Harnessing Your Generativity: The Secret to Productivity, Creativity, and Consistency

Being Well with Forrest Hanson and Dr. Rick Hanson

Being Well

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2023

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Rick joins Forrest for a deep dive into harnessing our natural generativity. How can we become more productive and creative, experience greater satisfaction, and lean into our biological drives to get more of what we want out of life? They explore what a drive is, our natural drive states, and what we can learn from models of motivation like self-determination theory, before moving on to what we can do if generativity doesn’t come naturally to us. Rick and Forrest share how we can lean into enjoyable experiences, feel more competent and autonomous, and learn to brave experiences of failure. The second half of the episode focuses on psychological tools that help us activate, enjoy, and hang out in generative states more often. You can watch this episode on YouTube. Register for Rick’s Yearly Program! The Foundations of Well-Being 2.0 is a year-long, science-backed journey through developing 12 key inner strengths like compassion, mindfulness, confidence, motivation, and courage. It’s Rick’s flagship program, and if you like Being Well you’ll probably love it. Visit FWBProgram.com to learn more, and get 20% off with coupon code BeingWell20. Key Topics: 0:00: Introduction 1:10: Rick's ability to stay generative. 3:25: Motivation, aggression, and our interdependence with others 12:10: A theoretical framework for generative drive 14:50: The process of making something as a form of healing 19:30: Confidence, autonomy, and relatedness 23:55: The way we think of ourselves 28:10: Agency, and what we can and cannot influence 34:30: Comfort with aggression 40:55: Work ethic, the role of passion and enjoyment, and finding your why 47:45: Competency and flow 50:55: Having positive associations with effort 57:10: Enriching vs. absorbing our experience 1:01:30: The little things that make a big difference 1:04:30: Recap Sponsors: Zocdoc helps you find expert doctors and medical professionals that specialize in the care you need, and deliver the type of experience you want. Head to zocdoc.com/being and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Join over a million people using BetterHelp, the world’s largest online counseling platform. Visit betterhelp.com/beingwell for 10% off your first month! Want to sleep better? Try the Calm app! Visit calm.com/beingwell for 40% off a premium subscription. Connect with the show: Subscribe on iTunes Follow Forrest on YouTube Follow us on Instagram Follow Forrest on Instagram Follow Rick on Facebook Follow Forrest on Facebook Visit Forrest's website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Tanssen. If you're new to the
0:11.2	podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.
0:15.0	I'm joined today as usual by Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and he's my dad. So so dad how are you today? I'm really good
0:24.4	Forrest and as always I'd love doing this with you. Yeah I really enjoy doing it with you
0:29.6	dad and I've been really looking forward to this episode and really doing this episode with you,
0:34.6	because today we're going to be doing a deep dive into generativity.
0:38.9	How can we become more generative and creative, experience greater satisfaction, and harness our natural drives to get more of what we want out of life.
0:48.0	We're going to be talking about motivation, about what makes people want to create things, blocks we have to generativity,
0:54.5	and how we can deal with common issues like fears of failure.
0:58.4	I'm really looking forward to it in part because I think of you as being one of the absolutely most generative people that I know.
1:05.9	So this should be pretty fun.
1:07.5	Thank you.
1:08.5	We'll see if it's true.
1:10.3	Yeah, yeah, and I actually just kind of want to start by asking you about that. Like ever since I was a little kid, I remember you in a seemingly inexhaustible way to my young self being able to just kind of like put your butt in the chair and
1:24.2	grind away on a project of one kind or another and you seem to have this almost like
1:29.6	endless energy toward creating things of different kinds whether it was like writing a new book or creating a
1:34.7	program or just like working with your clients as a clinical psychologist for many, many years.
1:39.1	And do you think that that's just like true of you at a base level or was that something that you had to really like work at?
1:46.2	It's such a deep inquiry this topic. I'm really psyched about this topic and one reason I'm psyched about it is because for a lot of people
1:55.3	in midlife, as Eric Ericsson pointed out in his developmental model, they're facing
2:01.5	what is a kind of tension or balance or dilemma between as he put
2:06.7	it generativity or stagnation yeah and stagnation is kind of a negative tone to it, but there can be a feeling that people can get where they've sort of, you know, they're in cruise control.
	...

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