Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast, My name's Forrest Hanson.

In our last episode, we completed our focus on the strength of learning, and today we're going to

begin a new series of episodes focused on grit.

The fourth of the 12 strengths we'll be exploring throughout this series.

Today we're particularly going to focus on agency, an aspect of grit where we feel like a cause rather than in fact.

Joining me as always is Dr. Rick Hansen.

So to start us off, what did you mean by grit?

It's that indestructible core that's the left after everything else has been worn away. And in a person, it's this core that

endures no matter how hard the world or your body sensations or your own history wears on you.

And if you think of it, grit is absolutely central to any kind of sustained resilience.

Could you give an example of grit?

Like a time when you exercised grit or when you saw somebody else be gritty?

I know that dramatic examples come to mind immediately,

like times I've been in the wilderness and I just had to survive or endure or I was with other people who were

Shivering and wet it was raining. It was horrible. It was dark. We were scrambling through trees but more than that I'm thinking of honestly

being around my dad toward the last six or so months of his life in hospital settings and watching the

orderly's and the janitors and the nurses and all the people who clean the

sheets and just how you can look at their faces, they were tired, long days they had to keep standing,

and yet they tapped into something inside themselves and they kept on going.

So that's actually more how I think about Gred, that every day steadfastness and durability

that's easy to underestimate, frankly, especially if it shows up in the ways that it does for women, perhaps in less glamorous

chest-stumping kind of ways, and yet it really counts.

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