Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks

for listening today, and if you've listened before, welcome back.

Since at least the time of Aristotle, very wise people have been telling us to be true

to ourselves, to line up the person we are on the outside with the person we are on

the inside, in a word, to be authentic. And when I was initially planning for this

episode, I thought, perhaps a bit naively, that we'd just parrot that. Hey, here are some

ways that you can get more in touch with yourself and become more authentic. But what is authenticity

really? What does it mean to be who we are or get in touch with ourselves or to go full

new age here for a moment, to live an alignment with our higher purpose? Do we even have some

kind of a true self that we can be authentic to? Maybe being authentic is just about living

from our values or imagining a more fully realized and aspirational version of ourselves

and trying to be more that way. But if we're doing that, whose values are we choosing?

Where are those values coming from? And as long as we're here, is there really much

of a difference between feeling authentic and just feeling good about ourselves? And

hey, is it even a good thing to be authentic in the first place? As I prepared for this

episode, I learned just how deep the rabbit hole went here. So to help me find the bottom

of it, I'm joined today by Dr. Rick Hanson, Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling

author, and he's my dad. So dad, thanks for doing this with me today. How are you doing?

I'm excited. As we go, spelunking in our cave diving. I'm going to keep my head

lamp on and hopefully leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind us so that we can find our way out

again. So during this episode, here's some things that I want to cover for people. First,

what do we mean by authenticity, including different ways to think about authenticity?

...