Why Hope Is a Leadership Strategy

Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Dr. Julia Garcia, psychologist, speaker, and author of The Five Habits of Hope. Julia shares how hope isn’t just a feeling—it’s a set of practical habits that anyone can build to move from survival to thriving. Drawing on research, client stories, and her own journey overcoming adversity, Dr. Garcia explains how reframing adversity, processing emotions, and building real community can turn even the darkest moments into sources of strength and innovation.

About the Guest

Dr. Julia Garcia is a psychologist, speaker, and author dedicated to making hope a practical tool for transformation. Through her Five Habits of Hope framework, she helps organizations, leaders, and individuals build resilience, process adversity, and foster cultures of belonging and growth.

• Website: https://www.drjuliagarcia.com/

• Book: The Five Habits of Hope – https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Hope-Stories-Strategies-Help/dp/1400250854

• Podcast: Journey with Dr. J – https://podcasts.apple.com/is/podcast/journey-with-dr-j/id1826571964

Actionable Insights

• Hope is not just a mindset or emotion—it’s a set of learnable, repeatable habits that can be built by anyone, even in adversity.

• The Five Habits of Hope blend emotional processing, reframing adversity, building community, taking emotional risks, learning to release, and repurposing pain into purpose.

• Reframing adversity starts with replacing negative language and identities (“I’m worthless”) with healthier narratives (“I’m worth more” or “I’m also courageous”).

• Emotional risk isn’t about adrenaline—it’s about opening up, expressing emotion (even joy), and connecting with others despite the risk of rejection.

• Community and belonging are essential—loneliness can strike anyone, but habits of hope help build genuine connection and support.

• Release is essential: Letting go of what you’re holding—stress, pain, pressure—creates space for growth and new stories.

• Hope is built by going inward, not through outward achievement; it’s about aligning your inner narrative with your real values.

• In business and teams, hope habits boost collaboration, creativity, retention, and create environments where people contribute—not just consume—culture.

• Measuring hope is less about “getting better every day” and more about having a repeatable process for returning to hope when you feel lost.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

• 01:02 – Hope as a Habit, Not Just a Feeling – Why hope is a learnable process, not just a fleeting emotion.

• 02:47 – The Dark Side of Hopelessness – Julia’s personal journey and the universal struggle with despair.

• 04:22 – The Five Habits of Hope (Overview) – From owning your story to repurposing pain into purpose.

• 06:13 – Reframing Adversity with Language – How changing your self‑talk can reshape your identity and outcomes.

• 07:35 – Emotional Risk and Real Connection – Why being vulnerable is the key to breaking loneliness and building community.

• 10:24 – Measuring Progress with Hope – Why inward alignment is more important than outward achievement.

• 12:35 – Hope in Business and Teams – How leaders can build cultures of hope, collaboration, and innovation.

• 14:47 – The Power of Release (Exercise) – A hands‑on exercise to let go of stress and create space for hope.

• 18:05 – Realistic vs. Unrealistic Hope – Why hope starts with honesty, not false positivity.

• 19:09 – Hope as a Practical Strategy – How habits of hope drive innovation, leadership, and culture change.

Insights

“Hope is a habit, not just a feeling—there’s always a way back to it, no matter how lost you feel.”

“You can’t have hope without honesty. The first step is to face your feelings and own your story.”

“Release isn’t weakness—it’s how we make space for growth, change, and new beginnings.”

“In business, hope drives creativity, collaboration, and real contribution—not just survival.”

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Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00.976)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dr. Julia Garcia. She's a psychologist, speaker, and author who has dedicated her career to teaching the science and practice of hope. Her Five Habits of Hope framework blends research, client stories, and her own journey overcoming adversity. She's worked with organizations, schools, and leaders to help them move from survival to thriving.

John Jantsch (00:40.184)

Making hope a practical tool for transformation. We're going to talk about her new book, The Five Habits of Hope, Stories and Strategies to Help You Find Your Way. So Julia, welcome to the show.

Julia (00:43.686)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

John Jantsch (00:43.686)

So and I'm sure you get asked this all the time. I know you have an answer for this, but I'll tee it up anyway. You know a lot of people think of hope as an emotion or a mindset and you're reframing it actually as a habit not just something that happens to you, but something you actually can control. So unpack that for me.

Julia (01:02.924)

Yeah, definitely. Well, I guess the best way to explain this is, do you know when you have hope? Do you know when you feel it? Would you agree? Okay. And do you know when you don't? Have you ever felt like you didn’t have it?

John Jantsch (01:11.413)

Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (01:17.166)

Yeah, you know, like we're down by three touchdowns and there’s three minutes left, right?

Julia (01:19.854)

Exactly. So you know when you have it and you know when you don’t. It's one of those things that's connected to our feelings. And so the biggest thing is we don’t always have a process or a way to navigate our feelings. So when we do that, then we can always have a process back to hope. So it starts with emotional habits to help us build and navigate back to hope. Because at the end of the day, I could tell you,

Hope is a cognitive science, but it really comes down to how you feel about it. And so if you’ve got feelings that are blocking you from having hope, then what we need to do is actually focus on how we process and navigate our feelings with emotional habits of hope.

John Jantsch (02:03.046)

And I think we’ve all experienced people that probably shouldn’t have that much hope, but they seem to, right? I mean, like they’re in a situation where you think I would never want to find myself in that situation, but that person still seems pretty hopeful. I mean, I think that explains a little of what you’re talking about, isn’t it?

Julia (02:08.366)

If all’s hope is not the same. Yeah. Yeah.

Julia (02:23.342)

Yeah, I like to debunk some of the things that actually hope aren’t. And so sometimes people think hope is being happy. And that’s not like true. That’s not what it is. And some people think you have to have a lot of it or a big amount or be the loudest about it or be super positive. And that’s not true either. You can have a very tiny bit and it might even be unseen to other people. And it could be just enough to get you through.

John Jantsch (02:47.418)

So what’s the, because you allude to it in your bio, what’s kind of the specific story in your life that kind of tested this idea for you?

Julia (02:56.504)

Well, I never thought hope was like something that takes seriously that could help me in my career and my relationships in life in general. Had no idea that it was like the single greatest predictor to our health and wellbeing. I really didn’t think that it had much substance to it. But when I look back to what happens when we don’t have it in the moments I have been hopeless, that is a darkness that you don’t wish upon anybody. And in my work, I’ve actually had like a front‑row seat to millions of people sharing those dark spaces that they’ve been in. They could be professionals, they could be students, they could be parents and family members. And it really didn’t matter what demographic a person it was or where they were from. That kind of similar dark place of despair was something almost everybody has ventured to and not sure how they were going to get out of it. And that really opened my eyes to it’s not just something I’ve felt and struggled with that I’m seeing the masses of people I work with.

There's a disconnect in being able to face our feelings so that we can get out of those places of darkness or despair that affect our relationships, our workflow, our teams, our culture, and the way that we build our lives.

John Jantsch (04:10.374)

So I don’t want you to go habit by habit and tell us the whole story. People should buy the book to get the whole story. But give us a little bit of the overview of the habits themselves. First one, own your own story.

Julia (04:22.796)

Yeah, I think that the emotional habits are really the premises for me. I did anything but face feelings. I thought like if I got real about my feelings or got vulnerable in any way, shape or form that I was weak, that I’d be a burden, those things. So it helps us really navigate the emotional things. And one of my favorite ones that I think your listeners will really like is habit number five, which is

the habit of repurposing. And it's where we take parts of our story and we rewrite it, we rebrand it, we rechannel it into something innovative, creative, a project, anything that you c