Hey everyone, welcome to being well. I'm Forrest Tanssen. If you're new to the

podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

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

Forrest and as always I'd love doing this with you. Yeah I really enjoy doing it with you

dad and I've been really looking forward to this episode and really doing this episode with you,

because today we're going to be doing a deep dive into generativity.

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.

We're going to be talking about motivation, about what makes people want to create things, blocks we have to generativity,

and how we can deal with common issues like fears of failure.

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.

So this should be pretty fun.

Thank you.

We'll see if it's true.

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

grind away on a project of one kind or another and you seem to have this almost like

endless energy toward creating things of different kinds whether it was like writing a new book or creating a

program or just like working with your clients as a clinical psychologist for many, many years.

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?

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

in midlife, as Eric Ericsson pointed out in his developmental model, they're facing

what is a kind of tension or balance or dilemma between as he put

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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