Hello and welcome to the Being Well podcast I'm Forrest Hanson.

In our last episode we wrapped up the strength of confidence with an episode that explored some ways to feel like a good person, which can be surprisingly challenging for many people.

Today we're beginning a new series of episodes focused on calm, the mental resource that helps us stay centered as we deal with the difficult things that happen over the course of a normal life.

Everyone experiences physical or emotional pain some of the time, and besides actual pain, the threat of pain comes from many directions much of the time, ranging from trucks driving too close to your car, irritation flickering across the face of a loved one.

When we grow the strength of calm, we're more able to relax and center ourselves when faced with threats,

recognize and separate the paper tigers from the real challenges of life,

feel safer and cool needless anger.

I'm joined today as always by Dr. Rick Hansen, so to frame the conversation in our book resilient we could only cover 12

strengths we had to pick 12 and you decided in your great wisdom that calm earned a spot as one of those 12 strengths.

Yeah. We describe people as many things. We describe them as brave or confident or strong or mature or whatever it might be.

But it's pretty rare to hear somebody be like,

wow, they're just so calm.

So kind of in that context, a little bit tongue in cheek. Why was it that you

kind of decided that calm was a sufficiently important strength to merit

inclusion?

Well, it's a great question.

I'll tell you why it popped out for me.

So we're entering into now the third group of three strengths, one for each of our core needs in order, safety, satisfaction,

and connection. In this third group of strengths, clusters around the aspect of well-being that has to do with regulating.

Just a quick reset, the way we structured the 12 strengths is that we thought in terms of three needs and then we considered

those three needs and especially we considered resources for these three

needs that related to four aspects of well-being, four ways we find a lasting well-being, namely

...