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 gratitude and today we're beginning our new focus on confidence

The sixth of the 12 strengths in our series to grow this key inner strength will start in this episode by grounding the topic in the evolution of the brain and the effects of secure and insecure attachment.

Then in later episodes we'll cover how to feel more secure in the core of your being and stay on an even keel of emotional balance.

We'll finish by exploring how to stand up to the inner critic and strengthen your sense of self-worth.

Joining me as always is Dr. Rick Hansen.

For me I think that secure and insecure attachment is one of the pieces of content in the book resilient and in your work generally that I've sort of

empathized with the most. So to kind of frame the whole conversation, what makes somebody more or less confident?

Yeah, I think of confidence, first in terms of healthy confidence and unhealthy confidence.

Okay. And second, confidence itself being comprised of two things.

First, realistic expectations about how capable one is to deal with certain things.

And second, the general feeling of work, self worth.

Now, unhealthy confidence would be a situation in which someone has a

unrealistically ambitious or optimistic positive attitude about how well they can do something,

like jump out of a building and fly before our home hitting the ground.

That would be problematic.

Another kind of unhealthy confidence

would be feeling that your worth is so great

that you're somehow grandiose

and you're entitled to really exploit other people that would be problematic.

But in my experience most people actually are more likely to have issues with being less

confident than they actually deserve to be, which creates lots of opportunities for the development over time, of healthy self-confidence.

Okay, so that makes sense. There's a natural spectrum of confidence, different people land on different points on that spectrum.

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