Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast I'm Forrest Anson. In our last

episode we completed our focus on the strength of grit, and today we're beginning a new focus on gratitude, the fifth of the 12 strengths we'll be exploring throughout this series.

We tend to spend our lives seeking to feel good in the future, but this is often stressful and

tiring in the present. With gratitude, you feel good already. Today we're going to

particularly focus on the role of positive emotions in general and their value for mental health.

We're then going to spend some time talking about thankfulness, a core component of gratitude

where we're able to authentically appreciate the good things we've been given in life.

Joining me today as always is Dr. Rick Hansen.

So in the book Resilient and in your online program the Foundations of Well Being that the book is based on, you use the word

gratitude as a kind of catch-all for positive emotions in general.

And why did you choose that word?

Well, first I'm kind of reminded of the saying,

never let what you're teaching get in the way

of what you're teaching.

And what I kind of mean by that

is a sort of behind the curtain acknowledgement

for those who are listening that we're using these

words often as big and fairly flexible umbrella terms for a lot of what's inside

them. I like the term gratitude as a general heading for

positive emotions because it's such a fundamental positive emotion itself and

implicit in the notion of gratitude is the sense of receiving something

good, getting something good, which is in many ways at the heart of so many positive emotions.

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