Hello and welcome to the Mindfulkind podcast.

I'm your host, Rachel Cable, author of the Mindfulkind book, Mindfulness Teacher and blogger at

Rachelcable.com.

Each week, this podcast will bring meaningful tips, tools and strategies so you can manage stress

and live more mindfully in the modern world.

Hello and welcome to episode 235 of the Mindful Kind podcast. In this episode, I'm really excited to

share the best case scenario method with you. As you might have guessed, this strategy revolves around focusing on

the best case scenario. But before I dive into the strategy itself, I thought I might share

the story behind it. So a few weeks ago, I was speaking with one of my wonderful clients and we

realized that both of us had scored low for hope on a character strength test.

I'll pop a link to that test in the show notes if you'd like to find out more about it.

But scoring low for hope basically suggests that neither of us are particularly optimistic about the future

or feel confident that things will turn out well.

I actually thought that was pretty surprising because

I like to think I'm a fairly optimistic person and I believe that hope is a relatively important

strength to have. In fact, a study published in 2020 involving nearly 13,000 participants

found that a greater sense of hope was associated with better physical

health, fewer chronic conditions and sleep problems, higher psychological well-being and

better social well-being.

It's been a little mission of mine over the last several weeks to understand more about hope

and how to cultivate it.

I've come across a number of interesting concepts like learned hopefulness,

...