Hello and welcome to the Being Well Podcast, I'm Forrest Hanson. In our last episode we talked about the role of the two voices in our mind,

the inner nurturer and the inner critic, and discussed how we can keep those two personalities

in balance. Today we're going to wrap up the strength of

confidence with a conversation on a simple concept with surprising depth,

knowing you're a good person. I'm joined as always by Dr. Rick Hansen.

Could you explain what you mean by knowing your good person

and let us know how that relates to confidence?

Well, confidence overall is kind of a general term for feelings of worth and having a sense

of trust in your own abilities, thus confidence, in yourself as you go forward in life.

And those experiences of worth with related thoughts like self-esteem

are very related to our history as children and how other people have treated us.

And now as adults we have opportunities to repair wounds of self-worth, feelings of inadequacy, feeling of inferiority or being less than other people,

we had the opportunity to repair those wounds which originated generally in relationships through both our relationships,

internalizing supplies from other people, and through recognizing things ourselves about ourselves, including our capabilities and our talents and our

virtues and most fundamentally recognizing in ourselves a kind of core of fundamental innate goodness.

So that recognition of that core in oneself is in a way one of our most fundamental and most reliable refugees because yeah

almost everybody does bad stuff from time to time I've done it and I do it. As you well know, Forrest, far from perfect. And also we have

ups and downs. People treat us in various ways. But if you know deep down

inside yourself that there's a fundamental decency there

fundamental and good intentions then you can draw on that no matter what else is going on

around you that's why I think it's really important and for many people. For some people they might be thinking what? Well, I already I know I'm a good person I feel it's not a deal. I'm great and I think you're probably in about a fifth of the population and I think the other four fifths including me when I

throughout most of my life at some deep level there was doubt as to whether I was basically a good person.

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