Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast my name is Forrest Hanson.

In our last episode we completed our focus on the strength of mindfulness with a conversation about the difference between responding and reacting.

Today we're going to begin a new series of episodes focused on the strength of learning.

Particularly, we're going to look at the practical how that

underpins any of the personal growth work that we do. How can we get more of the

useful strengths that we discuss like mindfulness, courage and compassion into our often uncooperative brains.

And to help us through this, I'm joined as you can hear by Dr. Rick Hansen, Dad, how are you doing

today?

I'm good and I'll try to get my brain to cooperate.

So to frame this conversation, why learning as a strength?

I don't think that in general learning is something that people intuitively think about

as being an inner strength that It's more this kind of

ephemeral process that just sort of happens.

Yeah, I want to answer this question in a certain kind of way, thinking about my own childhood.

And when I look back on my childhood

there were two or three things that were really important for me there were

refuges one was being out in the orange groves and the hills around my home,

out of nature, by myself typically. And the other great refuge for me, honestly, was science fiction. I started reading when I was young and I began devouring that stuff by the time I was probably eight years old and it was a very powerful influence for me and because in the world of science fiction

the main characters typically were able to solve problems and as they solved those problems they learned things and

developed along the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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