Hope: Believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be. High levels of hope lead to being able to motivate oneself, feel resourceful enough to find ways to accomplish ones objective, reassure oneself when in a tight spot that things will get better, beng flexible enough to find different ways of achieving ones goal or to switch goals if one becomes impossible, and having the common sense to break down a formidable task into smaller, manageable pieces.

--C.R. Snyder, quoted page 87 of Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman