Thank you for joining us for episode 531 of Live Happy Now.

As we launch a brand new season, we're going to lead off with something we all could use,

Hope.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm talking with author, podcast host, and

resiliency expert, Dr. Robin Hanley Defoe.

Robin's here to talk about why hope is so important for both our physical and emotional

well-being and tells us some of the practices we can use to cultivate hope even in dark times.

Let's have a listen. Well, Robin, thank you so much for being back on Live Happy Now.

I am excited to be here. Thank you for the

invitation to come back. This is a conversation I've been wanting to have with you. It seemed like the

perfect time and the perfect topic to open up season 11 because here we are, brand new season,

brand new month, and we need some hope. And hope is so important, but it is

something that can be hard to find right now. It really seems difficult to find. And I find it so

interesting that you actually conclude your last book, Stress Wisely, with a call to action for us

to embrace hope. So I wanted that to be our

starting point today. Can I find out what made you so interested in studying hope?

Well, first and foremost, congratulations on 11 seasons. That is not a small feed and you just

said it like it was, ain't no thing. That's a big deal. So to each and

every one of you who contribute to the success of this podcast, I just hold space to say

congratulations. Thank you so much. I just keep shining bright the work you do matter. So thank you.

And to answer your question. So as I've shared with you before, I was studying human resiliency and well-being for almost 20 years. And one of the themes that became so evident was this through line of hope. When we're navigating difficult, hard, dark seasons, there is this through line of when we think about human resiliency,

that hope is what gets us through that moment. And then when I was working with people around

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