Hope is often treated as a mood, something that either arrives or does not. Researchers who study it tend to describe something more deliberate: a way of thinking that combines a clear goal, a believable pathway toward it, and a sense of one's own ability to keep moving along that pathway.
Framed that way, hope starts to look less like luck and more like a skill that can be practised. Setting a specific goal, breaking it into a plan, and rehearsing what to do when the first plan fails are all things a person can deliberately get better at over time.
That reframing matters because it hands people something to do. Instead of waiting to feel hopeful, they can build the conditions hope tends to grow in: a clear next step, a backup plan, and evidence, gathered from their own past, that they have moved through difficulty before and come out the other side able to keep going.