Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast, I'm Forrest Hanson. Today we're continuing our focus on developing resources related to the strength of grit with determination. The steadfast fortitude we draw on to endure, cope with, and survive the challenging things that happened to us.

To help us become ever more determined, I'm joined today by Dr. Rick Hansen.

Dad, how you doing?

Excellent, I'm determined to be here. So I think that most everyone listening to this podcast has a pretty good general sense of what determination is.

But is there a particular way that you're defining determination inside of the strength of grit?

Yeah, I'm thinking in terms of what helps us be resilient.

In other words, what helps us cope with really hard things as well as keep on going every day.

And if a person is not zeroed in on a goal and able to keep pushing toward that goal, especially in the face of delay and discomfort,

it's really hard to be gritty.

And what's really need to appreciate is that we can become more determined as a person over time.

Which doesn't mean that we were becoming more driven or more attached to the outcome. In fact we can become more determined, let's say, to become

more gentle, to become more laid back, to become more accepting, more at peace, whatever it might be.

So determination in many ways is one of those, I think, easy to dismiss because it sounds

like a Hallmark card kind of thing.

But fundamental factors of resilience and well-being. So it's

a really important factor and it's something that you can grow inside yourself.

Yeah, as you were saying, determination sounds so big that it can kind of be

brushed off a little bit, I think, because it's such a general word and you could be determined

towards so many different things. For me, I talk to people I often kind of draw a

distinction between being motivated versus being disciplined and those are both kind of aspects of

determination so in terms of determination as you're defining it here of

kind of a aspects of determination as you're defining it here. What's it kind of made up of?

...