goal pursuits, who challenge their peers to pursue stretch goals, and who encourage those peers to overcome barriers may help people crystallize their hopeful thought.

Formal Hope-Enhancing Strategies With Youth

One of the first interventions aimed at increasing hope in children was developed by McDermott and Hastings (2000). This program involved eight weekly sessions with first- through sixth-grade students at a culturally diverse elementary school. During each week of this program, students were presented with information about hope- and goal-setting, as well as stories about high-hope children. Through hearing and discussing these stories each week for 30 minutes, children had the opportunity to identify goals in the lives of protagonists, as well as to apply the hope concepts to their own lives. Evaluation of the program was conducted through comparing pre- and posttest hope scores for the intervention group to a control group of students, and results demonstrated that there were modest gains. Furthermore, teacher ratings of students' levels of hope were significantly higher at posttest, suggesting that they perceived increases in their students' levels of hopeful thinking. McDermott and Hastings concluded that an 8-week session was not sufficient time to instill high hope, but they considered their results promising.

Another elementary school intervention, Making Hope Happen for Kids (Edwards & Lopez, 2000), was developed to enhance hope in fourth-grade students. This five-session program, based on the general format of the junior high school program (described subsequently), involves age-appropriate activities and lessons related to learning about hope and applying this construct to children's lives. During this five-session program, which was conducted in several classrooms, two graduate student cofacilitators led groups of 7 to 10 students in various activities and lessons.

The first week of the program involved learning about the hope model and acting out the parts of the model with laminated props. Students pretended to be goals, obstacles, pathways, and willpower (i.e., agency) in a brief psychodrama depicting meaningful goal pursuits. In the second week, children were introduced to a story that described a young girl navigating obstacles as she worked toward the goal of learning lines for her school play. The third week of the program involved the Hope Game (a board game depicting multiple goal pursuits), during which children identified obstacles, pathways, and agency thoughts as they worked in teams to accomplish a shared goal. During the fourth week, children designed hope cartoons, emphasizing hopeful language. Finally, during the last week of the program, children were asked to write hope stories describing the goals on which they had been working and then share their stories with one another; they then enjoyed snacks to celebrate the end of the program.

Evaluation of the program was conducted at the end of the first and second years. The Children's Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1997) was administered before and after delivery of the intervention with all children. While the evaluation of this program did not include a control group, comparisons of means at pre- and posttest demonstrated significant gains in hope scores in the fourth-grade students. Thus, hope was enhanced in these young children.

Pedrotti, Lopez, and Krieshok (2000) developed a program for seventh graders designed to enhance hope through five weekly 45-minute sessions. Assistance from classroom teachers allowed this version of the Making Hope Happen program to be integrated into the regular school day as a part of a family consumer sciences course. Groups consisting of 8 to 12 students were formed, and each was facilitated by two graduate student leaders. The program was designed to enhance the hope inherent in these youth by teaching them about the hope model.

The five sessions were developed to take these adolescents through the hope model step by step. During the first session, students were taught about the hope model in general, through the use of posters and cartoons. Pictorial representations were used to exemplify the different components to help students to commit these to memory. In addition, in this first session, two narratives depicting characters with high levels of hope were read. Group discussions followed in which the children delineated the behaviors that the characters had exhibited that corresponded to these hope components. Students also were placed in partnerships called Hope Buddies on this first day. These pairs were designed to help students to work with a peer to talk about their goals for the future. Finally, participants formed their own goals on which to work for the coming weeks. Goals varied from student to student, with some being very long term (“I want to graduate from an Ivy League college”), and others more short term (“I will keep my locker clean for five weeks”). All goals were treated as equal in terms of importance, and an emphasis was placed on the process as opposed to the actual achievement of the goal.

In Week 2, the tenets learned during the first week were reemphasized through the use of more narratives and exercises. Youth were taught about G-POWER this week as well. Each letter of this acronym was used to remind students of the various components of the hope model and to emphasize the goal-seeking process. Each letter was accompanied by a question designed to assist participants as they talked through this process (see the following list).

G-POWER

1. G  What is the character's Goal?
2. P  Which Pathways does the character identify to use to move toward his or her stated goal?
3. O  What Obstacles lay in the character's pathway?
4. W  What source of Willpower is keeping the character energized in this process?
5. E  Which pathway did the character Elect to follow?
6. R  Rethink the process—would you have made the same decisions and choices?

During the third week, the components of the hope model were reinforced through other forms of media—including the use of a board game (the Hope Game) developed specifically for use in the program. Differing forms of media were used throughout the program to tap into the many different learning styles. In Week 4, the group moved to a more individual focus to work more closely on goals relevant for each student. During this week, the concept of Hope Talk was introduced in which group leaders explained that the statements we tell ourselves about our goals often influence our goal pursuit process in general. Participants were then asked to determine if particular statements made by historical figures, book characters, and sports stars were of a hopeful or unhopeful nature. Individual worksheets emphasizing hopeful language were also completed during this portion of the program.

In the last activity of the fourth session, the students began to write their personal hope stories. From the goals formed during the first session, the students were asked to think about each of the components in the hope model. Separate paragraphs were written for each session, and the finished product was a short essay that told the story of students' progress and listed their future steps toward this goal. Each student read his or her hope story to the group during the fifth and final session.

As to program evaluation, before the first session, all participants were administered the CHS (Snyder et al., 1997). At the conclusion of the program, the CHS again was administered to the junior high students. Scores were then compared to those found on the CHS given to a group who had not participated in the program. When analyzed statistically, the participants in the program had significantly higher levels of hope in comparison to their counterparts who did not participate in the program. As such, the program appeared to enhance the hope in these children. In a follow-up study, the higher hope levels were maintained after 6 months, pointing to the robustness of the intervention results even after the program was completed. Therefore, apparently, the participants continued to use the tools taught to them during the Making Hope Happen program.

A similar psychoeducational intervention program was developed and tested with sixth-grade students in Portugal (Marques, Lopez, & Pais-Ribeiro, 2009). The intervention occurred in a group format over the course of 5 weeks and was designed to target the enhancement of hope, life satisfaction, self-worth, mental health, and academic achievement.

Participants were introduced to hope theory and the connections between hope, change, and positive outcomes in the first session. The following sessions were focused upon structuring hope, creating positive and specific goals, practicing hope, and review and applications of hope for the future. Each session started with a 10-minute segment dedicated to modeling and developing enthusiasm for the program and to reinforcing ideas learned in the previous session. Compared to previous hope intervention studies with children, Marques, Lopez, et al. (2009) included an intervention component focused upon the key social networks in the lives of the student participants, namely, parents, guardians, and teachers. Parents and teachers were included because past research suggests that children develop hope through learning to trust in the predictability of cause and effect interactions with parents and caregivers, as does building hope through learning to trust in the ordered predictability and consistency of their interactions with their teachers. Moreover, multiple factors are involved in the positive thinking of children and adolescents, and research clearly demonstrates the importance of ecological factors (Huebner, 2004) embedded in an interpersonal, social-familial, and institutional context (Gordon & Crabtree, 2006; Sarason, 1997). Such findings are inconsistent with programs that focus exclusively on changing individuals rather than environments. Hence, a 1-hour informational session with teachers and guardians of the students of the intervention group was conducted during the 1st week of the students' intervention. In addition, these adults were given hope manuals designed to (a) increase parents/teacher awareness of the principles of hope and enhance their goal-setting behavior; and (b) promote goal-setting behavior in their children or students.

Results indicated higher hope and greater levels of life satisfaction and self-worth for those in the intervention group following the 5-week intervention and being maintained at 6-month and 18-month follow-ups. The results did not support any significant changes in mental-health or academic achievement as a result of the intervention. The researchers conclude that the

findings of this study are consistent with previous interventions to enhance goal-directed thinking and strongly support the application of group-based approaches for raising the hopeful thinking of all students (e.g., the curriculum and school environment for students could be arranged and improved in the direction of supporting hopeful thinking). (Marques, Lopez, et al., 2009, p. 150)

Formal Hope-Enhancing Strategies With Adults

A number of group and individual hope enhancement strategies for adults have also been developed and evaluated. For example, Klausner et al. (1998) demonstrated that depressed older adults benefited from group therapy focused on goal setting and increasing the production of pathways and agency through actual work on reasonable goals, discussion of the process, and weekly homework assignments. Hopelessness and anxiety lessened significantly, whereas state hope increased reliably. Moreover, in comparison to members of a reminiscence therapy group, members of the hope-focused group experienced a more substantial decrease in depressive symptomatology. Irving et al. (2004) demonstrated that a 5-week pretreatment orientation group focusing on hope had benefits for a group of incoming clients who were in need of assistance. Those lower in hope reported greater responsiveness (as suggested by scores on measures of well-being, level of functioning, coping, and symptomatology) to the hope-focused orientation.

Cheavens and colleagues (2006) developed a treatment manual for an 8-week hope therapy group intervention that they tested on a community sample. Each 2-hour group therapy session was divided into four segments consisting of (1) review of the previous week and progress on homework assignments; (2) psychoeducation in which new hope-related skills were taught; (3) discussion of ways of applying hope skills to participants' lives and using hope skills in problem solving; and (4) introduction of homework for the upcoming week focused upon application of hope skills in daily living. Each participant selected a specific goal to work on over the course of the group sessions and was asked to apply the skills taught at each session to that specific goal. Results showed that participants experienced increased agency thinking, life meaning, and self-esteem and decreases in symptoms of anxiety and depression in comparison to a wait-list control group. In addition, increases in Adult Dispositional Hope Scale scores were related to reductions in posttreatment anxiety and depression scores, even after accounting for the variance associated with the respective pretreatment scores. The researchers conclude that such findings are very promising, for they suggest that there is indeed value in therapies designed around hope and other strength-based constructs.

The significant changes in agency scores, meaning, and self-esteem suggest that interventions designed to increase client strengths (in this case, hope), influence other psychological constructs. This fits with the premise that in addition to targeting symptom reduction, effective treatments also should bolster and augment other areas of strength and resiliency. (Cheavens et al., 2006, p. 75)

Feldman and Dreher (2011) tested a single-session, 90-minute intervention designed to increase college students' hopeful goal-directed thinking. The researchers note that such an intervention is highly relevant to college students, given the reported increases in psychological distress and lack of perceived control for this population (Lewinsohn, Rohde, Seeley, & Fischer, 1993; Twenge, Zhang, & Im, 2004). Participants were assigned to one of three conditions, namely, hope intervention, progressive muscle relaxation, or no intervention. Assessments were conducted at intervention pretest, at posttest, and at 1-month follow-up.

The hope intervention used consisted of a single, 90-minute session in which participants choose a personal goal that would like to accomplish within the next 6 months, received psychoeducation about hope theory, completed a hope-based goal mapping activity, and participated in a hope visualization exercise. More specifically, the goal mapping activity consisted of completion of a worksheet designed to foster hope-based planning via putting their goals to paper, writing three steps that they could take along their pathways to achieving their goals, and writing an obstacle that possibly could hamper their pathways as well as an alternative route around the obstacle. The workshop also contained prompts for participants to write how they could maintain their agency throughout the goal pursuit process. The goal mapping worksheet then served as the foundation for the hope visualization exercise that followed. The researchers note than a crucial component of this exercise is its realism; therefore, participants were instructed to make the visualization as vivid as possible. At the end of the exercise, participants were guided to see themselves accomplishing their goals and feeling the positive emotions and increased agency that result.

Participants in the hope intervention showed greater increases from pre- to posttest on both agency and pathways hope scores as well as in sense of life purpose and vocational calling. These increases were not maintained at 1-month follow-up; however, at follow-up those who received the hope intervention reported making significantly more progress on their goals in comparison with those in both the no-treatment control condition and the relaxation condition. The researchers conclude that this result is particularly meaningful given the extremely brief duration of the intervention. Finally, hope scores regarding the goals that participants' chose to work toward during the intervention predicted goal progress at 1-month follow-up. This finding supports a central tenet of hope theory (Snyder, 1994), namely, that hope is a strong predictor of goal attainment. Overall, this study offers some evidence that a single-session intervention can increase hope in the short term as well as lead to greater levels of goal progress as much as a month later. The researchers note that “from a more pragmatic standpoint, it offers hope that even a brief intervention can help a stressed generation of college students find greater direction” (Feldman & Dreher, 2011, p. 756).

Another single-session workshop intervention program featuring hope theory (Davidson, Feldman, & Margalit, 2012) was designed for use with 1st-year college students based on the same principles as the study by Feldman and Dreher (2011) previously reported. The workshop offered in this study consisted of segments featuring hope theory (emphasizing future goal-directed expectations through applying mental-rehearsal strategies focused on agency and pathways; Snyder, 2002), sense of coherence (emphasizing current experiences of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness; Antonovsky, 1987), and self-efficacy (focused verbal persuasion; Bandura, 1997). The combination of constructs targeted in this intervention was hypothesized to work together in increasing first-year college student academic achievement via hope serving to get students focused on achieving future goals, sense of coherence helping them to experience more confidence in themselves within their environment, and self-efficacy-enhancing beliefs in their ability to perform well while confronted with demanding tasks. Results showed that students who achieved higher levels of hope following the workshop got higher grades in the semester following the intervention. Sense of coherence and self-efficacy scores were significantly related to levels of hope at 1-month follow-up and to mean grades.

Hope interventions have also been tested within the context of adult relationship enrichment (Worthington et al., 1997). This type of intervention focuses on a mutual goal as defined by the presenting couple and enhances the relationship via growth, communication, and a mutual level of commitment to the identified goal. Reported outcomes of this program included increased partner satisfaction and quality of couple skills with higher satisfaction being maintained at a 3-week posttest. An additional follow-up study (Ripley & Worthington, 2002) indicated that the hope-focused intervention was particularly effective in increasing the ratio of positive to negative communications between couples.

Informal Hope-Enhancement Strategies

It is probable that many clinicians already have incorporated hope theory tenets into their interventions. Hence, we encourage clinicians to reflect on their practice and identify those strategies that work to enhance hopeful thinking. Sharing a list with other clinicians can serve to improve one's strategies and generate more resources.

Snyder, McDermott, Cook, and Rapoff's (2002) Hope for the Journey: Helping Children Through Good Times and Bad and McDermott and Snyder's Making Hope Happen: A Workbook for Turning Possibilities Into Realities (1999) and The Great Big Book of Hope: Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams (2000) provide well-conceptualized examples of how to engage clients and students in a therapeutic process focused on hope. For convenience, we have summarized the basic principles and steps of an informal approach to enhancing hope in the therapeutic context in Exhibit 29.3. The Psychology of Hope, Snyder's (1994) first book on the topic, provides numerous recommendations for enhancing hope that a clinician can share with a client. This information is summarized in Exhibit 29.4.

Formal Hope-Reminding Strategies

Being able to identify goal thoughts as well as barrier thoughts is a key element of the hope-reminding process. These thoughts serve as cues for the client to initiate the cognitive feedback loop. Self-monitoring techniques can be used to respond to these cues and for facilitating hopeful reminding. When the client has become adept at identifying cognitive cues of goal and barrier thoughts (this may occur early in treatment, or it may be a treatment goal that is difficult to attain), the therapist should encourage the client to use mini-interventions in sessions and outside of sessions. These mini-interventions should be selected by the therapist and the client on the basis of what has worked for the client in the past. Examples of mini-interventions include

• Reviewing a favorite hope narrative
• Constructing and completing a brief automatic thought record that refines goals and confronts barrier thoughts
• Reviewing personal hope statements
• Bonding with a hopeful person and meeting to discuss current goals and barriers

Clients can use these interventions on a daily basis each time they become aware of a significant goal thought or barrier thought.

Informal Hope-Reminding Strategies

Increasing clients' cognizance of goal and barrier thoughts, effectively modeling full-scale versions of interventions during sessions, and helping clients choose and refine mini-interventions are the therapists' how-tos of hope reminding. Clients make effortful daily use of hopeful cognitions by responding to cognitive cues with hope-assessing and hope-enhancing interventions. (See Tennen and Affleck [1999] for a discussion of benefit-finding and reminding, processes that influenced the development of the hope-reminding strategy.)