Self-Compassion The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself

Kristen Neff is a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. She's the author of Self-Compassion the Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and Fierce Self-Compassion How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up Claim Their Power and Thrive.

The belief that we need to be hard on ourselves, criticize ourselves, to succeed or reach our goals or make a change is actually the number one block to self-compassion we found in the research.

People are afraid that they're kind to themselves, they just won't get anything done.

It's okay, I messed up, it's only human, I'll just try again.

The literature now is huge. It's approaching 4,000 studies on the benefits of self-compassion.

So the research is, well, of course I'm a little biased but I think it's incontrovertible at this point that self-compassion is good for wellbeing.

You write about this in your book a little bit.

I was almost always the only black person working on a team, often one of the only black people working on an entire floor of a building.

The Times people confused me with other black people. The Times people assumed I worked in the mailroom. The awkward jokes about the racial comedy skits of Dave Chappelle's show.

I remember that when I lost the million dollars I made in the stock market, I was like, how am I going to get it back?

She's the author of the book Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself and Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive.

She's the author of a book called Self-compassion and the follow up book, Fear Self-compassion.

I'm actually writing a book about kindness right now and I want to do a chapter about self-compassion.

She said the challenge with the self-esteem movement is you know we have to be unique and fabulous and great and we have to be above average. But of course you know she said that's how can we all be above average that just mathematically doesn't make any sense we can't all be above average so that when we're talking about self-esteem it actually increases the pressure that we have on ourselves to be you know super wonderful.

She said the challenge with the self-esteem movement is you know we have to be unique and fabulous and great and we have to be above average. But of course you know she said that's how can we all be above average that just mathematically doesn't make any sense we can't all be above average so that when we're talking about self-esteem it actually increases the pressure that we have on ourselves to be you know super wonderful.