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

Last week we concluded the strength of calm with an episode dedicated to working with anger skillfully.

Today we're beginning the eighth strength in our year-long series, Motivation.

Life is full of challenges and opportunities.

To pursue opportunities in the face of challenges,

we have to be able to regulate the motivational machinery in our brains.

This includes enjoying pleasures without getting attached to them,

building and maintaining positive habits even when

the going gets a little tough, and drawing on healthy passion.

Broadly speaking, this strength, motivation, focuses on managing desire. This includes learning how to nudge our brains

towards desiring the things that are broadly speaking good for us, while avoiding

the things that are not good for us. So Dr. Hansen is here as always to help us learn how to manage

that motivational machinery. So to kind of frame the conversation here a little bit,

healthy desire is a great thing and a key part of motivation.

Unhealthy desire, which we're going to refer to here as craving, is held up in Buddhism as a primary source of suffering.

So in the book Resilient, you make a key distinction between liking and wanting as kind of your proxy for that idea of healthy desire versus unhealthy desire.

Would you mind explaining what you mean by that?

Yeah, so in this episode I'm going to use Wanting in a very narrow sense and not be restricted

to that narrow usage in future episodes.

And I've used it more loosely in the past.

So I want to draw a distinction between tracking

the pleasantness or unpleasantness, or let's even add relationality of an experience in the moment

...