Week 5: Rebuilding Hope After Disappointment

When Hope Feels Fragile, Start Here

Start at the Beginning! Catch up here on Week 1!

This Week’s Big Idea

This week is all about restoring faith in ourselves, in life, and in the possibility of good after disappointment. When hope has been broken—by loss, betrayal, burnout, or a long season of waiting—how do we learn to trust again?

Included in today’s newsletter:

• Video: “Rebuilding Trust When Hope Has Let You Down”
• Guided Audio Meditation: “I Can Hope Again”
• Essay for reflection: “What If I Hoped Again”
• Journal Prompts and Worksheet
• Theme Song
• Have you taken The Hope Test yet? Check it out here!

• Please begin by watching this short video

• Then take a few minutes to pause and reflect with this audio

Guided Audio Meditation

“I Can Hope Again”

• Here are a few thoughts for deeper reflection:

What If I Hoped Again?

There’s a quiet kind of heartbreak that doesn’t come from a loud disaster—it comes from repeated letdowns.

It’s not always a specific moment you can point to.
Sometimes it’s the feeling that you’ve tried to believe in something… and it just didn’t work out.
You launched the dream.
You loved with your whole heart.
You made the brave choice.

And then…
It didn’t go the way you hoped.

Maybe it blew up.
Maybe it fizzled out.
Maybe it just never took off.

And at some point—without meaning to—you stopped trusting yourself.
Or life.
Or hope itself.

When Hope Feels Fragile

We all have a threshold.
A limit where our brain starts whispering, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

It’s self-protection. It’s human.

You’ve been there before—excited, expectant—and then it fell apart.
So now, hope feels risky. Naïve. Too soft. Too exposed.

But here’s what I’ve learned:
When hope feels fragile, it doesn’t mean it’s gone.
It means it’s asking for gentler handling.

Not louder cheerleading.
Not toxic positivity.
Just tenderness.

Trust Isn’t A Light Switch—It’s A Muscle

There’s this idea that we either have trust or we don’t.
But it’s more like a muscle.

And like any muscle, when it’s been injured, it needs time to heal… and gentle movement to regain strength.

So maybe we don’t rebuild trust with a grand leap of faith.

Maybe we rebuild it with a whisper.
A breath.
A micro-step in the direction of life.

Trust starts with the small things:

• showing up for one journaling session even when you didn’t feel like it.

• sending that email.

• saying what you actually feel in a conversation.

• choosing rest instead of guilt.

These don’t seem like much. But they matter.
Because each of them says:

I believe something good is still possible.
I trust myself enough to try again.

You Don’t Need to Trust Everything—Just One Thing

Let’s be clear:
This is not about blindly trusting everyone, or everything, or jumping back into situations that hurt you.

No.

This is about learning to trust your own voice again.

The one that says, “I’m not okay here.”
The one that says, “I’m ready for more.”
The one that says, “This is who I really am.”

When you start listening to that voice—and believing it—trust begins to return.
And hope can take a breath again.

The Beautiful Part

Here’s the beautiful part:
You don’t have to have all the answers to move forward.

You just need one thing:

A willingness to trust yourself with the next small step.

That’s it.

Not the whole plan.
Not the outcome.
Just the next brave, beautiful inch.

So this week, be kind to your own hesitation.
You’ve lived enough to know what loss feels like—and that makes your hope even more meaningful.

You’re not starting from scratch.
You’re starting from experience.
From wisdom.
From strength.

And the fact that you’re still here—still engaging with this, still trying—that means there’s a flicker of hope in you that refused to go out.

Hold onto that.

That’s your spark.
And it’s enough to light the way forward.

• Here’s your opportunity to dive a bit deeper into this week’s theme

Journal Prompts:

1. Where do I feel hesitant to have hope again?

2. What’s one area I might be ready to explore, even gently?

3. What would trusting myself look like in action this week?

Get the FREE expanded journal worksheet for week 5 here!

Thp Week5 Worksheet

171KB ∙ PDF file

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I am so proud of my song “Time For Hope”—the theme song for THE HOPE PROJECT. Have you heard it yet? Listen for FREE now on YouTube.

I’ll see you next week for our final week—number six!

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THE HOPE PROJECT is presented free of charge with the hopes that all people can enter in without any limits. If you’ve been moved by what you’ve experienced, please consider supporting my creative work at one of the paid subscriber levels. Thank you for your consideration!