Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast. Today we're continuing our focus on the strength of grit by exploring a particularly tricky aspect of determination, fierceness. When we're exercising determination, it can tap into something ancient and wild inside each one of us.

Using that source of strength effectively and with sound judgment, rather than being used by it, can be a challenge.

To help us walk that fine line, I'm joined today by Dr Rick Hansen.

So to help frame the conversation,

what did you mean by the word fierce or by the concept of this fierce feral energy

in general?

It's a really tricky topic, so I'm glad we're going to walk through it carefully here.

And maybe I'll start with what for me is a kind of origin story about it.

And I talk about this in the book, resilient as well. It's that I was about

19 and as background I was raised to be a really buttoned down rational good boy and looking over my shoulder

to avoid any kind of criticism from any quarter for doing anything wrong ever.

Now, fast forward, I'm 19, it's in the spring, and I'm helping lead a group of school-age

children through the Upper Yosemite Valley area, the Upper Yosemite National

Park.

And as it happened, we stopped for lunch in a huge jumbled pile of boulders kind of near a river and then after

lunch we continued down the trail a mile or two down the trail one of the kids

realized raro he forgot his jacket So I said I would go get it and then

rejoin the party later that night when they made their way to their campsite. I dropped my pack,

went back for the jacket, I think I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, that's it, no water, no compass, no nothing,

went back to the jumbled pile of boulders where we had lunch, searched around,

finally found the jacket, and then I could not find the trail.

I could not find my way back to the trail.

...