Inspiring Hope: Stories of Hopeful Living for More Success

I Chose Hope—

and That Has Made All the Difference

Arlene R. Taylor, PhD

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

—Dale Carnegie

Yes indeed! I owe a great deal to teachers—two in particular. One of their names I recall. The other I only remember by my personal nickname for him. Most people are impacted by their teachers, negatively or positively. Fewer analyze and identify the impact. With some thought I was able to pinpoint how the influence of these two individuals changed the entire course of my life. Because of them I learned to hope. In fact, I may even be alive today because of them, because back then my life was not working. If being sick frequently with at least one bout of walking pneumonia annually, continual fatigue, experiencing my then-husband run off with my secretary, and feeling as if I could never succeed at anything, counted, then my life was not working. I had taken a new job, hoping it would be less stressful and a better fit with my aptitudes. So far, so good. Until my first performance evaluation at my new job as director of infection control at an acute hospital.

It’s time to start working on a Master’s, my boss said, smiling encouragingly. I smiled back, but doubt that the smile reached my eyes. How could I explain that, as much as I loved to learn, getting a Master’s degree was simply not in the cards? Not for me. I wasn’t very smart. Besides, I would have to take statistics. And pass. And my brain didn’t do math. My boss wouldn’t let it go. She kept bringing the topic up, and I kept making excuses. Enter Dr. Terrence Roberts, or Doc T, as I thought of him.

In a serendipitous coincidence, my boss asked Doc T to provide some lectures, assessment, analysis, and personal feedback to nursing middle-management personnel. As a member of the faculty at a local 4-year college and director of Behavioral Health at our facility, he was eminently qualified to do so. At our first one-to-one meeting, he asked about the stressors in my life and what I planned to do, career-wise, with the rest of my life. I laughed and teared up as I repeated the pressure I felt to earn a Master’s degree. I concluded by reiterating the fact that there was no hope of my ever accomplishing something like that. I was very lucky to be doing as well as I was (which, by the way, was not doing very well at all, but I didn’t know the difference at that stage of my life—thinking that struggle, illness, and exhaustion was what adulthood was all about). He must have astutely seen through my convoluted thinking.

I have little recollection of anything he explained about my Johari-Window results. I do remember his posing half a dozen questions and suggesting I find time over the next few weeks to arrive at answers. Over time I’ve come to believe there are few accidents in life—just opportunities that we so often miss. Doc T was one of my great opportunities. Fortunately, I already held him in great professional regard, knowing that he had been one of the Little Rock Nine, one of a group of African-American students who had been enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. I figured that if he could survive that unspeakable hardship and abuse and go on to get a PhD, I could trust that he must know something. Maybe even something that could help me. After all, what did I have to lose?

I took his questions one by one and tried to answer them against the backdrop of my life experiences to date.

1. What made me think I was not smart? That one was easy. First, I’d always felt different from others. Second, when I made comments at the dinner table, family members frequently laughed. It had never occurred to me that I might actually have said something witty. And third, as I listened to people talk, my brain’s perception of the topic often differed from theirs. These and a hundred other examples had come to be equated with not smart.

2. How did I know my brain didn’t do math? That was one easy, too. At age 16, taking trigonometry by correspondence, I had actually equaled my age on the final-exam grade. 16%. My mother had been horrified. When I was your age, she had said more than once, I scored a perfect 100% on my trig final. How could I have a daughter who flunked? If you didn’t look so much like your father and me I’d think the hospital had given us the wrong newborn . . . And so it went between sighs and moans. That 16% coupled with my mother’s bewilderment had translated into, I’m math illiterate. Since then I had accepted the fact that my brain just didn’t do math. It could do other things: write verse and short stories, play and sight-read music, brainstorm new games, problem solve on the spur of the moment, glide around the ice rink . . . it didn’t do math.

3. What stories had I heard over the years about my abilities? That one was harder. I had been home-schooled for nine of my K – 12 years. My internal explanation for being home schooled was that my parents thought I wouldn’t be successful in a real school setting (although that had never been verbalized). I was the only student, and my home school teacher was a very high-IQ adult. A continual emphasis on missed test questions, versus no affirmation for the ones I had gotten correct, contributed to a sense that I couldn’t do it right. There was also a big push for me to work on areas of weakness, rather than concentrating on what my brain did energy-efficiently. Current brain function rhetoric strongly suggests that such an antiquated view is not only unhelpful over the long term but also can contribute to multiple problems ranging from an increased risk of illness, to managing one’s weight, to a potential decrease in longevity. But that information—in the era of brain imaging—was half-a-century away. So, concentrating on tasks that were difficult for my brain to accomplish led me to believe that my abilities were few and far between, and the ones I did have were not particularly admired or rewarded.

4. Did I know the stories I was telling myself about my abilities? No, not until Doc T suggested I identify them. They weren’t pretty, those stories. They related primarily to fears of what I could NOT do successfully. Fears related to what others would think, of not fitting in, that my mother would die of breast cancer, that my father would not recover from jaundice (Hepatitis A), that I would forget the music for the piano recital (rote memorization being so difficult for my brain), and on and on. No wonder I was tired and sick and sick and tired. I had obviously accepted the mantra of fear as my own. That’s a load for any brain to carry!

5. Had I grown up in an optimistic or pessimistic environment? I grappled with this question. Using the definition that optimism is a conclusion reached through a deliberate thought pattern that leads to a positive attitude, I had to conclude that my childhood environment veered toward the pessimistic side. For as far back as I could recall, the comments and instructions directed toward me had been couched in the negative: don’t, can’t, shouldn’t, oughtn’t, won’t, and so on. Much later in life I would be told by a brain-function specialist that although no family can truly be considered as functional, there are degrees of dysfunction. In a mildly dysfunctional family, estimates are that children hear nine or ten negatives for every positive. Double that for a moderately dysfunctional environment and triple it for an environment considered tobe outright dysfunctional. People tend to do what they have experienced, and you can only pass on what you know. Therefore, it’s no wonder pessimism can be transmitted down the generational corridor.

6. What had happened in my life to deprive me of hope? That definitely set me back on my heels. Until then I didn’t even realize I had none. According to Erik H. Erikson, the well-known developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst who postulated that a human being goes through eight stages from birth to death, hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained, hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded or trust impaired. Hopefulness is the clear sense that something I wished for might actually occur, that what I wanted might be possible. Somewhere during my childhood I had stopped wishing or wanting—just plodding along, one foot in front of the other, not thinking about anything I didn’t already have. Double ouch!

It was several weeks before Doc T and I chatted about these six questions. It was even longer before I found the courage (at his suggestion) to take an IQ test. Part of me said it was better to wonder how non-smart I was—better than to have my beliefs confirmed. If Doc T hadn’t kept encouraging me when our paths crossed in the cafeteria I might never had screwed up the courage. His premise was that my score would fall within the bell curve of distribution and that with a good teacher there was every reason to believe I could pass statistics. Right. The teacher could not be the issue. I hadn’t had one. Not really. I had a correspondence course. My brain’s inability to do math was the issue. That was my story and I stuck to it.

In retrospect, it is amazing how tenaciously we are wont to hang onto our stories and interpret everything that happens in their light. Eventually I returned to Doc T’s office to learn the results. Eyes twinkling, Doc T told me that my score was definitely above 85—that being the lower end of the first deviation from the mean on the Bell Curve of Distribution. This removed all doubt (his words) about whether or not my brain could wrap itself around statistics. The issue, he pointed out, is whether you can alter your perception enough to risk taking a statistics course. I think you’ve given up hope. He was right. I had. But at his words the dim outline of a door marked hope began to materialize in my mind.

More time went by as I tried to picture my life differently, as I tried to rewrite parts of the script I had been handed at birth. Looking back, that represented a colossal waste of time, except that it gave me time to consider and reconsider the beliefs and attitudes I had consciously and subconsciously absorbed—many of them no doubt before the age of three. I was struggling to develop new habits of joy in an effort to change my mindset from pessimistic to optimistic. Once again this brilliant teacher came to my rescue. Drawing on a paper napkin he introduced me to Paul MacClean’s Triune Brain Model.

Basically, think of the brain as three functional layers: two subconscious and one conscious. The brain thinks in pictures and deals easily with positives—a one-step process. What you see is what you get. The 3rd brain layer can process negatives, but it is a challenge—a two-step process, which involves the reverse of an idea. There’s a huge difference between Don’t touch the stove, and Keep your hands away from the stove. What you think in the conscious third layer filters down to the second and first layers and provides a map for them to follow. (The first and second layers can perceive language even though they don’t use language per se.) And here’s the rub. The first and second brain layers may be unable to process negatives at all. That’s the reason affirmation is considered to be the programming language of the brain, the most effective way to communicate with the subconscious layers. It was a slow process to learn to recognize a thought as negative and figure out a way to state it as a positive. Slow, but possible!

D-day arrived when Doc T tossed a college summer school bulletin across the table and casually remarked, Go register for statistics. Keep it a secret, if you want to. When you pass you can enroll next fall in a Master’s program.

And if I don’t? I asked, half seriously and half in jest.

Get a math tutor and retake the class. He was nothing if not direct. Go ahead. Risk it.

Risk it? I looked up some information on risk. One person defined it as a function of three variables:

• probability that a threat exists

• probability that there are significant vulnerabilities

• potential impact of the vulnerabilities

If any of these three variables approaches zero, the overall risk approaches zero. My conclusions were that there was no real threat—only the possibility that I wouldn’t make a C, and someone else would find out about it. The only vulnerabilities were my abilities and my own perceptions. Hmm-m-m.

I signed up for summer school along with 58 other adult students. Believe me, I kept it a secret. The only people who knew, were my immediate family members (I would be in Statistics class four nights a week for the next six weeks and spending every available minute studying) and my best friend in San Francisco.

The Statistics instructor was male, middle-aged, bearded, and had a PhD in mathematics. Wow! What a brain he must have! Filled with apprehension, I slipped into a desk at the back of the room and did all those nervous little things I would have preferred to avoid: dropping my pen, knocking over my bottle of water, stuttering out my name when he reached my desk creating a roster.

What is your reason for taking this class? the instructor asked when he reached my desk. You look like you’re headed for the guillotine, he added. The class laughed. Blushing, I explained that my boss was pushing me to get a Master’s degree, that statistics was a pre-requisite, and that my brain did not do math—unfortunate for me. Looking at me from the corner of one eye he calmly and deliberately tapped his pen on my desk. Your brain will do math in my class, he said, matter-of-factly. The tiny crack appeared in the door marked hope. From then on I thought of him as Dr. H—H for hope.

Over the course of the next six weeks my brain worked beyond diligently. It over-learned, but I was still terrified that when push came to shove I might fail to pass. I doubt I’ve ever been as stressed in any other class before or since. I cannot even recall the instructor’s actual name—just my nickname for him.

What I do recall in living color is how my brain felt in his presence. He believed that my brain could pass his statistics course, and I slowly absorbed some of his certainty. To my amazement, as the classes sped by, my brain not only seemed to get it at some level, but I also started to look forward to solving some of the statistical problems. Many of them involved aspects of epidemiology, an area of study that intrigued me. As each class morphed into the next, terms such as probability, reliability, mean, median, mode, and p-values actually took on some meaning. Gradually my apprehension lessened and my interest in the subject grew.