Connecting With Your Best Parts | Being Well Podcast — Transcript

Explore how recognizing and connecting with your positive inner traits fosters personal growth and overcomes self-doubt and shame.

Key Takeaways

Most self-awareness reveals positive traits rather than just areas needing change.
Shame and negativity bias strongly inhibit recognizing our inner goodness.
Early life messages shape our self-identity and can disconnect us from positive traits.
Recognizing good in oneself enhances empathy and recognition of good in others.
Investing in self-prizing and positive self-recognition is crucial for personal growth.

Summary

The podcast explores the importance of recognizing the good within ourselves as a key to personal growth.
Dr. Rick Hansen and Forrest Hansen discuss how self-awareness often reveals positive aspects more than negative ones.
Shame, self-doubt, and negativity bias often block people from acknowledging their strengths and goodness.
Many people are disconnected from their inner positive traits due to early life experiences and internalized stories.
Recognizing the good in oneself helps improve the ability to see and appreciate the good in others.
The hosts emphasize the cultural and psychological challenges that prevent people from embracing their positive qualities.
They discuss the reparative power of being seen and valued by others for one’s positive traits.
The episode encourages listeners to invest in themselves and practice self-prizing as a form of self-support.
The conversation highlights the social and tribal nature of behavior and how it influences self-perception.
Listeners are invited to reflect on their talents, positive intentions, and efforts as a path to deeper self-awareness.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the podcast, this is where we explore the practical science of personal growth. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm joined today, as usual, by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is an author, a clinical psychologist, and he's also my dad. So, Dad, how are you doing today?

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I'm good, and honestly, just looking at that question in the present, I can truly say, Forrest, one of the absolute highlights of my day

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is when I get to do this with you.

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Oh, well, that's very sweet, Dad. I really appreciate that.

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Well, it's a good setup for our topic today, which is recognizing good inside ourselves. And here, what do you do when

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somebody recognizes good in you? Right here I am, life recognizing good in you, and it's really a good that we co-create, and certainly you're a major source of it, the major source of it really since you run the podcast. And

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what do you do suddenly when your attention has turned to something factually good inside yourself?

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Yeah, well, that's really sweet for starters, Dad, and I appreciate it. And it's also a great introduction for what we're going to be

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talking about today. And a little while ago, we posted an episode on self-awareness that we got really positive feedback about. And the key part of that conversation was an interaction that we had where you emphasized how, for most people, much of what there is to

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become more aware of inside of ourselves is our positive aspects, like the good news that there is to find. And if you missed that episode, here's a cut-down version of that short clip. Also, a lot of the time, what we become

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aware of is good news, like I'll ask you, is there anything that you got in touch with through self-awareness that, for you, was reassuring, a relief, good news?

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I know I'm not totally sure how to answer that question, to be honest. Maybe

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I'm just wrong about this. I

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I don't feel like that's where the pain points are for people. I think the pain points are around dealing with things that they need to change, not embracing like positive aspects of their personality.

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But that's maybe because that's where the pain points are for me. I'll definitely say my clinical experience, 80% of what there is for people to recognize about themselves is good news-ish on average. Maybe 20% is how they

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could be more skillful.

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Oh, really?

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Yeah, really.

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Yeah, now in my clinic, that's my clinical population, but that's my experience. That interaction was really helpful for me personally, and I thought that it made sense for us to essentially have a

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follow-up episode where we focus on what people can do to become more aware of and connect with their positive aspects, including dealing with some of the natural blocks that emerge inside of people to feeling good about ourselves. So, does that sound good

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to you?

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We're already in it.

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Awesome. So before we get started, a few quick reminders. First, please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already through whatever you're listening to it right now on. And then second, if you'd like to support us in

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other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwell. So to follow up on that introduction, Dad, if most of what there is for us to become more self-aware of is our positive aspects, what we do well,

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our good nature, positive impulses, good traits that we have inside of ourselves, and it stands to reason that there's something that's getting in the way of that, what do you think gets in the way of people really hearing the good

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news about themselves?

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Boy, several things just really stand right out. First is the very strong psychic gravitational pull of shame, feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, self-criticism, anxiety about incapacity. What I mean by that is this feeling that we're

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smaller than our challenges, we're weaker than the forces arrayed against us, and so that material has a strong pull. Not to be clear, sometimes there are aspects in that material that are factually based. Maybe there are things that it's

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appropriate to be ashamed of or to have guilt or remorse about. There's certainly things for myself that, wow, every time I think about it, I just, ugh, you know, I feel bad about it. I should feel bad about it. It's okay that I feel

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bad about it. Also, sometimes we appraise ourselves and we recognize, boy, I really am being outgunned these days. I really am smaller or weaker than these negative forces coming at us. All right, there's a place for that, but much of that is wrong.

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It's based on the negativity bias in which we overlearn from episodes, especially when we're children, of being smaller than the forces around us. And also, we can be caught up in a culture that tells us that it's not

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okay to really recognize our strengths. So that's one part of it. Second part of it that I see is that for many people, their interior is a great mystery to them. They don't have much sense of what's underneath it all, and because

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they don't have much sense of what's underneath it all, they don't have much sense of the capabilities there, the talents, the virtues, the efforts, and deep, deep, deep down, a fundamental natural goodness in just about everybody. So those are some of the reasons why.

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Yeah, I think that a part of that that you alluded to there in terms of our early experiences where we have these authentic experiences of the world being bigger and stronger and scarier in a lot of different ways than we are, and we

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internalize them. And one way that that can show up for people is the stories that they hear from the people around them, particularly from parents or caregivers, authority figures, other kids at school, whatever, where we get told, and I have a lot of

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empathy and sympathy for this because I think this is very much attached to my own personal story, where we get told that we're a certain kind of way, and we internalize that certain kind of way as part of our self-identity because

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kids are lumps of clay and the adults know and we don't. And if you have that kind of an orientation, which certainly I did as a kid, you go, okay, that must be how I am. And so one of the personal

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stories that I took on was very much the story about being very cognitive, very much a knower, not really a feeler, all of that kind of content. And over time, that got very much attached to my own story, and that's not

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purely negative, but there were certainly some negative aspects of that that I really, really oriented toward, and I didn't orient toward so much the very positive aspects of being a sensitive, emotional, touchy-feely kind of person that I really think I am sort of

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deep down. And so because I internalized that story, I got cut off from those more positive tendencies, and I really had to rediscover them in adulthood.

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Well, as a parent, you know, that's poignant to me. And one thing that motivates me on this

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topic, Forrest, is that I think it's incredibly important at this moment in history to recognize the good in other people at a whole other level, particularly the people who are quote-unquote not like me.

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Yeah, it's so important to recognize the

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good in other people. It doesn't mean overlooking the bad, doesn't mean overestimating their capabilities. It's not about positive thinking. It's about clear seeing. And the truth is, I think here I am, Mr. You Know Seeing the Good, most people suck at recognizing the good

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in others, let alone acknowledging it. So I think that's a very important thing to do. And one of the things that can help us be better at that for all kinds of pro-social purposes, you know, that will ripple out and affect the

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whole world, one way into that is to get better at recognizing the good in yourself and standing up for it. I grew up in a way in which my parents were loving and decent, but I felt like they were seeing someone

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that was displaced from the real me by about a foot to the side, and it's deeply unnerving to feel unseen, particularly important parts of yourself. It's very wounding to be unseen. And as a repair for the ways in which others,

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maybe while growing up and even in the current time, don't see us clearly, at least we can see ourselves clearly.

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playing the stock market you played the old guys online and you just kept harvesting money from them good on you they knew what they were in for for them it was entertaining for you it was a living everyone was a consenting participant

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yeah totally anyway long story so you lead with that but then to have a person kind of go well forest you know behind that rationalist uh play the odds cool detached thing you're an incredibly sweet kind loving person who has a compulsion for justice

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a compulsion for justice i like that that was that was a good way to put that dad i mean but the uh the positive aspects of it is the problematic ones that pop up sometimes yeah and they haven't recognized right like whoa what

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like what's it do to you right now to have that recognized flip it around can we give ourselves that recognition yeah yeah totally and and and it's two parts right on the one hand i think that there is something in being

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seen by other people in the positive traits that we feel are under acknowledged about ourselves that is like extremely reparative and very like yeah you know and you just lean into it in a different kind of way and maybe

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this is just me but i actually think this is a lot of people there's also something about it where you can feel very exposed because this is often a very private part of people like the the parts of ourselves

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yeah i'm struggling for the language here but it's like the there are these vulnerable parts of ourself they're often very young to use the language of ifs you know we have these younger parts inside of ourself and and they can be a little bit

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more more more sensitive in a variety of different ways and connecting with them can feel really lovely but it can also feel very exposed and there's this kind of dance there where there's a part of me that goes oh i don't know this is

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getting a little vulnerable and there's also a part of me that's like wow really hungering to be seen in that way and i think that that dance is one of the things that that gets in the way of people connecting with their more

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positive aspects really because there's that sensitivity and that vulnerability associated with the process yeah there's also something powerful when somebody sees something in us that we had not really seen in ourselves and it can give you permission to see it

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totally yeah and to name it right and this gets a little tricky related for example to uh an episode we did recently with with my friend ron siegel a psychologist teaches at harvard with this beautiful book the extraordinary

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gift of being ordinary yeah right and it's also true that each of us is has characteristics that are on a distribution and we have characteristics that are toward the tail of the curve that are at the high end of the curve in

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certain regards we all have these characteristics in which routinely we're just the best person in the room almost always at that particular thing it might be flavoring the spaghetti sauce or being able to really tune into a troubled cat or dog or

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toddler or fixed hair whatever it might be right or to uh you know and so forth uh have a gift of language be able to be a little political something something to have those qualities acknowledged in us just it's beautiful it's a really it's

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high impact so i think a lot about uh gifting what are the social gifts that we can so easily give other people in a very sincere way the the offering of the valuing of others what a powerful gift and there's a term

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in developmental psychology prizing where appropriately children need to feel prized now there's skillful pricing and unskillful pricing and people have pointed out in research that if we prize kids a lot for the results then they can get kind of attached to the results

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rather than pricing them for process and having a growth mindset and so forth but boy don't you want to feel prized like the world is scary it's hard a lot of people are mean you know they're kind of jerks

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they're not prizing you they're devaluing you how beautiful isn't it to prize other people yeah and i think that that is just such a great way to support people in reconnecting with those those banished aspects of their self right

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because a lot of the time what happens is that we have these these qualities that look really good in adulthood that get essentially punished out of us in childhood and an example of that might be a really high degree of emotional sensitivity

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which looks wonderful in a relationship partner but is not always rewarded on the playground with other kids and so we learn to neuter those impulses inside of ourselves so we don't get punished when we're children but the lesson that we

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learned back then becomes problematic a lot of the time in the here and now and so reconnecting with those aspects as an adult can feel like it can feel scary because we've learned that there is a punishment associated

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with that part of ourselves and i think just a beautiful way through that is other people taking a role in supporting us in that process by doing that pricing that you're talking about dad so can can i practice on you would you be

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willing to do this a little you know weird but experiential all right all right so these are three questions that people can ask themselves or they can think about this with regard to somebody else so one has to do with good intentions

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good intentions so for you forrest i could ask what's one of your good intentions uh i think i have a strong intention to do good work and maybe i'm just thinking about it because we're doing the podcast right

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now but i really care about it like i want it to be good um and i don't just want it to be good out of like a narcissistic you know i want to be associated with a good thing kind

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of thing although i'm sure some of that comes in there as well i i mean in terms of like i actually really care about giving people like good information and really vetting it and being very thorough and not

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not making a mistake in a way that could be problematic or harmful so that's an example wonderful the way you put it it reminds me of zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance and we're going to do an

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episode someday about books yes and that's been in the hopper for a while yeah for many people that's been a seminal book and you know the key word in it is quality the seeking of quality whether you're maintaining a motorcycle or raising a

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child or engaging your own awakening process or supporting a podcast you know the seeking of quality how about you dad oh that's sweet um i wasn't ready for that that's great good for you i i definitely have a strong learning

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intention you know i i intend to learn i'm very inclined toward learning and that's an intention value is close to intention i love to learn you know i'm a student okay here's another question so intentions and these are things for

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people to reflect on themselves maybe talents something that you are naturally inherently really quite good at innately what's one of your talents well i think this is where i start to bump into some of my content which is going to be a

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good topic transition for us at some point but um i think i've always had a had a talking capability i've always been pretty verbally gifted with like words and writing and stringing a sentence together it often but not always comes through on

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the podcast that i'm certainly a very chatty person um so yeah so that's something that i feel a real a real positive uh quality associated with so if i were to answer it and there are different kinds of you know talents

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i have a talent with little kids i'm very comfortable with them i'm fascinated by them i'm i'm safe with them there's a lot of your work was with kids yeah that's right so you could call that a talent you know

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i'd be a good preschool teacher yeah yeah totally so people can ask themselves what are their talents what are they innately good at skills are different skills are acquired talents are innate and they're different kinds of talents for example

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sensing who in the room is hurting or having a feeling for beauty or orderliness aesthetics that's the talent many many kinds of talents here's another one third one efforts where do people make efforts honorable efforts you know including just the effort to

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endure really really horrible conditions well i think that i've made a a major effort around and again we're we're bumping into a little bit of my content here uh which will be useful to talk about but i think that i i started with a lot of

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advantages um but regardless i've made a very dedicated effort to deal with my own material um inside of myself and to peel back some of the negative tendencies problematic tendencies maybe a better word that i developed particularly in

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like my late teenage early 20 years um they were really just getting in the way of my relationships with other people and have made a very dedicated effort over the past five to ten years to work on them in a in a thoughtful and

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consistent kind of way um so that's an area where even more so than like consistent work effort or something like that i feel good about that um because i think that a lot of people just don't do that um and so

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yeah so that's i think a good example that's great if i would pick one when i'm in a situation in which there's a wrangle with another person and maybe they have a criticism for me or there's there's an issue between us

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after i finish spewing or being a little reactive in the beginning or righteous you know captured by my own righteousness i'm very reliable to strongly make an effort to to clarify my own correction how can i do better next time what can i

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learn how can we repair here including what are the takeaways for me for the future it kind of goes to learning as as an intention how could i do better uh you know that's that's a pretty good effort to offer some commentary on our

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commentary i think that's for starters totally true i've seen you do it many times and this isn't intended as an exercise and and two guys praising themselves um it's intended as a way in for ways that you who are

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listening right now can do this exercise with yourself and also i think that a really really useful part of listening to this process is listening to the bumpiness associated with that i've been bumpy during this as you might be able to tell as a listener

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certainly felt bumpy internally and a lot of what has created my bumpiness has been me bumping into my own material and particularly material associated with being pretty hyper-sensitive to coming across as narcissistic conceited entitled offering sufficient appreciation for the

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ways in which i had an easier run of it than many other people did all of that stuff and so whenever i start to do any kind of a process i've noticed particularly around like traits because kind of efforts or intentions

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like okay that's stuff you're doing on the world but traits i think is tough for people a lot of the time and particularly i think for for people who have any kind of a self-help orientation which almost everyone listening to this

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podcast probably does uh because you receive so much messaging about don't be conceited don't be a narcissist and narcissism in general is like a big hot button word these days in the culture so what do you think helps people kind

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of get through that dad in terms of connecting with these positive aspects without well dealing with like the cringe of like uh am i being too am i being too conceited here am i being too pumping myself up in some kind of

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inappropriate way i've grappled with that a lot because i had a lot of inadequacy you know and and feeling small last week so i'll just name a few things that people can relate to so one is the value on just seeing the truth

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all right see your warts see your room for improvement and also see your virtuous efforts see your talents see your character virtues see where you are progressing and developing it's about seeing the truth it's not about praise or blame it's about clear

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seeing and that's a way in here second is to appreciate that it's justice much as it is unjust to inaccurately criticize others or to systematically exclude their positive qualities that would be unjust to them in terms of our social

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appraisals of others so we want to see people clearly that's just and in much the same way there's justice and seeing yourself clearly third to help yourself get through it is to realize that for you it's therapeutic you know how many of us are carrying

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around a kind a a deeply invested arrogance and superiority well way too many you know especially who come from families of privilege and uh yeah you can just think about people as the line puts it born on third base who think

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they hit a home run right yeah born with a silver spoon in their mouth and and um okay on the other hand most people err toward feelings of inadequacy self-criticism carrying a lot of shame self-doubt it's therapeutic to see

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yourself clearly and to give yourself the same kind of support that you would back your own play you would invest in yourself because it's a worthy investment much like you would want to invest in another person fourth to realize that recognizing the good in

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yourself is the path a very important path to recognizing the good in others and giving them that pro-social yeah this is a really really big one i think that like a lot of the time this becomes a little bit of a scarcity

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mindset thing actually where we view praise as a scarce resource and so if somebody else is getting praised then we're not getting praised or if we feel inadequate inside of ourselves we can project some of those inadequacies onto

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other people and certainly as i've over time just gotten into more touch with some of my positive qualities i think that i've been way more willing to see positive qualities on other people um and to do what you were talking about earlier

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with with the the um the pricing part of it and just the the recognizing uh those present yeah the present part of it and just recognizing that in other people because there's something where i'm i'm comfortable being emotionally intimate

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with myself so i'm comfortable being emotionally intimate with other people and those two things have really gone hand in hand then last one that comes to me and this is going to seem counterintuitive maybe it's to go down a path in which

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you're both increasingly loving in an unconditional way you're moving through the world with a kind of warm-hearted spacious presence as the field in which activity is occurring and you're having meetings and you're encountering people so you're you're more and more that this is doable

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you're developing in this way on the one hand while on the other hand becoming less and less uh implicated in other people's mind streams less and less bound to their reactions to you it's really interesting so you're less

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and less bound to how other people see you you know you take it into account you're interested in it as information but it doesn't um usually move you strongly one way or another shanti deva you know a tibetan teacher a

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thousand years ago or so he said yes people praised me but i know that inevitably people will criticize me and yes while people criticize me i know that inevitably some other people will praise me and it's becoming increasingly

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free of praise and blame essentially from other people so you move toward wanting to recognize the good in yourself and whatever man you know if they have a problem with that that's their problem many many people are are kind of a hot mess and uh are we

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gonna govern ourselves and regulate ourselves and play small and live in fear of of their of how they might see us and then you know we there's also the super deep level um someone quoted the roomy poem to me

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earlier today and to paraphrase it the thing about there is you know there is a space beyond right and wrong good and bad and in that garden we can meet something like that in the patreon notes you'll probably put a a really good uh

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pull the actual roomy poem yes for sure yeah that's right underneath it all underneath all these appraisals of ourselves what do you see when you look deeply inside and when people look deeply inside they see awareness they see a level of being that feels

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deeper than personality deeper than gender the deepest layer of your being is a gendered doesn't feel like that is it even forest or rick in a personality sense it feels deeper than that sure right and yeah we can get into the

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ontological status of that is it a soul nature of themselves whatever but just experientially you go down you go wow there's wakefulness there is kind of a natural benevolence very few people wake up in the morning thinking how can i hurt somebody today

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right they don't we don't yeah there's a natural movement to constructing to building to helping rather than hurting well we're sliding into a human nature conversation here dad uh which is great because i love human nature conversations but uh

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one of the things that i think can actually get in the way of people waking up to their good news you know their positive qualities connecting with that underlying good nature seeing the good about themselves their good intentions their good attributes all

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that stuff that we just talked about is just a lot of a lot of traditions in the world that are very focused on the idea that human nature is fundamentally bad and a lot of people are raised inside of

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those traditions or raised inside of structures i mean you look at earlier early 20th century psychology freud basically believed that humans were savages and that our job was to constrain our savage nature through a lot of extreme top-down regulation of

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our impulses and you can really interpret the last 50 years of psychology as a increasing movement away from that worldview and that as time has gone on people have moved more and more toward a more a more naturalistic view or more

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positivist view maybe of human nature and so but nonetheless those those systems perpetuate right there's there are people who still have those world views they're still very very uh present in the popular culture and so if you've been

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in raised in them if you've received a lot of messages early on of like people are fundamentally untrustworthy then you're probably going to develop a view of nature as being problematic and dark and therefore may might be a little

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concerned about what you find when you look inside of yourself true and i think also we tend to infer about ourselves from what we see around us yeah so if we see people around us for all kinds of reasons being selfish and

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yeah absolutely nasty we think oh i guess i'm like that myself and yet if you really observe and affect your body when you when you come down again to the roots of who you are which is this evolved

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biological process that has you know continuity hopefully for 80 or 100 years what's the nature of your body does it want to take the next breath yes does it want to move away from pain and rest and well-being yes

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as an enormously social body does it want to affiliate and attach with others yeah right is it moved toward learning it actually is or dopamine-based systems that release with novelty there's a tournament about children name they naturally have what's

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called mastery motivation they want to get good at stuff our bodies want to do these things yes our bodies are capable of holding weapons and killing and harming and and engaging in you know destructive behaviors of one kind or

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another and yeah but those are the exceptions the rule is is a basic kind of positive constructive helpful uh well-being seeking engagement in the world that comes right out of our own biology that's native to us you know when you when we start

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encountering these questions i of course got curious about this when doing prep for this episode because i can't help myself and i just did a little bit of a dive into like well what do people say about this on a research level and the the

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difficulty of course is in separating what you're speaking to dad which is like what is truly beneath it all from people's behavior out in the world because of course we know that people do horrible things all of the time and so

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how can you see that horrible behavior and think of human nature as being fundamentally positive you know these are questions that people have grappled with for thousands and thousands of years we're certainly not going to answer them on this episode of the

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podcast but anyways i'm just acknowledging that there are these two different levels here there was a very very interesting study that was done by rand green and nowark that was published in the journal nature in uh 2012 that

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found that when people were forced to make a decision quickly and intuitively they tended to be more cooperative but if they were given enough time to make a decision more deliberatively they tended to be a little bit more

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selfish some of those cooperative tendencies got ameliorated by something else who knows and that kind of suggests that we're intuitively pro-social and this isn't the only study that's find this there's a lot of research that suggests that people default to cooperation

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but the big modifier of this whole thing is something i want to ask you about that you alluded to earlier where very early in the conversation you said i think that one of the big things that there is for us to do out in the world

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these days is to see the good in other people particularly other people who look different from us because what we find over and over again in research is the power of in-group similarity and yes people are generally motivated to be cooperative giving

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supportive willing to to incur a small cost to give the group a big benefit if that group looks like them if that group is part of various in-group similarity identifiers whether it looks it means literal your racial or ethnic background or

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looks as like the political party that you're a part of or the religious group you're a part of um and we're a lot less willing to do that when people aren't part of those same in groups as we are

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and this leads me personally to a view of behavior kind of separate maybe from deep nature as being neither good nor bad but profoundly tribal and i'm not offering a unique view there that's a view that's been posited by a lot of

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people who've done a lot more research on this than i have but just taking a quick look at things like wow that's really what it looks like over and over again particularly when you start to delve into cognitive

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biases and the ways in which those are profoundly tribal all of that good stuff so that's my own view of behavior in terms of nature out in the world and i know that you've been thinking about this a lot dad so i'm wondering if

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you've got any reflections after that uh that little monologue of mine i think you're right and i think great starting point i'd love to hear it that's right and i think karl marx was right too and what i mean by that is that

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you know i think who was it we had yes it was gabor i think it was gabor uh we talked or i'm not sure if the episode's released yet that episode hasn't published yet that's actually going to go live in like september or

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something but preview for people we talked to gabor mate around his new book it was a wonderful conversation and i'm really excited for the embargo on that going up so that we can publish it yeah so a bit of a preview he um

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quoted someone and the parable basically uh you know of where there's a old fish and young fish and a bunch of young fish you know swim by the old fish and the old fish says howdy how's the water

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today and they grunt and they swim on pass and then one of them turns to another and says what's water all right and then gabor took it to another level he said what about if you have a petri dish with a culture medium

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in it in which you're trying to grow various microbes and if you take a you know healthy collection of bacteria of some kind and they do not flourish in the petri dish you ask yourself what's wrong with the

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culture what's wrong with the culture media and we are very shaped in ways we don't often realize because it's the water we swim in by the means of production as marx talked about it he can these so the

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economic systems were embedded in the cultural systems were embedded in just the presumptions of everyday life that we're embedded in that really affect us and constrain who we can be and it makes me think about almost famous one of the great movies in which

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you know the line love that movie yeah where something like this grizzled person says to the young kid uh the only real currency in this life is what we say to each other when we're not trying to be cool

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yeah or close to it yeah and so we're very affected and we're constrained in a sense of the possible if you want to oppress people um constrain their sense of the possible the possible in terms of how they are

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of of who they are and the possible in terms of how they can be with each other or what they can see in each other or what is possible even to imagine or dream and we're very affected by our culture

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so i think that's part of it including the ways in which culture and politics and circumstances often manipulated by authoritarian demagogues of various stripes throughout history you know push that tribalistic style all that said you know my rant here

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is that i just think we think too small we we accept a smallifying that's baked into these larger systems in many many ways because that's what produces docile workers and you know hungry consumers that drive the machine and it's

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revolutionary to stand up and think big to see big and to see good in a large scale and i just think that it's so important to stand up for who we all really are to stand up for who that person across

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from you sitting on the bus tired at the end of a long day who they really are yeah and part of that is to stand up for who you really are as well not as some self-congratulatory bs form of you know

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narcissism and arrogance and oh look at me my brand is sincerity like what authenticity absolutely but as an act of courage right you read fiction it's easy to have a bad ending you know like your heroes rolling along

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does a good job and then suddenly boom an asteroid kills them like that's easy that's easy to have a credible happy ending that takes a lot of courage to to really write that in a way that's credible for us so to me it's about

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courage the courage to see the good in yourself and to stand up for it no matter what they say and to see the good in other people and to stand up you know for that as well even if they give you a

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lot of denial about it you see it in them i mean i thought it was great for starters and it's uh sometimes we have these episodes where i've got like my my nice little summary outline of it and

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just by the third sentence there's a bomb has gone off in the outline it's everywhere it's on the walls you know cause you just walk in and you're like no man here's what we're doing and i got totally carried by that today and i i

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really enjoyed it personally i hope the listeners did as well um and so to be clear no complaints but it's one of those things where it's like wow this is not what i was expecting to talk about today but hey i'm here for whenever we

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can get a mark shout out on the podcast and do it in a way that feels authentic to the to the other work we're doing here uh but okay so all that said and i think that that's a great framing for

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for the value of this process of connecting with the positive aspects of the interior and you've already named some ways that people can do that for starters feeling down into their core nature something that lies beneath at all then

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we did that exercise where he walked you together like what can you really name about yourself what can you name about your positive intentions and your positive attributes and your positive efforts on the world and then you mentioned pricing can you

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prize other people can you prize yourself so these are already a lot of different techniques that you've gone through through the episode um but i'm wondering here at the end do you think that there are some other ways that

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people can take that brave step that you were sort of talking about there to seeing the good in themselves or seeing the good in other people like what do you think supports people in that you said something about 10 minutes ago just

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important and quick that was basically about intimacy that was the word jesus yeah and emotional intimacy yeah to be intimate with ourselves and to be intimate with the other person when we are intimate with ourselves and intimate with the other person clear

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seeing naturally naturally follows we start to recognize what's there and valuing of it we can engage in an appreciative inquiry into ourselves and with other people and also a lovingness it's stupid the person who's in popular culture certainly in america who's a

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loving pro-social see the good and other people kind of person is represented as a sort of chump maybe a nice jump but basically a chump that you know the people who really have got the goods people who really see

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things clearly are cynical despairing and really grumpy well to me that's the coward's way out it's easy to be despairing it's easy to be critical that's a cheap thing it's cheap to take those shots but to see the good and to

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build the good and go for the good including the big long-term good i i think of it as courage i think courage is totally the right word i think it's it's the perfect word actually um because for me

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there is a certain i'm reaching for words during this conversation for some reason and and it's because i think this stuff is hard to put into language but there there is a fear associated with this almost always for

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me and i think for other people as well where there is a fear to see our positive aspects sometimes there is a concern with reaching into the soft underbelly um because we feel the feelings there we feel the fear we feel the sadness we

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feel the the sensitivity the vulnerability and and i think that that that fear and and the pain of change that is often associated with it is just the price for entry here it's it's the price for entry to play the game and whether the game is

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the game of self-development the game of seeing the good and other people seeing the good in yourself it's the price to play um and so there is a courage associated with that where it is a brave act to see

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those positive aspects of yourself and to equally to see them in other people a lot of the time and so i think that courage is exactly the right word and it takes courage to go through that process so yeah

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developing that and understanding that the first couple of times it's gonna feel uncomfortable and weird is i think a very useful thing to come to terms with i think also people have this fear i've encountered many times that a

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person will not want to recognize some strength they have because then they feel there would be the burden of responsibility to do something about it to manifest out in the world to be recognized oh you have a musical

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talent oh wow now i need to start a band i know and the issue there is this common pattern for us that really uh gates growth and really flattens people's healing and development and the structure of it is well if x

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therefore must also be y no you can recognize a musical talent and decide to just piddle around with your guitar that's it it's okay you don't have to do y or it doesn't necessarily mean y or you're or the why

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of other people how they might treat you isn't necessarily going to happen um and that's made up in your own mind and this is a generalization that people can take away when they look at themselves uh the yes but well yes but

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why well no not necessarily just yes yeah i'm i'm not totally sure how to how to bring this how to wrap this one up but a tiny way because we i feel like we went so many different places with it

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but i really loved having this conversation i think was super useful for me uh personally including the ways in which we can connect with the courage aspect of it of what we're doing here as itself a positive aspect that you could

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come more into relationship with right and as you can tune into that part of yourself maybe it allows you to fuel the rest of this process of connecting with those underlying positive impulses there's something that's so tender in this and there's

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something tender you're you see the person sitting across from you in the bus you don't know them and you can just see they're tired their back hurts they're vulnerable and still they're not organized around hurting and harming other people they're they're

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probably maybe they have a kid at home or they have an agent they're doing the best they can yeah and to cherish that other being in this perishing world and to have that feeling of cherishing it takes courage

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to come into relationships in that way and what you and i are talking about is ways in which we can also encourage other people to be more cherishing including cherishing of us you know to ask another person will you

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cherish me that's so scary to ask for that too yeah and yet that's something we could do well i think that that's as good a place as any to close our conversation today so thanks so much for doing this uh with

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me today dad i think it was a really interesting one today we talked about how we can accept and appreciate and get in touch with the positive aspects of our nature and we started maybe a little ironically with a

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slightly negative topic which is all the stuff that gets in the way of us doing that and maybe a little predictably i'm becoming a parody of myself here i went pretty developmental with all of this we get told early on in life that we're a

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certain kind of way by parents and caregivers teachers other kids and we're just a kid and kids are very moldable so we take them very seriously and we internalize those stories as part of our self-identity there's also something

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called the anchoring bias which is our tendency to over infer from early experiences so if again as a kid we have early experiences that just due to random chance or variation bad circumstance whatever of something not going so well for us we

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tend to overlearn from them a classic example of this is somebody who struggles early on in math and just starts to think to themselves oh i'm bad at math but you're actually not bad at math at all you just had a bad math

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teacher or for you were a little younger than the other kids in your class so what you were learning wasn't perfectly developmentally appropriate or whatever else then we might have fears about being the nail that stands up to steal

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the japanese proverb narcissism is a real hot button topic these days and i think that there are probably a lot of people out there who are really hypersensitive around being perceived as conceited or egotistical i know that certainly that's something

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that i never want to be perceived as and that can actually cut people off from being able to go yeah i am authentically just good at that which is great that's a positive thing right that i'm good at this thing and

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it's not this egotistical statement it's just a fact statement it's a reality and it allows that person to lean into the things that they are authentically good at which then probably make them more successful out in the world as time goes

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on then something we've talked about a lot on the podcast we might have banished aspects of the self uh we have early experiences all the time where aspects of ourselves that might be really useful in adulthood get punished

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out of us in childhood examples of this might be that you were an outgoing kid that you were really sweet that you were emotionally sensitive or maybe you had a fiery nature that allowed you to be really energetic in pursuit of a goal and we

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could see how all of those things might be really great to have as an adult but they also might get punished sometimes as a kid either directly punished by our parents or they're just sort of generally punished by other kids and the

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slightly lord of the flies style environments that describe most elementary schools and middle schools probably and so now as an adult you might be looking back and going hey i could use a little more of that these days but when we're

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punished that creates internal systems that cause us to be discouraged from reconnecting to that material then finally we might be carrying around views about the nature of the self that are stopping us from getting in touch with our own positive qualities a really

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common view of human nature found both in many religious traditions and in a lot of philosophy is that humans are fundamentally immoral chaotic feral animals who need to strongly regulate their bad impulses with a lot of top down psychological

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control and it's really easy for us to internalize that view particularly if you were brought up in a born in sin style tradition and if that view's true then looking into the underbelly of the psyche or connecting with your internal material

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can almost inherently be pretty fraught with peril and one way to interpret my take during the early part of the episode on self-awareness that we referenced early on in this episode is that i was getting a bit too carried

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away by that perspective we then spent a little while talking about well what is human nature and what most research finds is that humans are intuitively pro-social when forced to make a choice rapidly they tend to make the more

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cooperative one but when people are given time to reflect that's when those more selfish tendencies tend to come in the big modifier inside of research is in-group similarity research consistently finds in-group preference in almost all behavior we're much more

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likely to be good to people who are like us in some way and my personal view of this whole territory is that it's much more useful to think about our nature as tribal rather than good or bad and there

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are things that we can of course do actively inside of our minds to become a little less tribal over time and to be aware of those tendencies so we don't fall into them as readily we then talked for a while practically about what we

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can do to connect to those parts of our interior that we really like the things that are authentically good about who we are a few different ways we can do this one of them is by changing our internal

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narrative how are we turning our positive aspects into problematic ones based on the stories that we're telling about ourselves and how can we change those stories a little bit so that the things that we've set up as problems

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now get positioned as positive aspects then we can have a general stance of reclaiming our interior we can have a desire to see our own fullness just as we see the fullness of other people and we cannot get bound up in a

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very narrow story about who we are which is often one that is tinged with negativity because the brain has a bias toward negativity and then maybe this is just me but my own experience is that discomfort is the price of entry for

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change and it's kind of funny to think that even connecting with our positive aspects is uncomfortable but the reality is that all change is uncomfortable for me personally my life changed enormously when i let myself go through the uncomfortable experience

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of feeling all of my emotions and accepting all of my interior that was a big process for me and it was not an enjoyable one even though it ultimately had so many positive impacts on my life as a

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whole and so we can just accept we can accept that discomfort is part of the process we can accept that looking into our experiences even if we find beautiful things there is often an emotionally fraught process and then of course we develop the

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strengths over time that allow us to go through that process and and bear that discomfort i really enjoyed having this conversation with rick it was super helpful for me personally and if you've been enjoying the podcast we'd appreciate it if you take a moment to

Speaker A

subscribe through the platform of your choice maybe leave a rating a positive review and hey you can always tell a friend about the show if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com

Speaker A

being well podcast and for just a couple dollars a month you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return things like expanded show notes transcripts and ad-free versions of the episodes until next time thanks for

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listening and i'll talk to you soon

Topics:self-awarenesspersonal growthpositive psychologyself-esteemshameself-doubtinner goodnesspsychologyclinical psychologyBeing Well podcast

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main focus of this podcast episode?

The episode focuses on recognizing and connecting with the positive parts within ourselves to foster personal growth and overcome internal barriers like shame and self-doubt.

What are common barriers to recognizing the good inside ourselves?

Strong feelings of shame, self-criticism, negativity bias, and internalized early life messages often block people from acknowledging their positive traits and inner goodness.

How can recognizing the good in oneself impact relationships with others?

Recognizing the good in oneself helps improve the ability to see and appreciate the good in others, fostering empathy and more positive social interactions.

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