Hey everyone, welcome to being well. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome to be here to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

We're getting toward the end of the year, and it's a great opportunity to evaluate where we are and where we'd like to go.

As I was planning what I wanted to focus on today, I thought about the process I've gone through of stepping into new ways of being, and how that process of becoming something a little different, a little new, often required letting go of some aspects of who I was.

Sometimes we become so attached to a part of ourselves, a thought, a feeling, or some view

about the way that things are or the way that they should be, the way they even need to be,

that it becomes very difficult to imagine life without that deeply entrenched view.

It's almost a kind of fixation or an obsession that we have about ourselves or our lives that can keep us trapped.

So today we're going to be exploring how we can go through a process of letting those things go.

And to help me do that, I'm joined by Dr. Rick Hansen. He's a clinical

psychologist, a best-selling author, and he's also my dad. So dad, what do you think about this?

I think it's a great topic, and I'm hearing the soundtrack for Ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch ch You're dating yourself a little bit with this reference here, Dad.

Oh, I think it might even have even been before my time, I forget.

Yeah, it's a great topic. I mean, embedded in it are these two meta themes of freedom and unf freedom.

On the one hand becoming free and enacting that freedom inside our own minds in terms of who we can

allow ourselves to freely be and become.

And also balancing that, what are the things that we get attached to? Our rigidities,

vexations, our insistances, and how can we become more flexible as they talk about and act, you know,

acceptance and commitment therapy from Stephen Hayes and others.

And one way to kind of think about this is through the framework of self-concept, which we've talked about on the podcast in the past, and self-concept is just this kind of mental picture of who we are, and it might include things like our beliefs and our views, our traits. But what I really want to focus on today is this

kind of dual process that tends to underlie most useful change, where on the one hand we let

go of some things that,

for whatever reason, just aren't doing it for us anymore.

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