Dr. Rick Hanson on How to Focus On the Good in Life | EP 559

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Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles.
And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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Before diving in to today's episode, let's take a moment to reflect on the game-changing insights from last week. On Tuesday, Max Lugavere shared his powerful journey from personal tragedy to becoming a leading voice in brain health and nutrition.
We explored actionable steps for cognitive well-being and how the choices we make today shape our brain health tomorrow. On Thursday, I sat down with Esther Dyson to discuss how technology is shaping human connection and how we can reclaim our humanity in an increasingly digital world.
Esther's perspective on systems change and fostering meaningful relationships in the digital age was truly transformative. And then in my solo episode, I explored how a sense of hope helps us feel like we matter to ourselves, to others, and to the world.
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Imagine waking up each day with a deep sense of calm, knowing that no matter what challenges come your way, you have the strength to navigate them. Imagine relationships that don't just exist, but truly thrive, where every connection feels purposeful, authentic, and rooted in mutual care.
In a world that often leaves us feeling fragmented, rushed, and unseen, these aren't just lofty ideals. They're necessities for a fulfilling life.
But how do we reclaim this sense of resilience and connection when everything around us seems designed to pull

us apart? How do we rise above the noise to build lives of purpose, presence, and belonging? Enter

Dr. Rick Hansen, a visionary in the science of resilience and happiness.
Dr. Hansen is a

psychologist, senior fellow at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, and a New York

Times bestselling author of seven books, including Making Great Relationships, Resilient, and Hardwiring Happiness. With over a million copies sold in English alone, his work has been translated into 33 languages and has helped countless people create lasting inner strength and deeper connections.
Through decades of research, contemplative practice, and helping millions worldwide, Rick has uncovered the profound interplay between our brains, our emotions, and our relationships. His work answers some of the most pressing questions of our time.
How can we train our brains to focus on joy even in the face of adversity? What practical steps can we take to transform disconnection into belonging? How do we build relationships that nurture not only others, but also ourselves? In today's conversation, Rick unpacks these questions and offers actionable insights drawn from neuroscience and ancient wisdom. Whether you're grappling with stress, seeking deeper relationships, or simply yearning for more meaning in your life, this episode will provide a roadmap to not just survive, but to truly thrive.
Together, we'll explore how to fortify your inner core, reshape your habits, and cultivate a life where resilience, connection, and joy are not just fleeting, but foundational. His work has inspired people worldwide, and today, I'm excited to bring his wisdom to the PassionStruck community.
Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin.
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Hey, PassionStruck family. I am absolutely thrilled today to bring you Dr.
Rick Hansen. Rick, welcome to the Passion Struck Podcast.
John, I'm really happy to be here. Truly, not a platitude.
I've looked forward to this. I've really enjoyed the connection with you in our few minutes before we started.
And I just think this is a great opportunity. And I feel connected already in some ways to the people who are listening as well.
Well, thank you. And one of the ways I initially discovered you was through your book on happiness.
And as I was doing research, I actually went back and listened to an episode of School of Greatness you were on a number of years ago. And I went back to that because I really liked the way that Lewis did that interview with you.
But it was really nostalgic for me because as I was thinking about doing my own podcast, yours was one of those episodes as I was studying how to conduct a podcast that I originally listened to. So it was fun to go back and hear it.
That's good. The thought arising in my mind is, I hope I didn't suck too bad.
But anyway. It was a great discussion.
And during part of it, Lewis just makes this comment that your voice was so soothing to him that he felt himself almost going in a mindful state. And That's where I was this morning at 530 on my walk.

And as I'm listening to this, I look up in the sky and all of a sudden it just brightens up.

And I could see a SpaceX launch in the distance from where I am in Tampa.

And so it was really cool listening and seeing the spaceship going up. So that's a nice enrolling.
Wow. Good for you.
Yeah. Well, I'm going to tie this in, I promise, because I know you love nature.
And one of the things I found in my research is you specifically love mountain climbing. And it's something that I haven't done that much of, but when I have done it, I've really loved it as well.
How for you have those experiences in nature and mountain climbing shaped your understanding of mindfulness and resilience? I've been on a lot of things and no one's ever asked me that. That's such a penetrating, interesting question.
So one part of it was that growing up, I was a shy, nerdy person. And I skipped a grade and I have a late birthday.
So I was very young going through school, a little late into puberty as well. And so I was routinely picked last for PE sports teams.
And my dad, even though, as I've mentioned, was a cowboy, born on a ranch in North Dakota in 1918, he was not into athletics. So I didn't, he never threw a ball with me while being still a very loving and engaged father.
And so rock climbing for me became, and that's been my particular entry into the, into wilderness, as rock climbing, technical climbing. When I started doing it right out of college, it was a way for me, I'm going to use a really funny word here, to claim my manhood.
In a sense, I just felt more badass. Like I could do this.
And I was athletic. And I actually am fairly athletic.
And so a lot of the early rock climbers, especially especially they came out of Caltech and JPL and Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there was, it appeals to a kind of a determined, slightly obsessive compulsive personality, which I'm sure I have, rock climbing, boom, boom, boom. So it really fed me emotionally.
So that was important for me. But I think also more broadly, as I've come to realize what we feel in nature, and you reported it, and neurologically, there's some interesting underlying circuitry related to this.
When you looked up at the sky this morning, and you had a sense of the vastness there early in the morning, I imagine it was quiet. And then you saw this, the SpaceX launch going up further.
Sense of awe coming through. I believe you've had Dr.
Keltner on your show. Friendly acquaintance of mine at Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley.
Wonderful being. And when we're out in nature, there's an openness.
There's an opening that occurs that itself is inherently calming. When I was a boy, pretty unhappy growing up, there were two great refuges for me.
One was science fiction, which also has that sense of vastness and vistas and exploration, and the woods around my home, the hills and the woods around my home. And lately, I've come to appreciate as well, and this goes to some deep topics related to contemplative practice and just life in general, that the openness and vastness in nature was akin to the ultimate vastness in the mysterious, underlying, unconditioned, eternal ground of all.
and there was in me a longing for that ground and i satisfied to some extent that longing through being in nature and of course in nature to finish certainly rock climbing you really need to be mindful you're not really focused absolutely do and here in florida where i live the closest thing we have to it is an indoor rock climbing center. But my parents have lived in Chantanooga on Signal Mountain or Walden's Ridge, Signal Mountain is a town on it for over 30 years.
And there's some great rock climbing there. Um, yeah, that's right.
I remember being a younger man and I love that movie.

Not sure if you remember it by Robert Redford called A River Runs Through It. It was one of Brad Pitt's first movies.
And I got to, shortly after I saw the movie, I actually got to go to, I actually got to go to Montana for the first time. And there is something, as you're about the vastness of at that point in Montana's history, just how vast it felt when you were in the rivers or looking at the mountains there and really a deep down connection as you're looking at that to one, how small we are in the big scheme of things, but also how central we are to it as well.
Yeah. Yeah.
Beautiful.

I am really glad you brought up Dacher because I really love his work on moral beauty. And I wanted to give a highlight to Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center, because I'm not sure how many of the listeners know about it, but in it, they're really exploring the science of how do you create a meaningful life? And you're looking at things at like altruism, happiness, which Dacker studies, compassion, intellectual humility, social connection, empathy.
How has being part of that center shaped your own work? Yeah. So I'm a quote unquote senior fellow there.
So it's an affiliation that I feel very honored by. And both our kids went to Berkeley, UC Berkeley.
So there's a connection, go Bears as well. I think that the science that can intersect with wisdom, including wisdom from First Nations people, indigenous wisdom, and then also certainly contemplative traditions.
When you bring those two together, it's a very powerful combination. And then when you apply it to the notion of the greater good, what is the greater good for all of us today? It's crucially important at this time in the social history of humanity, which, if you look at, has had many positive developments, certainly over the last 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, notwithstanding also some very serious challenges.
facing us, notably divisiveness that social media enables and various actors exploit

that disrupts and erodes the very notion of the common good that's necessary for a functioning, certainly democratic, civil society. So the GSC, the Greater Good Science Center, serves two really important purposes in terms of promoting individual well-being and then linking individual well-being to the societal scale factors that promote individual well-being, including the very idea of the common good.
Well, thank you very much for touching on that. I'll make sure I put a link to it as well in our show notes so listeners can tune in and understand some of the great research that's going on there.
Well, Rick, today I'm really excited about where we're going to take this interview. We'll be having a conversation about how resilience and relationships are interconnected, highlighting how our intentional choices, which is what this podcast is really about, in our inner lives explored through your book, Resilient, directly affect our ability to foster meaningful connections in our outer world, where we're going to deep dive into your book, Making Great Relationships.
So I'm going to start with Resilient. In this book, you start with recognizing strengths

like mindfulness and compassion.

How do those practices help individuals reconnect

with their true selves and overcome many of the feelings

that we're experiencing today, like isolation, loneliness,

people who are feeling helpless. Well, I'm pausing because as usual, as I'm getting to know you, you really do get at the heart of the matter, which is great.
And for me as a longtime clinical psychologist and parent, and now approaching my, I believe, 44th wedding anniversary, and I'm old enough now to have lived through a tremendous amount of social change in America and the world. I was born in 1952.
You can imagine what I've seen in my life, including in the 60s and the 70s. And it's extremely clear to me in all those ways that we need to have strengths inside.

I think a little bit about your background in the Naval Academy, which I, of course, know very little about. But still, in any domain, we need to grow strengths of different kinds.
Now, some of those strengths are skills, knowing how to do things. generally speaking so much research as well as life experience show that the most important

inner strengths to develop have to do with emotional intelligence broadly, like determination, fortitude, good-heartedness, empathy, self-regulation, insight into yourself, insight into other people, a warm heart. So we need to have these strengths.
Strengths are crucial. Resilience is what enables us to weather the worst day of our lives and achieve our goals every day of our lives.
How do you have resilience? You need to have resilience through inner strengths factors inside yourself. And again, research shows that roughly about a third of the variation in our inner strengths is baked into our DNA, for better or worse, right? I caught a lucky break in some regards, and I'm still overcoming some tendencies in other regards.
All right. The other two-thirds of who we become is up for grabs.
It's developed. It's acquired over time based on how life influences us and what we do with it.
So we have a tremendous amount of influence over who we are becoming and influence over the strengths we are growing. And therefore, we have moral responsibility for what it is that we develop inside.
So that's, for me, a really important frame here. And it's a very hopeful one.
The more that society pushes us around with these large-scale forces we just just cannot do anything about the results of an election. We get one vote.
The election happens. Large macro systems, economic issues, cultural forces, weather, plagues recently, all that.
We don't have much influence over, if at all, but we have tremendous influence gradually,

bit by bit, over who we are becoming. And for me, very much in the center of my work is not some airy-fairy, loosey-goosey, soft, new-age thing.
A hard-boiled clarity about the challenges of life and also our tendency, which we might get into, to have a negativity bias in the brain that tends to obstruct the cultivation of the strengths we need to grow.

So deliberately... tendency, which we might get into, to have a negativity bias in the brain that tends to

obstruct the cultivation of the strengths we need to grow. So deliberately focusing on inner strengths, psychological strengths, is a really important thing.
And it's very hopeful because we do have power there. So that's contextual.
And then in terms of, if I follow you right, the inner strengths, the process of developing inner strengths, and in particular, the inner strengths of mindfulness and compassion, which is where you started, brings us home to ourselves. And it's a remarkable fact, given all the arguments about what is human nature historically and religion and philosophy, things like, are we saints or sinners? Well, we're both.
And we have these two wolves in our heart, as the proverb puts it, love and hate. And so we have these two qualities.
But still, fundamentally, what are people like when they're not running for their lives, when they're not stressed out, when they're not overwhelmed with grievances or in great physical or emotional pain? What are most people actually like? Most of us, most people, because this is our biology, settle down into a quality of presence and centeredness and good-heartedness.

That's who we are in our resting state when we're not disturbed in various ways. And the resting state of a complex system defines the system, not where it goes when it's jiggled one way or another by a threat or a loss or the latest

event in the news.

Who are we when we're at rest?

And when we're at rest, we are naturally mindful and compassionate.

That's our home.

That's our true home.

That's who we really are.

And that's so good to realize.

It's a hardcore scientific fact that when people settle in, they don't become sociopathic jerks. They typically are scattered all over the place.
They become centered and caring. That's our nature for most people.
And so it's a homecoming. So I think of, long story short here, and then I'll shut up.
I think of meditation broadly and inner practices in general as a kind of homecoming in which

we have to come home to ourselves to take those moments of breath or two or three to

help experiences really sink in, to grow durable strengths hardwired into our nervous system.

We have to be present with ourselves. We have with compassion and caring toward ourselves.
We have to be on our own side to grow the good inside. That's a homecoming.
And also, as we practice, we also uncover the good news that's already true inside ourselves and inhabit it increasingly and feel at home increasingly in who we are and have confidence in it in the face of all the self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy and comparison messages from the world. That's a beautiful path.
And what you just said is really profound. So thank you for going there because my questions are not typically softballs.
They're meant to invoke taking you to places you might not have gone on other podcasts. Job well done.
Part of where I'm going with this, and I'll just give you some more context, is we need resilience now more than perhaps ever that I've seen in my lifespan. However, I am really coming to the belief that we have some forces at play.
One is what I refer to is the disease of disconnection. We are so focused outside ourselves that we're losing touch with our very selves.
And then what this is causing, I believe, which is leading to this feeling of isolation, of loneliness, these chronic things that we're seeing, is a chronic state of people around the world feeling unmattering. They're losing their significance.
And because they're so disconnected with themselves, that gap of disconnection is only growing.

And where I'm going to take this is, because I think it's a real huge issue. And it's part of where I'm really trying to step in.
Because I think so many people are hurting, and they're really stuck here and it's only getting worse.

You started your mindfulness practices in 1974-ish, if I have my research correct. I started it in the weirdest of places, I think.
I was in the military stationed in Rota, Spain, and I got assigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10, which is

a sail base in Rota that is more of a training command, but I was starting

a new echelon there for the National Security Agency. Long story short is it was the least

place I thought I was going to start getting involved in yoga and mindfulness. But it was really interesting because the SEALs really used it to gain a better sense of purpose and belonging, and as well as to have clarity over their mission and their intentions.
Yeah. So how do you see this understanding that we gain from mindfulness support our deeper sense of purpose and belonging? Well, again, pause for reflection.
and appreciating the point you're making about the value of various inner strengths in this case we wouldn't think about it but what is developed through mindfulness training what is developed through the practice of yoga that would be relevant for navy seals the tip of the spear, as I believe. And even in that environment, obviously, it's important to develop various qualities inside, including mindfulness and that sense of centeredness and being in your own body through yoga.
So purpose and mission. I'm still haunted, John, by what you said about a disease of disconnection and not mattering, right? And that's very deep.
Maybe we'll circle back to mattering in a bit here. But one way into it is to start by connecting with yourself and mattering to yourself.

A little bit on that latter point. As a therapist, it took me years to realize that many of the people come to me, their pilot light was out.
There I was, in a sense, with my hot air, gassing them up, trying to fuel them, and they would nod pleasantly and they were suffering. They were motivated, but it wouldn't matter.
It wouldn't affect them because their pilot light was out. They were not on their own side from the get-go.
They were not for themselves initially. They did not treat themselves like they mattered.
They treated other people like those other people mattered. They were loyal to other people, but they were not loyal to themselves.
So that's the first step to develop that fundamental loyalty to oneself that even if you don't feel like you matter in the larger society, even if you feel like, for example, I believe many young men, certain kinds of roles that had been available to young men like you, your father, your grandfather, and so forth, are just disappearing, certainly in the American economy. And you don't feel like you matter.
How do you matter when you don't have access to that kind of role, which would enable you to be a provider and so forth? So these are challenging times. Well, even if things, like I've been saying, outside you are out of your control, what's under your control is to matter for yourself.
And same with connection. Being connected with oneself is crucially important.
And as we connect with ourselves, that can help us manage social factors that disconnect us from others, at least to some extent. Clearly, a simple practice of mindfulness where you're becoming aware of what's going on in your own interior in a deep way brings you into connection with yourself and is an expression of mattering to yourself.
As a little point here, mindfulness, the way I traditionally define it based on how it was originally taught, is about present moment awareness, period. Sustained present moment awareness of the outer world and the inner world.
So we need to be very mindful if we're driving in traffic in the rain. And it's also helpful to be very mindful of our internal reactions.
When your wife gives you that look and you realize, I need to clean something up here. So mindfulness really helps in those ways.
As we become more mindful of our own interior, we start having more access to what really matters to us inside. What are our deep longings of the heart? What are our core values? What do we care about? What's our personal code? Regardless of what other people are doing and the lines they're crossing, what are the lines we don't cross ourselves for our own sake, even if we lose some momentary advantage? And so learning about ourselves through mindfulness, feeling down into our interior, and also giving voice to the different parts of ourselves that we become more aware of that may have been suppressed or pushed away.

The inner child and also maybe parts that have been shunned aside that they really care about something important, but we haven't been listening to them.

So mindfulness, again, lets us do that.

So in all these ways, mindfulness helps us get more in touch with what we really care about and to start recognizing the difference between the shiny objects out there we might be chasing and the manipulations and blandishments and persuasions of others that were, and intimidations and threats of others that we're reacting to. We become more able to sort that out.
Fundamentally,

I'll finish here. Mindfulness brings autonomy.
I'm a scruffy individualist. I'm a therapist,

I'm mellow, and I'm a longtime meditator. I'm very individualistic and determined.

And I think that autonomy is crucial.

Autonomy is the foundation of intimacy. We can't be connected with others if we don't feel that we're coming from a kind of an internalized secure base inside ourselves, which has a meaning in attachment theory.
You probably know it may have a military meaning as well no secure base of operations. Anyway, that's autonomy.
And without mindfulness, we lack autonomy. We're pushed around by this or that, including the internalized impact of life experiences going all the way back to early childhood that we don't even remember.
Those forces are like strings pulling us as a puppet. But with mindfulness, snip, snip, snip, we start cutting those strings and we become more and more our own person at home in charge of ourselves.
What you were just saying in some ways reminded me of some of the work by Richard Ryan and Edward Deasy on self-determination theory. Exactly.

Competence and relatedness drives so much of our intrinsic values, which we're going to be exploring here a little bit more. Rick, I want to go back to negativity bias since it's something that you brought up.
I wasn't really going to go down here, but let's tackle this because I think it's important. The brain's negativity bias often keeps us stuck as we know in patterns of fear, stress, or self-doubt, even when we know intellectually that focusing on the positive can and should transform our mindset.
So I've been working on this article between how do you bridge the gap between theory and action? So I'm going to ask it to you in this way. What do you suggest for listeners on how they can bridge the gap between understanding the concept of negativity bias? Short version, we have a brain designed by evolution over 600 million years of the evolution of the nervous system to be biased by being like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good experiences.
And that's because in the wild, our ancestors, going all the way back, needed to get carrots and avoid sticks. The difference is that if you don't get a carrot today, food or a mating opportunity, you'll have a chance tomorrow.
But if you fail to avoid that stick today, that predator, that aggression in your band or between bands, whoop, no more carrots forever. So the brain is tilted toward overlearning from painful, stressful, upsetting experiences, including in everyday life, and underlearning from beneficial experiences, including experiences of the strengths we want to grow.

They wash through the brain like water through a sieve.

Well, negative experiences of feeling criticized, disappointed, less than others, lonely, irritated, aggrieved. We live at the age of grievance.
Those, boom, get stuck immediately. That's a fact.
And we can recognize that in all kinds of ways. And there's a lot of science about this in detail.
Okay, great. Now what do we do about it? I have a little bit of a saying, three parts, deal with the bad, turn to the good, take in the good.
So for sure, we got to deal with the bad. And one reason we grow strengths through turning to the good and taking in the good is to deal with the bad.
So there's nothing in this for me that's about positive thinking. I tend to avoid the word positive just because it's so easy to misunderstand as some la-di-da, discretionary, privileged, luxury for upper-class yuppies.
No, the worse your life is, the more important it is to take in the good that's real, including the good that's already present inside you. Your own good heart, your own good intentions, your own good qualities, registering them and growing them.
Okay. So we got to deal with the bad, That's for sure.
That said, first be careful about ruminating on the negative, doing laps around the negativity track in your brain, the resentment track, the grievance track, the self-criticism track, the anxiety track that's looping. If there's no more, think about it.
There's a saying from Sokny Rinpoche, as a Tibetan teacher.

He says, yeah, think the same.

I have him coming on the show in April.

So thank you for bringing him up.

Oh, what a history.

Oh, there's so many levels there.

Anyway, one of the things he has said is,

yeah, I think the same thing over and over 10 times.

10 is enough, right?

Anyway, pull out a rumination.

And one of the best ways to pull out a rumination is to go to the big picture. And also another way at the same time, you can do either or both, is to tune into the internal sensations in your body, interoception, breathing, the sense of your chest expanding or contracting, because both of those neurologically, big picture, and also interoception, act like a circuit breaker that reduces activity in the default mode network of the brain, which is the primary location of the ruminator when we go, when we're ruminating about things, which reinforces them.
So pull out a rumination as fast as you can. Think about it to the extent you need to deal with the bad, right? But past the point that's useful, pull out.
And that takes autonomy. And that takes what you said from the very beginning, how our internal choices affect our outer actions, including our relationships.
So that's a big headline for me. When I learned about this brain stuff, I became much more alert to just marinating in crud.
My case, my righteous case about other people, my criticisms of myself and so forth. That's huge.
Second, when you're experiencing something useful, don't waste it on your brain. Think about all the money you leave on the table every day by first hardly noticing the good facts around you, like you did early this morning.
How cool. The sky, the early light, the spaceship going up there.
Wow, how neat. Notice them.
So if people say a nice thing about you or you get something done, don't just blaze past it, hardly noticing it. Try to recognize the good fact.
And then second, when it's a good fact, it's an authentic, legitimate, good fact, usually a little one. I call them ordinary jewels, but it's real.
Let yourself feel it. That's the other thing.
So many people, frankly, especially men, not as a generalization, they know that they recognize a good fact. You're not deluded or psychotic, but they don't feel it.
They don't slow down for the two, three seconds it takes to shift from the idea to the experience in the body of whatever, a sense of relief, a sense of satisfaction, feeling of connection, that moment of awe and ease, spaciousness you had this morning.

They don't feel it.

So don't feel it.

Don't waste it, right?

You earned it or it was God's gift to you or the universe's gift to you.

It would be churlish not to receive the gift, right?

Feel it.

And then once you're starting to feel it, help your brain, which has this bias.

That poor little brain needs your help.

Thank you. the gift, right? Feel it.
And then once you're starting to feel it, help your brain, which has this bias. That poor little brain needs your help.
Slow down. I've written a lot about this.
People can look at my published paper on learning to learn from positive experiences, learning to learn from positive experiences. And I go through the neurology of this and eight different factors.
But for me, the big three, anyone is good, the more the better. Slow down for a few seconds or more to stay with the experience.
Keep the neurons firing together so they have time to wire together. Second, feel it in your body as much as you can.
Open to it in your body. The more embodied an experience is, the more it tends to register in the neural nets of memory.
And third, appreciate what's meaningful or enjoyable about it.

And that quality, the reward value of the experience that you can heighten through this third method,

third technique, increases its registration and consolidation in neural memory.

Deal with the bad, turn to the good that is also true, and then take in the good to grow the good that lasts inside. Those are fundamental ways.
Pull out of negative rumination and take in the good along the way. Thank you for sharing that.
That practice of taking in the good is such a profound way to rewire the brain, especially in moments when negativity feels overwhelming. And when I've gotten this same question sent to me, like, how do you advise people get over this bias? People often build a bucket list.
And one of the things I tell people to do instead is to have a reverse bucket list and to post it on a wall by them. And what I mean by reverse bucket list is write down all the accomplishments that you've made in your life that when you look back, you would have felt it would have been almost impossible for you to do them or just a pipe dream.
And refer back to that when you feel these biases, this negativity coming into you, because that is a great way of visually taking in the good and giving yourself a reminder of how much you've already accomplished. That's great, John.
And I want to underline the finding from research and personal experience that most of us come into adulthood with what could be called wounds and lacks. Wounds being ways we've been injured by life, even just without trauma or abuse, just ordinary hassles, disappointments, people making fun of us in fifth grade, an unfortunate loss early in our career.
We come into it with wounds and also lacks the absence of the good. right and so for people who often including me i'm talking about my own learnings along the way

who you who deep down inside feel maybe a little bad about themselves. Deep down inside, there's an ache in their heart.
Deep down inside, maybe there's a moral injury. They feel remorse or grief or shame about certain things.

It's just unresolved.

It just sits there.

Well, that material truly can be healed, truly can be healed.

The bigger it is, the bigger the job, the more we have to do.

But it truly can be healed.

And the fundamental process of healing it is to grow the good around it. It's a two-part fundamental strategy.
I'm bringing you in to clinical thinking. This is how it works strategically.
Number one, growing the good around it that would compensate for and balance and, yeah, what was wounded. Like for me, I grew up, I felt

very inadequate by the time I went off to college and just like the runt of the litter, as my dad would talk about from his ranch background and like a huge hole in my heart. And whatever that might be, I know people who feel deeply guilty about certain things.
Maybe they allowed their cat to go outside and it was taken by some predator and they just feel terrible about that, whatever it might be. Okay.
So one of the most powerful ways to do that, to deal with this is you grow the good around it that is matched to whatever the issue is. Like in my case was growing the sense that people actually wanted me and noticed me and wanted to include me and saw me.
Second, you know this from my material about the heal process. It's this fundamental framework for deliberate healing and growing.
The fourth step, L, is to link in which we associate in our minds the positive with the negative. We feel the relevant positive experience, the beneficial experience, such as being valued or cared about or that we accomplish things or our life has meaning or gratitude, let's say, while also feeling the related negative material.
And by feeling both of those together, for example, your bucket list, feeling the reverse bucket list alongside that sense of emptiness or frustration or disappointment in your life, or even excessive drivenness in your life, you got to achieve, there's all this sense of pressure. If you feel them both at the same time, neurologically, they start associating with each other.
And if you keep the positive experience bigger in your awareness for 5, 10, 20, 30 seconds in a row, while also feeling the negative material, the positive will associate with the negative and gradually ease it, soothe it, bring context to it, and even eventually completely uproot it.

It no longer burdens you.

Okay, I hope I didn't go into too much detail there.

That's how you can do it for yourself.

That's how I do it for myself.

That's what therapists are doing with people fundamentally or other kinds of settings.

These two fundamental processes.

We grow flowers in the garden of our minds, and then we use those flowers to uproot the weeds in the garden of the mind. I really like that you brought it up because I don't like to just give the listeners theory.
I like to give them practical application, which is what you just went into. Yeah.
So I want to read something from your book because I've brought up helplessness a couple of times you had a beautiful thing that you wrote agency is the opposite of helplessness you go into research by marty seligman and others has shown us that we're very susceptible to acquiring learned helplessness through experience of powerlessness and mobilization and defeat then you go into, it typically takes many experiences of agency to compensate for a single experience of helplessness, which again, goes into this negativity bias that we've been talking about. To prevent helplessness, you write, the first thing to do is to gradually unlearn it.
And you really go into this power of choice, which I talk about. Look for experiences in which you are making a choice or influencing an outcome.
And I often say our choices, don't look at the big choices we make, look at the micro choices because they either lead you to a valley of despair or a waterfall of fulfillment. Yeah.
What are some of the choices that people may be making that they should be considering looking at it from a different approach? Meaning, I think we get so caught up in either or thinking. And one of the things I really talk about is some of the work of Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis and both and thinking, which is really an Eastern world concept.
But I don't know if you want to go there or maybe just talk about choices, but I really enjoyed this portion of the book. I appreciate that.
And you are right out again, the heart of it, because without that sense of agency, autonomy, including and mattering, right, they all go together. Like, if you don't matter at all, why should you take action? and what happens and i think this is relevant in terms of the early research from seligman and

others on dogs if it's a very short distance from there's nothing I can do to I don't matter. Very short distance.
And I think that's relevant again in our societies, that when people feel they don't have influence over their lives, including being able to find work that's meaningful and would enable them to buy a house these days, let's say, then they start to feel like, well, I guess I don't matter. And then they're very vulnerable to the appeal of various, you know, ideologies and other ideologies.
Yeah, that appeal to their sense of grievance. So what do we do about that? I think it's very helpful to also appreciate that for many people, they were punished for agency in their family.
They were punished for having the agency to have a different opinion than the people around them or for speaking up or standing out. So one of the useful things to address is what's the fear inside of taking agency, particularly in areas where you feel hemmed in.
People live inside the bars of an invisible cage, and they're used to it. They don't like it, but they're used to it.
And fears understandably come up and inhibitions that block the fullness of living ourselves including expressing our true self fully when we start getting close to those bars of the invisible cage that were installed through painful experiences in our history or observing painful experiences that others were having if they started pushing out or that we imagined we would have. So paying attention to the bars of your invisible cage and what I call dreaded experiences, risks of dreaded experiences.
So if you're mindful, circling back to our mindfulness fundamental theme here, through greater self-awareness that mindfulness can bring you, you can start to recognize where are those bars. And then with the sense that you matter and a really underestimated psychological strength of moxie or chutzpah, my seenness is really useful.
I'd rather have a client who's pissed off than a client who's depressed, not for my sake, but for their sake, because at least if you're pissed off, there's some juice you can work with. In any case, as you recognize those various bars of your invisible cage, you can then do deliberate, small, one-step-at-a-time experiments in which you risk

the dreaded experience, let's say, of speaking up or being different or declaring your deep purposes, as you brought up earlier, as expressions of agency, and then notice what happens. and if, as it usually does, goes well

when you take a one-step experiment

risking a dreaded experience by going one step past the bars of your invisible cage, when it goes well, that's a super high value experience to take in. That's gold.
You really want to notice that. You really let it land so that mer one step, the bars go out.
And in that way, gradually, you expand the range of your life in which you feel free and autonomous inside and at cause rather than sell out effect. That's a good way to experience more sense of agency over time.
Well, thank you for sharing that. And I feel like I could talk to you for four hours because we're barely doing justice to your book.
And I think it's a good thing because your books are really so deep. And I think that's why they've been popular with so many millions of people.
And I highly encourage the audience to go out there and pick up a copy of Resilience.

So I want to move on now to Outer Connection.

So once we've developed resilience and inner strength, how do these qualities influence

our ability to create meaningful relationships?

We're naturally relational.

Arguably, Homo sapiens is the most social species on the planet. And certainly in terms of layers of behavior and also inner experience.
Ants are social, but it's a pretty mechanistic kind of sociality. So we're very social.
We're naturally social. On the other hand, life happens and we internalize various bars for our invisible cage on the one hand.
And on the other hand, to navigate significant relationships at work and in love, raising a family, it's very useful to have a whole bunch of inner strengths of different kinds, empathy, being able to tune into others, being able to regulate ourselves so that we can stay open and connected, even if it starts to feel vulnerable and scary. So for both of those reasons, both to deal with the wounds and the lacks, the learning, emotional learning from our childhood that has left us with living inside a suit of armor that's maybe three sizes too small to deal with that, and also to just manage various kinds of relationship issues with other people who themselves had a childhood and a life and are dealing with all kinds of pressures in their life today.
To deal with that, it's just so useful to have all kinds of inner capabilities and including skills for how to manage certain kinds of interactions. You think about people who are really good at anything, but you want to study them, right? I admit it.
Lately, I've just been so fascinated by watching these short, these interviews on YouTube with people from very high level special forces, SEALs, Delta, and others. And just, oh, they do it at that level of excellence.
It's a clear kind of excellence. I'm also weirdly fascinated with Magnus Carlsen chess videos and Alex Honnold rock climbing videos, and probably some other things as well about quantum physics, where you have people who are excellent at something.
Well, we reverse engineer that. We study.
Huh, how do they do it? What are they doing that enables them to be so skillful in different kinds of interactions and relationships? And how can I develop more of those strengths, more of those skills, more of those attitudes, more of those ways of being myself? So in that sense, clearly the process of inner development has all kinds of benefits in our outer relationships. I would flip it around.
Kids are 36 and 34. And if you ask them, so Forrest, who's my partner, he co-authored Resilient with me and he co-hosts the Being Well podcast and our daughter, Laurel.
We're all close, but we're direct with each other. If you ask them on your show, so what skills, what inner strengths do you wish your dad had more of when you were 14? They would have a little list.
I would agree with what's on the list today. So yeah, these are good things to develop inside.
Yeah. And also one last thing, the more that you take responsibility on a moral standpoint and exercise autonomy and so forth for your side of the street, I call that the unilateral virtue, whatever they do on their side of the street, we need to work on our side of the street, too, for all kinds of reasons, including the ways it puts us in a better position to ask them to, could you like pick up the garbage on your side of the street? Cause I'm picking up the garbage on my side of the street and haven't been for a while now.
When we work on developing inner strengths inside ourselves, we become more aware of the process of growth. And we understand more that we can be at cause in the black box of our own being our own mind.
Well, that then gives us more sense of clarity about, and frankly, a moral standing in asking other people as appropriate that we supervise or that we're parent or that we're made it to ask them to maybe develop something more inside themselves too, much as we've been developing things inside ourselves. There's a Buddhist term called karuna or compassion, and it teaches us to act with

empathy. How do you believe that cultivating compassion in our relationships reflects the idea that everyone inherently matters? I'm just laughing again, John.
People can see my face if they're watching the video. You're just at it.
Well, of course, Buddhism has no monopoly on compassion. And I have friends who are scholars, actually, of contemplative practice.
And one of them pointed out to me that in the Quran, the word compassion, in translation from the original Arabic appears much more often in the Quran than it does throughout the Old and New Testament in the Judeo-Christian Bible. I'm not saying this at all critically, I'm just pointing out that there's a universal appreciation of compassion.
Now that I said that, I'm trying to recall the exact question.

How is compassion natural or how is the value of it? Oh, how do we develop? How does cultivating compassion in our relationships reflect the idea that everyone inherently matters? Yeah. Because you were talking really, really strongly about the need to matter to ourselves yeah i believe that we need to matter to others but then we also to make need to make others feel like they matter and to me those are the three concentric circles of mattering mattering to mattering to our others, and making others feel like they matter.
I love, honestly, your framing of this. And it's really central to my own experience.
Because when I grew up, I did not feel I mattered. Part of that was my own constructing as a shy kid who just chose to stay inside the bars of my own invisible cage.
I was a kid, but still, I made those choices. And one of the things that's been extremely important to me personally is to look for people with whom I can feel like I am a thou to their I.
If you're familiar with Martin Buber's framework of I-thou relationships or I-it relationships or it relationships. And we all have had the experience of being an it to somebody's I.
They're selling us or intimidating us, manipulating us. They're using us as a means to their ends.
Compared to feeling like a thou to someone's I, I feel like a thou to your eye, that you're with me, you're present, you have a job to do here, we haven't known each other before this, we're getting to know each other here. It's not more than what it is, but it's not less than what it is.
It's a genuine I-thou relationship. And I actually have a little piece I wrote a while ago called Thou All Others.

It's an orientation.

It's an aspiration, an asymptote. We don't always reach it, but we approach it increasingly where we treat all others as a thou to our eye, even if we need to oppose them or protect ourselves from them.
We don't lose sight that there's a being behind those eyes who wants to live,

doesn't want to suffer, loves their children, enjoys chocolate, and there's someone over there.

And so both of those are true. So I love how you're approaching it.
And you said it in a

beautiful summary way. And indeed, compassion sounds like a fancy word.
What it's about,

essentially, is the combination of empathy and benevolence in response to suffering. Kindness does not presuppose suffering.
Compassion presupposes suffering. It's a response to suffering in ourselves or in others.
And clearly, if we don't give a damn about their suffering, that kind of is foundational for they don't matter, right? Look the other way. If we're with people who really clearly, they just don't give a darn about our suffering.
We don't really matter to them, certainly as our innermost self. Maybe we matter to them as a tool they can use for their purposes, but it's not like our innermost being matters to them.
So compassion is really foundational. That's partly why you may know I founded the Global Compassion Coalition a couple of years ago.
And I think that much as you've said, there's a, as you say, disease of disconnection, but there's a loss of mattering. Part of it has to do with the ways that in our hunter-gatherer bands, in which we live with just 40 people our whole lives, more or less, for most of our time as homo sapiens, 300,000 years as homo sapiens, and then another 2 million years before that as tool manufacturing, hunter-gatherers,ids.
During that time, in the band, you knew you mattered because everybody mattered in the band. There was common welfare.
You needed to function as a team. People brought food in.
They shared it. You were related to each other.
You had to fight to deal with those marauding other bands who wanted to

kill the men and take the women, frankly, and all the rest of that and take your food and move into your area. And you had to really matter.
You knew that. But now, since agriculture last 10,000 years, it's been much more like Game of Thrones, in which that sense of mattering has just been blown up.
And to me, the central challenge of this time, an opportunity, is to reestablish the sense of mattering, just like you're saying, grounded in connection, like you're saying, at the scale of the whole 8 billion strong human tribe. How do we do that? That we have our our work cut out well i'm trying to do my small part because my tagline is just as disney their goal is to create the happiest place on earth i'm trying to create the most intentional a place on earth because I think the more intentional we are globally about the choices

that were. to create the most intentional place on earth because i think the more intentional we are yeah globally about the choices that we're making to and how we're showing up not only for ourselves but how we're showing up more fully enough authentic authentically in our relationships is going to influence how the whole world is changing

and kind of closing this inner and outer growth that we've been exploring on this whole podcast.

If I could underline, I think the power of compassion is a way to expand the circle of us,

the circle of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect enabled us to be morally lazy what i mean by that is

you of caring. I think that in evolutionary terms, the fact that we lived in small bands, in effect,

enabled us to be morally lazy. What I mean by that is because it was so natural and easy to care about our kin and our partners and the people we lived with and were in our faces every day.
And if we didn't care about them, if they did not matter to us, they would throw us out of the band, right? We didn't have to learn, obviously, to care about 330 other million Americans, let's say, or 8 billion other humans on the planet. So compassion is a very powerful way to reestablish that circle of caring at wider and larger scale.
So compassion is really central to that. And as part of it, if you're with someone and they're basically saying, essentially, I'm not going to have compassion for you.
I'm not interested in it. I'm not going to go there.
Your suffering is irrelevant to me. And in fact, I might be deliberately creating suffering for you for my own purposes.
Obviously, that tells you, you don't matter to that person. If they're not prepared to have compassion for you, you don't matter.
Flip the other way. If people can sense in you that your heart is closed, they know they don't matter to you.
Compass compassion is absolutely central. Well, just think about it from a different context.
Imagine your role in a company is in sales and you might be saying, what the heck does mattering have to do with sales? Well, isn't the key to selling something to someone else, making them feel that they inherently matter? Yeah. And their needs matter.
And you have a solution for their problem. Correct.
So there you go. Oh, I agree with all that.
And to be clear, my own background, I have a business background and I have a business. So for me, I'm very realistic about this.
It's also, though, really important to avoid, there's a term in Buddhism, near enemy. It's the idea that there are these ways of being that are close to something valuable, but not really it.
And because they're close to it, people sometimes just go into those things as a way to avoid what they really could do. For example, let's see here, compassion.
A near enemy of compassion would be something like superior pity. It's like compassion, but it's not really it.
And another one, equanimity, a fundamental core of emotional stability. A near enemy would be something like indifference or apathy.
And I think it's important because to watch out for people who act like they care about you. I grew up in LA around movie business and stuff, entertainment world.
And if you have a hundred best friends, you don't have any real friends. The phoniness of pseudo caring.
I've been around people in the consciousness world, the new age psychology world, who they phone in their pseudo compassion, but they're not prepared to let you land in their heart and to let you matter to them really. So I think it's some, yeah, I'll just say all that.
Okay, good. I'm going to have to look more into that.
Maybe I'll even do an episode on it so I can do the research to understand it better. Like faux compassion, pseudo friendliness, pseudo caring.
Yeah. Don't like that.
Well, Rick, I'm going to wrap it up. Your work is such a gift to those seeking transformation.
And it's been so profound for so many. We've touched on just the tip of the iceberg today.
But if there's one takeaway you hope listeners gain from today's conversation, what would it be? Well, like you said, I could talk with you for another four hours.

You, John, and I could learn more from you. I'm so sorry.
I'm going to take two. So first,

you, my first takeaway that I would hope people would really get is to appreciate their own innate goodness. You are inherently already innately enough

Thank you. really get is to appreciate their own innate goodness.
You are inherently already innately enough.

Okay.

Worthy.

Capable.

Your inherent nature,

particularly deep down is inherently wakeful,

loving and wise.

And that's who you are at peace deep down inside yourself.

Thank you. is inherently wakeful, loving, and wise.
And that's who you are, at peace, deep down inside yourself. And people can see that.
They sometimes need to slow down and quiet down so that underlying truth can be evident. You know, the metaphor that if we're like a pond and it's often turbulent, full of sediment, but if we let the sediment settle, the water clears and we can see the beautiful bright jewels that have always been there all along, deep down.
So that's the first takeaway. And people can look inside and see it.
And they can give others the blessing of recognizing that in them. and then, alongside that inherent goodness is the truth that we're all works in progress.
And there are things to develop. There are things to clear out.
There are things to heal. That's true.
Both are true. Inherent, innate goodness and developmental opportunities of various kinds.
And in terms of that part, the two-thirds of who we are becoming that I alluded to in the very beginning here, we have profound influence in the innermost temporal sanctuary of our being to influence who we are becoming based on what we do in the moment with the experiences we're having. And we can let them be wasted on our brain.
We can over-focus on painful, stressful, hurtful, harmful, negative experiences, or we can choose to exercise our agency in a framework in which we matter at least to ourselves to direct our attention, to pull it away from obsessive rumination of various kinds that doesn't go anywhere, and instead rest our attention on what is valuable, what is beneficial, what is wholesome, what is beautiful, what is wise, that we wish to develop and cultivate inside ourselves. We have that power.
And no one can take it from us, but no one can do it for us. The deliberate internalization of beneficial experiences so that we can help ourselves with who we are becoming.
And so we have a responsibility to use our power, that power for our own sake. And as we grow more of the good inside ourselves, there will be more and more, our cup will runneth over increasingly as we have more and more to offer to others.
Those are the two takeaways I would hope people would get. Well, I love ending there.
And Burke, there are lots of places where people can buy your books. I'll put a bunch of them in the show notes.
What are some other things that you would like to highlight? You've got a great podcast, over 15 million downloads yourself on the podcast. What are some other things? Well, maybe the best thing is where's the best place for people to go if they want to learn more about you and everything that you're doing? That's a kind question.
Thank you. Very simply, my website, probably a great place, or just Google my name, Rick Hansen, S-O-N, and you'll find on our website tons of really well-curated, short audios, talks, videos, articles, so much there is freely offered.
A little bit of what we offer are online mental health programs on different topics. We're, I think, doing one currently on grief and loss.
We're talking now in the very early December. I don't know when this interview will post.
Point being there too, these are very excellent programs. And if there's any question of financial need, we offer them for free.
And that, for me, is really part of our fundamental purpose here, to be able to offer these kind of skillful means to people around the world, essentially.

And they're in multiple languages, too.

So people can just go rickhanson.com or just Google my name, and that'll be a portal in all kinds of good stuff.

And the last thing I'll say is if anyone in the audience ever has an opportunity to see Rick do a keynote speech, they're phenomenal. And he shares the stage with people like Sharon Salzberg and Deepak Chopra and others, and they're really meaningful.
So I would also encourage you if you get the opportunity to go see him speak live. Well, Rick, thank you so much for being on the show.
It was such an honor to have you. Mutual, John.
Real respect. Thank you.
What an incredible conversation that was with Dr. Rick Hansen.
From his groundbreaking insights on resilience and mindfulness to his practical strategies for rewiring your brain for happiness, today's discussion has been an absolute masterclass in creating a more intentional, connected, and fulfilling life. Dr.
Hansen's wisdom on building an unshakable inner core and fostering meaningful relationships reminds us that transformation starts with small, purposeful actions. Whether it's practicing gratitude, setting healthy boundaries, or reframing challenges as opportunities for growth, his tools provide a powerful roadmap to strengthen your mindset, deepen your connections, and bring more joy into your life.
As we close, I encourage you to reflect on the insights shared today and consider how you can apply them in your own journey. Remember, change begins with intention, and every small step you take can lead to profound shifts in your life.
If this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. Your feedback not only helps us reach more listeners, but also keeps the PassionStruck movement growing.
And don't forget to share this episode with someone who could benefit because sparking change in others is how we amplify impact together. You can find links to Dr.
Hansen's transformative books like Resilient, Making Great Relationships, and Hardwiring Happiness, along with all the resources discussed in today's episode in the show notes at passionstruck.com. And if you'd like to watch this conversation, the video version is available on my YouTube channel.
Before we go, I want to remind you that I'm dedicated. Thank you.
or organization, visit johnrmiles.com slash speaking to learn more. Let's ignite transformation together.
Now here's a sneak peek at what's coming up next on PassionStruck. I'm joined by the brilliant Adam Galinsky, a world-renowned expert on leadership, decision-making, and creativity.
We'll be diving in to how to expand your influence, make bolder decisions, and tap into your full potential. You won't want to miss it.
Leaders are made because there is a universal set of characteristics that make someone inspiring. We can study those, learn those, practice those, and develop those skills.
It also means that it's our current behavior that inspires or infuriates. So that means that you could be inspiring today, but you could slide towards the inferior end of the continuum tomorrow.

But it also means no matter how bad you are today, tomorrow you can be a little bit better.

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