Dr. Paul Conti

And what sits on top of that is this empowerment that lets us exercise agency and

And a sense of humility and humility isn't what it may often seem.

It's the opposite of arrogance, right?

Very often humility is just letting myself be human too and to say, hey, if I've had problems or the things that haven't gone exactly as I want them to, you know, I'm human and it's okay that that's happened.

or it's okay if I've made mistakes.

What my responsibility to myself is, is to bring myself to bear and not get so down on myself as if I'm not allowed to be human or I'm afraid of myself and I'm afraid of the world because I've been human and I've made mistakes.

And if our structure of self and function of self are imbalanced, then we have the empowerment that gives us agency and the humility that lets us act through gratitude.

And agency and gratitude are like this.

If we're acting, we're interfacing with the world through agency and gratitude, then we're in balance in the broad scheme of who we are.

And what this means is our drives are imbalanced.

So there's an assertion drive in all of us and a pleasure drive in all of us.

And the pleasure isn't just hedonism.

It can be the pleasure of knowing, hey, I'm doing okay in the world.

I've got a good roof over my head.

I have good friendships around me and whatever.

When we're asserting ourselves in the world in a healthy way and we're getting pleasure from what we're doing, really our lives are governed by the generative drive.

And that's the drive in us to make the world around us better than we found it.

It's the spirit inside of us that drives literally the species forward and each of us differently.

for it it's what lets us do things that we don't get any credit for like offering somebody a hand up when no one else is watching right or creating art or music just for the sake of creating art or music doing a nice turn for someone just because it feels good and we like that it makes them feel good if the generative drive is governing us that's that's the ultimate manifestation of us being imbalanced and just as we can understand our bodies and our physical health and know when

we're being robust and healthy and we're setting ourselves up for the future in a good way, we absolutely can do the same for our mental health.