Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. The other day I was getting my hair cut by Lisa, I talked about her in earlier podcast. She didn't go to university right after high school, so now in her 30s, she decided to go back.

Well, when I saw her, I could tell that she was upset.

One of the courses that she had to take in order to go forward and stay in her program was statistics.

She felt that she was never very good at math and though she'd already work with five tutors

with this class, she failed her midterm exam. We talked for a while and I told her that learning math is

really based upon two things. It does seem true for some people, math comes a lot easier.

And for me, I really love math.

But the two things that she needed in order to succeed in her class were, one, first find a teacher

slash tutor that she really likes that is good and helps her learn math.

And then the second thing is, you have to really, really work at it when math doesn't come naturally to you.

And what I believe is if you do these two things, you can really accomplish math or any subject for that matter.

I had another friend who gave me a beautiful drawing for my birthday once,

and she told me that she was a terrible drawer. She wasn't very good at it, but she took a class at university and she had an excellent teacher and she

worked at it and she became quite a proficient drawer.

I was very impressed.

For myself, though I tend to be quite good at math and the sciences, what I wasn't proficient

at was languages. So at university, though I took quite a few languages, I had to work harder at it and in each situation I was able to get very good grades because I really worked hard at it.

That is the key. We can learn anything, any skill as long as we have a good teacher and we work at it.

I really deeply believe that.

So I've been teaching how to make our lives better for over 30 years now. And of course over the years I've met people that they feel they really just can't be happy.

It's too hard for them. It evades them. It's just something that they feel they aren't capable of doing.

And I actually think it gets reinforced through the medical community. I think there's a lot of information

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