Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast, my name's Forrest Hansen.

Today we're going to continue our exploration of the strength of gratitude, which we're using here as a kind of catch-all term for various kinds of positive emotions, by focusing on feeling successful, how we can get better at identifying and internalizing the many successes

large and small that we experience each day. Joining me to talk about feeling successful is, as always,

Dr. Rick Hansen. So when we're talking about

feeling successful as a big umbrella term we're almost necessarily discussing

goals and goal direction. Yeah. Most of the time when we feel successful it's because we

completed some kind of goal, right? No matter how large or small. So if it's all right with you,

I'd like to start talking about feeling successful in the context of having and keeping goals and

having a positive relationship with those goals. To start with a question, why do we

have goals at all? Why is having a healthy relationship with our goals important for

various kinds of mental health? Relentless necessity of goals is so obvious that we

very very often ignore it.

And part of what informs my own thinking about this

is that coming up through the human potential movement,

I encountered many people who with good intentions, and

intentions are goals, emphasize the non-dual nature of reality.

It's all just one thing in which there are no meaningful distinctions

between things and in which it is problematic to make one thing better than another.

And obviously for us to have a goal, it means to make one thing better than another.

And obviously for us to have a goal, it means that it's preferred in some way.

There is some sense of valuing it.

Or to put it kind of simply, over there is better in some sense than over here.

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