Shane Lopez: The Psychologist Who Taught the World to Practice Hope
How a self-described "hopemonger" from Louisiana took the science of hope out of the lab and into classrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms - and why his work matters more than ever.
Shane Lopez grew up in New Iberia, Louisiana, firmly believing that his future was determined by his past. His school experiences reinforced this at every turn. On his first day of first grade, his teachers placed him in the advanced class - not because of anything he'd done, but because his older brother Harry was known to be smart. Later, a Catholic middle school put him in the gifted and talented programme based on test scores from fourth grade that the school had previously forgotten to post out. By senior year, convinced his path was already set by decisions other people had made years earlier, he was doing very little work.
At thirteen, his ambition was to become a podiatrist. He changed his mind after seeing old people's feet. He became a psychologist instead - and one of the most important voices in the science of hope.
From Studying IQ to Hope
Early in his career, Lopez worked as an intelligence researcher, studying what IQ could predict about people's outcomes. Then his mentor, C. R. Snyder, shared something that changed everything: life outcomes are determined by a multitude of variables, and you can predict a person's future far more accurately by combining past performance with future-oriented thinking - hope and optimism - than by relying on past performance and IQ alone.
The past, it turned out, wasn't the only answer to where we end up.
Lopez abandoned research into intelligence and dedicated the rest of his career to studying hope. He became a Senior Scientist at Gallup, Research Director of the Clifton Strengths Institute, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and the author of Making Hope Happen - the book that brought the science of hope to a general audience. He called himself a "hopemonger" and described his job as "a psychologist studying hope for a living."
He died in 2016, at forty-six. His work has only grown in influence since.
Making Hope Practical
Lopez's great contribution was making Hope Theory - the framework developed by his mentor C. R. Snyder - accessible and actionable. Where Snyder built the science, Lopez made it something people could use.
Snyder had defined hope as a cognitive process built on goals, pathways, and agency. Lopez took this framework and asked the question that mattered most: what do you do with it? How do you teach it? How do you build it in a classroom, a boardroom, a community?
His definition of hope was characteristically direct: hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present, combined with the belief that you have the power to make it so.
The second part of that definition - the belief that you have the power to make it so - is what makes it distinctive. Plenty of people believe the future will be better. Hopeful people believe they can contribute to making it so. That's the difference between wishing and hoping - and it's the difference that Lopez spent his career making visible.
The GPA of Hope
Lopez popularised what he called the GPA framework - Goals, Pathways, and Agency - as a practical way of understanding how Snyder's Hope Theory works in everyday life.
Goals thinking is about envisaging the future and refining your goals to make them approachable and attainable. A goal that feels too vague or too distant won't activate hopeful thinking. A goal that's clear and meaningful will.
Pathways thinking is the ability to create strategies and alternate routes to get from where you are now to where you want to be — especially when obstacles arise. Hopeful people view setbacks as challenges to navigate around, not reasons to stop. They plan alternative routes before they need them.
Agency thinking is the mental energy and self-belief required to actually pursue those goals along the pathways you've identified. A goal and a plan mean nothing without the motivation to act.
What Lopez emphasised - and demonstrated through years of research at Gallup - is that these three ways of thinking work together. The more pathways you can see, the stronger your agency. The stronger your agency, the more creative your pathways thinking becomes. And both are oriented toward goals that give the whole process direction and meaning.
Hope in Business and Leadership
Lopez's work at Gallup brought hope squarely into the world of business and leadership. His research - published in the Gallup Business Journal - produced findings that are hard to ignore.
Hope is the leading indicator of success for careers and businesses. Having a high-hope mindset is worth the equivalent of an extra day of productivity each week. For example, a highly hopeful salesperson can accomplish in six days what it takes a low-hope counterpart seven days to achieve.
And when Gallup studied what people need most from their leaders, hope emerged as one of the four essential qualities —- alongside compassion, stability, and trust. This research, which I've written about in my piece on the Gallup Global Leadership Report, later expanded into the landmark 52-country study that confirmed hope as the dominant need, accounting for 56% of all positive leadership attributes.
For founders and leaders, the practical implication is clear: the most effective thing you can do for the people you lead is help them see a better future and believe they have the power to create it. Lopez argued that leaders should strive to be the most hopeful person in their team's professional lives. Teaching hope, he pointed out, costs a business absolutely nothing - yet the returns are measurable in productivity, engagement, and retention.
Hope and the Future of Work
Lopez was passionate about something that extended well beyond the corporate world: the way we prepare young people for the future.
He believed that people naturally default to thinking about the future - children do it instinctively. But schools, as he saw them, were often structured as impersonal factories rather than dynamic human development centres. He advocated for an education system that gave students the space to imagine their futures, refine those visions, and build the pathways and agency to pursue them.
His argument was rooted in a practical reality. The modern economy increasingly requires people to design and build their own careers and lives. Traditional jobs are not always waiting. The entrepreneurial mindset - the ability to imagine a future, map a route, and act - is becoming essential for everyone, whether or not they start a business.
Between the ages of zero and eighteen, Lopez noted, not a single person had asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. That absence of adult investment in his future shaped his entire mission. He wanted every young person to be asked that question - and to be given the tools to answer it with genuine hope.
Why Lopez Matters Now
Shane Lopez died before the UN designated the International Day of Hope in 2025. He didn't see the Gallup Global Leadership Report confirm what he'd spent his career arguing — that hope is the single most important quality followers seek in their leaders. He didn't see hope enter the mainstream conversation about leadership, strategy, and organisational development in the way it has over the past two years.
But he laid the groundwork for all of it.
Where Snyder built the science, Lopez built the practice. He showed that hope could be taught in a twenty-minute lesson, measured through validated instruments, and applied in classrooms, boardrooms, and communities with measurable results. He proved that hope predicts outcomes better than intelligence, that it drives productivity beyond what talent alone can explain, and that leaders who provide it see their teams thrive.
His legacy is the idea that hope is something you do, not something you feel. That it can be learned. That it can be practised. And that it belongs at the centre of how we lead, how we build, and how we prepare the next generation for a future they'll need to create for themselves.
Lopez called himself a hopemonger. His life's work was the conviction that hope can be taught, practised, and built - by individuals, by teams, by leaders, and by communitie
The Purpose Company's strapline - building the future we want - is inspired by his work. It's what I believe, and it's what I see every day in the founders and leaders I work with. The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we create. And creating it starts with hope.
Further Reading
Shane J. Lopez, Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (2013)
Gallup, Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want (2025)
C. R. Snyder, The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here (1994)
If you'd like to explore how hope-centred strategy applies to your own business or leadership, I'd welcome a conversation. [Book a callnd let's explore it together.
This piece is part of a series on hope-centred strategy. You can also read about Hope Theory, the Gallup Global Leadership Report, and the International Day of Hope.
Denyse Whillier is the founder of The Purpose Company, working with purpose-led founders and leaders to build the future they want. Read more about her experience and approach here.
