Maximize Your Business Success Today
Welcome to the Hierarchy of Hope Method
Hierarchy of Hope is a structured counseling format that enables educators, mentors, and mental health professionals to help individuals overcome their problems while developing happiness, hope, mental wellness, positivity, resilience, goal orientation, and perseverance. HOH focuses on positive, proactive, wellness-based activities that promote hope, healing, and mental wellness. HOH helps shift the client's focus to a more positive and empowering approach by promoting meaning, accomplishment, engagement, relationships, and control, rather than just avoiding or coping with mental illness.
Our research on the science of hope found that when people are exposed to activities related to the HOH steps, they experience statistically significantly higher levels of hope, resilience, and happiness, and can develop greater levels of mental wellness. By applying these easy-to-apply and straightforward methods and techniques, your clients can transcend their problems, experience problem mitigation, and move quickly from hopeless to hopeful.
Our Services
We offer a wide variety of services to help you implement the Hierarchy of Hope Approach. To learn more, click on the link below.
Features of the HOH Approach
Harnessing the Healing Power of Hope to Outgrow Mental Health Problems
Some features of the Hierarchy of Hope Approach include:
- HOH is an evidence-based and clinically supported approach grounded in positive psychology and Hierarchy of Hope research. Because the approach has been supported by research and used in practical clinical settings, clinicians can be confident that they are using a theoretically sound model with empirically supported interventions. You can integrate the workbooks alongside traditional therapies, knowing that the content aligns with best practices for treatment.
- HOH is a positive, strengths-based approach focusing less on symptom deficits and more on client motivation and strengths. It provides tools to identify and build on personal strengths, values, and successes. This positive psychology framework enhances the therapeutic alliance and improves client engagement, as individuals feel understood and empowered rather than “fixed.”
- HOH is a future-oriented framework that builds a highly hopeful mindset. Clients learn to replace catastrophic or negative thought patterns with a future-focused, hope-based perspective. By concentrating on goals and possibilities ahead, they gain a sense of direction and purpose, which counteracts the despair of helplessness and depression. This future orientation helps to instill optimism that life can improve.
1. Adopt a Positive Psychology Perspective
While traditional branches of psychology have focused on mental illness and psychopathology, positive psychology takes a different approach. Rather than asking “what’s wrong with people,” positive psychology asks, “What’s right with people?” Positive psychology focuses on helping people build a life filled with meaning, hope, and resilience. It is about helping people meet their needs to move from surviving to flourishing. Positive psychology asks:
- How can people live a good life?
- How can people improve their lives?
- How can people find joy in their lives?
- How can people capitalize on their strengths rather than trying to “fix” their weaknesses?
To help people who are sad, anxious, and stressed, psychologists have gained a better understanding of well-being and have developed effective treatments for many psychological problems. The problem with this approach is that it primarily focuses on the negative aspects of health and well-being. This approach attempts to “cure” or “fix” people rather than focusing on enhancing the positives in life. On the other hand, positive psychology practitioners focus on helping people discover and explore their strengths, potentials, and talents to engender hope and joy and promote positive functioning.
2. Be Future-Oriented
People can learn to replace catastrophic or negative thought patterns with a future-focused, hope-based perspective. By concentrating on goals and possibilities in the near and far future, they gain a sense of direction and purpose, which counteract the despair of the past and present. A “stay in the present” orientation can prolong feelings of sadness. This future orientation helps to instill optimism, hope, and joy that life can improve.
3. Acknowledge Jung's Influence
Psychologist Carl Jung famously stated that the most significant problems of life are not solved. They are not “fixed.” Problems are outgrown or transcended. They are overcome through psychological growth, a shift in mindset, and a renewed hope for the future. This "outgrowing" involves experiencing the problem differently, seeing problems as opportunities, integrating new aspects of yourself, and ultimately gaining a new perspective that allows you to transcend the issue.
Although considered an analytical psychotherapist, Jung focused on positive psychology in one aspect of his theory. He believed that life's most significant problems are not meant to be solved in a linear, problem-solving way. He argued that they are inherent in the human condition and should be looked at from a positive rather than a negative perspective. Jung claimed that instead of seeking a definitive solution or fix, people should approach these problems as positive opportunities for growth and integration. This involves setting transcendent goals, finding unique ways to interact with the world, and having an empowering mindset. When people can do this, they ultimately find a new perspective that allows them to transcend the problem’s power over them.