Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science Of Self-Compassion | Serena Chen
Episode Date: April 29, 2024How self compassion works, how to practice it, and what the research says about the benefits.GUEST BIO: Dr. Serena Chen is Professor of Psychology and the Marian E. and Daniel E. Koshland, Jr.... Distinguished Chair for Innovative Teaching and Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the self and identity, interpersonal relationships, and social power and influence. She is a Fellow of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychological Association, and Association of Psychological Science. Dr. Chen was also the recipient of the Early Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Social Sciences Division of the University of California, Berkeley.In this episode we talk about:The connection between self-compassion and authenticityAs well as self-compassion exercises that you can incorporate into your daily lifeHow self-compassion influences the desire for self improvementHow it can lead you to be more understanding of other people The connection between self-compassion and good leadership And how self-compassion can apply to parenting as well as to educational realms Related Episodes: How to Make Self-Compassion Work for You | Kristin NeffKryptonite for the Inner Critic, Self-Compassion Series | Kristin NeffSelf-Compassion Ain’t Always Soft | Kristin NeffSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/serena-chenAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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This is the 10% Happier Podcast.
I'm Dan Harris.
Hello, everybody.
How we doing?
How we doing?
Today, we've got a scientist who is gonna thoroughly dismantle the widely held belief,
one that you may harbor yourself,
that the only way to succeed is to kick your own ass.
One of the many things I like about Dr. Serena Chan,
who's a professor of psychology
at the University of California at Berkeley,
is that she initially approached self-compassion
quite skeptically.
She is now, however, one of the leading researchers in the field.
And in this conversation, we talk about the definition of self-compassion, the difference
between self-compassion and self-esteem, the studies that show that self-compassion leads
to more desire for self-improvement and increased authenticity.
And she lays out some self-compassion exercises
that you can easily fit into your daily life.
Self-compassion has been huge for me personally
in my own life.
It's actually a major focus of the book
I've spent many, many years working on,
which hopefully will come out next year.
So anyway, this is a subject that's very important to me.
I approached it with a lot of skepticism,
but I'm now a full-on convert.
Let me just say before we dive in,
this is the first part in a week-long series
we're doing here on the show on self-compassion.
Coming up on Wednesday,
we're gonna talk to a great meditation dharma teacher,
Afosu-Jones-Courté, about how to rewire your inner dialogue.
But today, it's Dr. Serena Chen, and she is coming right up.
But first, a little BSP, blatant self-promotion.
Two little things to tell you about, then one big thing.
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Okay, here's the big thing I really wanna promote.
We've got a meditation party retreat
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We've got a great DJ, Tasha the Amazon, who's coming to play some jams on
Saturday night. Come for this. The last one we did was incredibly fun, so we're
doing two more this year. Go to eomega.com to sign up or to the link in the show notes.
Before I go, I just want to say something about the 10% Happier app.
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I'll also link to it in the show notes.
Hello, I'm Emily, one of the hosts of Terribly Famous,
the show that takes you inside the lives
of our biggest celebrities.
Some of them hit the big time overnight,
some have to plug away for years,
but in our latest series we're talking about a man who was world famous before he was even born.
A life of extreme privilege that was mapped out from the start, but left him struggling to find
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You might think you know everything about him, but trust me, there's even more.
We follow Harry and the obsessive, all-consuming relationship of his life. Not with Meghan,
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I'm Alice Levine.
And I'm Matt Ford.
And we're the presenters of British Scandal.
And in our latest series, Hitler's Angel, we tell the story of scandalous beauty Diana
Mosley, British aristocrat, Mitford sister and fascist sympathiser.
Like so many great British stories, it starts at a lavish garden party.
Diana meets the dashing fascist Oswald Mosley.
She's captivated by his politics,
but also by his very good looks.
It's not a classic rom-com story,
but when she falls in love with Mosley,
she's on a collision course with her family,
her friends, and her whole country.
There is some romance, though.
The couple tied the knot in a ceremony
organized by a great, uncelebrated wedding planner,
Adolf Hitler.
So it's less Notting Hill, more Nuremberg.
When Britain took on the Nazis, Diana had to choose
between love or betrayal.
This is the story of Diana Mosley on her journey
from glamorous socialite to political prisoner.
Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery app
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dr. Serena Chen, welcome to the show.
Thank you. Fun to be here.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
From what I know of your biography,
you're a pretty hard-nosed scientist and researcher.
How did you get into self-compassion,
which I'm a huge fan of, I'm totally sold on it,
but I can imagine to some people,
and maybe even to some of your colleagues,
might have sounded a little gooey.
Well, I can't take credit for it.
I had a graduate student, maybe 2008, 2009,
who came to me and said,
she introduced me to the concept of self-compassion.
And I was the one who founded a little woo woo, gooey,
choose your word for it.
And just luxurious and not, you know,
something I was certainly raised to practice,
this notion of self-compassion,
but I wanted to support my graduate student's interests.
And so we dove in, it was related to the self,
which is one of my primary areas of research.
So I was game, you know, to support her
and learn about this, try to keep an open mind.
And it's been a great journey. I've learned so much and I've gotten to do science on it,
which has made me a complete convert, a believer. But it wasn't, I didn't start it.
My graduate student, Yuli Brines, she's the one that came to me with this idea.
I'm curious to hear more about the impact of your life and why it didn't necessarily jive with the way you were raised.
But let me just ask a question that might be a little bit of a digression,
but I can't help myself.
When you say your area of interest was initially the self,
what does that even mean?
Oh, OK.
Well, I care about how people think about themselves.
I care about how people evaluate themselves.
And I really care a lot
about how the social situation, in particular our close relationships, shape so much of
who we are in a moment by moment basis and a more chronic stable basis. I mean, this
is a very widely understood idea in psychology, as old as a discipline, that we are socially constructed beings.
And a lot of my research takes that really seriously, that who I am is so bound up with
the people around me, particularly the close others around me, like my mom, my best friend,
romantic partner, what have you.
So that's what I mean, like how people see themselves, how they evaluate themselves. This notion that the self isn't some discrete entity, but is in fact socially constructed,
to use what I believe were your words. Yeah.
Doesn't that seem to point us in the direction of Buddhism in some way, which argues that,
yeah, some conventional level of reality, you are you, Serena and I am Dan, but ultimately
there is there's no core nugget of self. Yeah, it's just not the way I approach
the study of this. I understand that and I know there are perspectives like that.
There's no self. I can't even wrap my head around that. Phenomenologically,
there is a self. I mean, I think people can readily talk about who they are, ask you who you are, people
can go on and on and on for a long time.
So for me, you know, staying on this, I don't know, secular day-to-day phenomenology level,
there is a self.
I'm not interested, by the way, in the self in like a capital S way, as if there is a self. I'm not interested, by the way, in the self in like a capital S way as if there is a true
objective self out there.
As a social psychologist, I care about what you think yourself is because that's what's
going to influence how you react to things, how you relate to people, the choices you
make, what you think is yourself, whether others agree with you or not.
I won't drag you into a metaphysical debate about the self.
But it's interesting to me that you might ask me, how do I think of myself?
But I might not, for some people, I might not talk about my relationships.
And yet, what is true is that we are,
the self is socially constructed,
but we may not see that aspect of ourselves.
Absolutely.
I'm not saying that it's visible to us
or in our conscious awareness and our day-to-day lives.
And in fact, most people, especially in a culture like ours,
which is Western individualistic,
we're very into being independent entities.
We don't want to admit or acknowledge at times how much, how deeply we are shaped by the
social context.
So I, by no means am I saying I'm going around thinking this is true, but there's so many
different theories in my field and related fields that shows, and just intuitively
we know the impact of, for example, caregivers like our parents or teachers or siblings,
what have you, have had on shaping who we are.
I mean, you know, so many theories about this, but it becomes invisible and that's fine.
I mean, it's not something I'm wedded to that
people are necessarily aware of it. And the other thing I'll say is that if I ask you who you are,
maybe not you, Dan, but a lot of other people, people like to think in terms of a self that is
pretty stable, continuous. I have a coherent sense of self as if that's who I am all the time.
And yet we know in our day-to-day lives who I am right now is not who I am with my 14-year-old
when we're having a fight.
I mean, these are very different selves that I am enacting.
Okay?
So we are constantly fluctuating who we are, at least outwardly, but we don't necessarily acknowledge that either.
But everything you're saying could be taken as an argument for the Buddhist notion.
That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. Okay. But I, yes, that's fine. And I'm not studying
that. I find it fascinating. I've started to read a bit about it. I have a colleague who's coming whose spouse is very
Interested in this no self idea. So I have been reading a little bit about it and I will confess
When I read about it my head wants to explode because of course my whole career has been built
The existence of a phenomenological at least subjective self, so I'm not sure where I stand on that yet.
I just know that people can readily talk about themselves.
And I'm certainly one of thousands of researchers
about the self and relatedly our identities
as part of social groups like my identity as a professor,
my identity as an Asian American.
I mean, those are real things to people in terms of influencing their behavior and
so forth. Yeah.
I think the Buddhist view to the extent that I can represent it faithfully is, is both
and.
Yeah.
All those things are true. Like on one level of reality, it is true. I can talk a lot about
myself. I can also look in the mirror when I show up places I have to show my driver's license
and that's all true.
And the fact that I am a different person with my kid than I am with my boss and the
fact that actually my sense of self, whether I know it or not, is constructed based on
input from other people.
It is, as I've once heard it called, dialogic.
In other words, it's in a dialogue with other people all the time.
That points to another layer of reality that is true at the same time, which is I can't
close my eyes and find a gift wrapped, discreet Dan.
Yeah, no, that's so useful, level of reality.
I am operating in my work and in my life thus far
at the level of reality that I was talking about.
But that doesn't mean that that other one can't exist.
You're right, that's useful.
Yeah.
Now that I've taken you down this primrose path,
let's get back to self-compassion for a second.
You said you found it woo-woo or gooey and that it wasn't the way you were raised.
Tell me more about that.
What was behind that reaction?
I'll say that I definitely had a negative first impression too, Sue.
I'm not asking this question from a position of judgment.
Yeah, no, I don't take it that way. I think partly culturally, East Asian, collectivistically, but maybe more so just who I am.
I was a much more self-critical versus self-compassionate sort of person.
And wherever I picked it up from, I found it to be luxurious, too woo-woo, to be so nice and
warm and non-judgmental toward the South.
Maybe because I come from the East Coast, got plopped down in Berkeley.
It has been over two decades, so I'm over it now.
My parents, they were not hugely involved in terms of telling me what to do or my education
or things like that.
So they weren't saying, they weren't the stereotypic tiger parents at all and telling me, you know,
I need to get better grades or anything like that.
So I think it was self-imposed, but I can't imagine them having said, be kind to yourself,
Serena.
I just, I mean, it's comical to me.
And it's not how, for example, my siblings raised their children.
It's just not how we were raised at all.
So it's felt very, to be honest, I am Chinese American,
but it felt very American in addition to woo-woo, to be honest.
But like I said, I mean, I'm pro-wellbeing.
I'm pro-people feeling good about themselves
in a way that is bound to reality.
I'm pro-having good relationships.
I'm pro-obviously good mental health
and all those things self-compassion
had potential to contribute to.
And I'm pro-supporting my graduate students' interests.
And at that point, Kristin Neff and others had already started doing work on self-compassion.
So there was beginning to be a literature, a scientific literature on the construct,
which made me more comfortable to explore it.
For the uninitiated, Kristin Neff.
Dr. Kristin Neff is at the University of Texas in Austin.
She's been on the show many times.
We'll put the links to those conversations in the show notes
so you can go back and listen to them.
She's been massively influential for me,
and she really is like the godmother of self-compassion.
But she's not here right now, so let me ask you the question
I probably should have led with. What is it? Which is, what is self-compassion, but she's not here right now, so let me ask you the question I probably should have led with.
What is it?
Which is, what is self-compassion?
Yeah.
I mean, I could certainly tell you about the different components.
I've completely absorbed how Kristin Neff has theorized and conceptualized it.
But speaking a little bit more broadly, you know, people can think about it as just a
strategy, a way of thinking about
the self and emotion regulation strategy, all different ways to think about it.
But to put it most simply, it's a way of treating the self in times where you're facing some
sort of difficulty, a challenge, a failure or setback.
And this happens to the best of us, hopefully not all
the time, but at some point in our lives we're faced with things that are negative that happen
to us that make us feel badly about ourselves.
That's when self-compassion is relevant.
And it involves three different elements, okay, according to Kristin Neff back in the
early 2000s.
She would argue, and we have all these data that support,
that involves treating yourself kindly, with warmth and non-judgment. So basically, let's
say you didn't get a promotion at work, you're not going to berate yourself. You're going
to be kind and understanding, just like you would if a friend came to you, called you
up and said, oh my God, I didn't get this
job.
You would not judge them.
You would be kind and understanding and listen to them.
Self-compassion is directing that kindness towards yourself.
It also involves two other components.
One is a sense of your similarity and connection to others in the sense that everybody experiences failure and setbacks at times.
Okay, so something negative, something bad happens to you, you sort of recognize that this is a shared human experience.
There's a common humanity here. So there's self-kindness, there's common humanity.
And then there's something that Neff coined mindfulness.
And mindfulness is used in many different contexts
and it's related in all these different contexts
in the context of a setback or negative event
that feels terrible.
Somebody broke up with you.
Again, you didn't get that job promotion.
You failed the test.
It is, you know, acknowledging the negativity.
I feel bad.
This sucks.
You know, I didn't get the job.
Somebody else did.
It's acknowledging that, being mindful of it, facing it,
not trying to deny it, not trying to make excuses
and so forth.
But at the same time also approaching it emotionally
with some level of balance,
not getting overrun by the negativity.
So you've got self kindness, non-judgment, kindness, warmth.
You've got, hey, I'm not alone.
Everybody has made mistakes before.
And I'm going to face this negative event.
I'm going to allow myself to feel these crappy emotions, okay?
But I'm not going to blow it out of proportion.
I'm going to try to take a balanced perspective on it.
Those three things together, and this is reflected in how it's typically measured in research
on this, together, some components might speak to some people more than others, but they're
really treated as sort of a package to reflect a self-compassionate response to something bad
that happens.
I'm curious about the order of operations because you listed self-kindness, common humanity,
and mindfulness in that order.
For me, and this may be idiosyncratic, it would be the exact opposite.
Nothing can happen until you're mindful and self-aware. And then maybe you bring to mind that right now millions of other people worried about
money or feeling rejected or whatever it is, and then you add in this.
No, you're absolutely right.
I can't believe, you know, I think it's a function of how the scale is described in
the paper that describes the scale and how Kristen originally theorized about it, let's say in her probably most cited paper in 2003. But you're absolutely right.
If you can't even sit in and acknowledge the negativity of the setback or failure,
I mean, it is a first step. I didn't mean to imply anything by that these were sequential
at all, but I can totally see your logic, although I've never thought about that before to be honest
But I yes. Yes, it requires that in some sense. Yeah
the mindfulness I
Call it the nef three-step. She doesn't like that. But um, yeah, you know the the first step is waking up to the suckiness
You know, you have to nothing can happen without that. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It's funny
Why doesn't she like that?
I'm surprised.
Oh, actually, I don't know if she doesn't like it,
but she certainly hasn't taken it on as hers.
Like, I think she wouldn't call it the Neff three-step.
She would call it a self-compassion break.
Yes.
I like giving her credit.
Yes.
You know what, I think that my guess is that
for the regular person who doesn't talk jargon,
like us researchers often slip into, I think self-kindness is the easiest to grasp.
Be nice.
Be nice to yourself, just like you would a friend.
So if I had to guess, maybe that's why it comes first when people write about it, because
mindfulness is a little bit more abstract and vague to a lot of people, whereas be nice.
Like would you berate your friend?
Would you say, you suck?
No, you wouldn't do that.
You would be like, you know, oh my God, I'm so sorry to hear that.
You'd be kind and warm.
So maybe that's why it's often talked about first, but I totally agree that it really
requires at some level,
the mindfulness, the awareness,
the acknowledgement, the acknowledgement, yeah.
I wanna talk about some practices
and then I wanna have a long discussion about your research.
But before we do those things,
just staying on the level of like definitions for a second,
how would you distinguish self-compassion
from self-esteem and self-love?
Well, I mean, self-esteem for sure.
I mean, the two are correlated.
You're high in self-compassion, you're high in self-esteem, and these are not small correlations.
But they are really conceptually and empirically distinct despite the high correlation between them.
That is that they tend to go hand in hand.
But self-esteem, which is a construct that people love and it's been studied for decades
and decades and decades, is about an evaluation of the self.
And it typically involves comparing yourself to others. There's a
competitive element to it. We're all striving to have higher self-esteem. It's
absolutely evaluative. It's a judgment about the self. How good or bad am I in
whatever domain we're talking about or in general. Self-compassion is not a
judgment at all. It's not a judgment at all.
It's not an evaluation at all.
It's a way of treating the self, of relating to oneself.
There's no judgment involved, definitionally.
So conceptually, there are absolutely different things in terms of one being an evaluation
and judgment, the other expressly not being.
This is not about evaluating the self. And the other thing that self-esteem typically connotes
is you're comparing yourself to other people.
You're trying to distinguish yourself from other people.
It suggests the distancing from other people.
Am I better or worse than you?
In fact, the most often used measure for self-esteem
has items that connote I'm'm better than you, or I'm
better than most other people. So it's very much comparative. Whereas, sub-compassion is
really about drawing you closer to people, not comparing, emphasizing how we are similar,
how we are all humans, we are connected. And these are really different concepts. And then empirically, the science bears this out.
They're correlated, yes, because self-compassionate people tend to, because of what self-compassion
does, have more favorable views of themselves.
But empirically, they predict different things.
They have different correlates with other things.
For example, self-esteem is correlated with narcissism, positively.
Self-compassion is not.
But because of the fact that they go hand in hand, when we talk more about the science,
you'll see in every study or every really good study, you measure self-esteem or you
track self-esteem or you track self-esteem so that if you want to make claims about what
self-compassion results in, you want to make claims that it results in something separate
from any positive effects of self-esteem. So we empirically demonstrate that the effects
of self-compassion are unique to self-compassion, don't have to do with its overlap with self-esteem.
Does that make sense or is that too?
Yes, it does.
Okay.
Yeah, self-love, like I actually don't know what the formal definition of self-love is,
honestly.
I can guess based on the words self-love.
So I'm just going to take it at face value that it's feeling its acceptance of
the self in a deep, stable, genuine way. But tell me if I'm wrong. It's not this literature
I actually know or I don't know anyone who works in that literature per se. It might
be too woo-woo. I'm just joking a little bit. But I think that there is definitely overlap. But to me, it sounds still like self-evaluation
to some degree versus talking about a way
to cope with negativity and relate to yourself,
how you treat yourself.
But I am positive without even knowing
what the technical definition of self-love is,
they're correlated.
Because self-compassion promotes acceptance, genuine self-worth, which sure sounds like
what self-love would be about.
Yeah, well, I was actually at a conference a few months ago with Kristin Neff and we
were taking a walk to go to dinner together and I was running this theory, I have a theory
that I'm going to run by you and I was running it by her. And I have a visual of the walk, but I don't remember what she said about whether I'm full
of shit or not.
So with the caveat that I am not an academic and I've done no research on anything, I kind
of think of love as the overarching term that would include under it compassion, kindness, understanding, friendliness, delight in other
people's success. Yeah, so just I'll leave it at that. So I think of self compassion as a flavor
of self love. And it's the kind of self love that you direct toward yourself when things are hard, but there is also self-love that you could just have
at any regular three o'clock on a Tuesday.
Yeah, I'm not gonna call that full of shit.
It doesn't sound ludicrous to me.
I don't know how data would bear that out.
It'd be really hard.
These things are all gonna be really correlated.
At first, when you said this,
I was thinking
about love as sort of the big love that you want to put at the top as sort of a non-ego
kind of thing. Like you're, you know, it's not about self-protection or self-inflation
or boosting the self in relation to self, but of course, love, there's love toward other people.
Yeah, so, but something about putting the ego aside,
both when it comes to how you treat yourself with love
and how you treat other people.
To be able to be there truly for other people
and to love other people, I mean,
there's a deep other orientedness,
a genuine other orientedness that has to be there,
which puts their interests before yours.
And the other thing that came to mind, I can't help but think about authenticity, which I
care so deeply about in general, when I, you know, self compassion is not unrelated to
it.
I don't know, it came to mind too as this overarching construct too, but I'd have to
think about it more.
But it's not ludicrous in my mind.
Well, that's good because see, honestly, what I hope for when I advance a theory, the best
I hope for is not ludicrous.
Yeah, it's not in left field.
Yeah, it's not on left field.
No. Yeah, it's not in left field. Yeah, it's not on my field. No You know, I'm gonna Google self-love and see what the hell is out there in the science on this
Yeah, but boy does it it has woo-woo dripping with woo-woo. But okay. Yeah
Well, I like to take things like that, you know
My first book was about meditation which at that time ten years ago that word was dripping with tough connotations.
Yeah, and it still is in some places, a lot of places, yes.
So that's what I'm going for with love and self-love especially.
So got it.
Coming up, Dr. Serena Chen talks about the connection between self-compassion
and authenticity or realness. And she talks about some self-compassion exercises that you can do
or realness, and she talks about some self-compassion exercises that you can do on the daily and in a free-range fashion. It doesn't take a lot of ceremony.
I'm Afua Hirsch.
I'm Peter Frankopan.
And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Alan Turing. Why are we talking about Alan
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Alan Turing is the father of computer science. And some of those questions we're thinking
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Just to get back to one thing you said there, actually two things I want to get back to.
One is you're talking about, you know, other love, other directed love,
and it being, you know, ego-less in some ways.
I think a true holistic understanding of self-love would see that it feels so good to be attentive
to other people that you would do it more often.
So you're saying you're still getting something out of it?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's okay.
That's okay.
I didn't mean it that way.
I mean, that's a whole debate one could have is, you know, doing something for someone
else genuine or true if you also gain from it.
I think that's great, actually.
It works.
It's a win-win, those kinds of situations.
So I didn't mean it in that strict sense.
So maybe I mean that other people's needs need
to matter as much as your own.
And if you get something out of it, that's great.
That's great that you value that.
So yeah, so that's a complicated thing.
You know, it's always talked about
in relation to altruism, for example, right?
I don't have an issue with that.
I think I like to think of it as a win-win.
As long as, you know, it's not motivated
for just the self gain.
It gets back to this Buddhist thing
that we're talking about at the beginning
because the line between self and other is so blurry self-gain. It gets back to this Buddhist thing that we were talking about at the beginning because
the line between self and other is so blurry that in some ways the whole debate doesn't
make sense from seeing from one angle.
Yeah, I know.
I get what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you're challenging me here, dude.
I want to be munching on this for days, okay? Yeah.
Self-love, I think, I know in the past I have Googled the literature on this and so I can't
swear by this but my memory, which is always faulty, is that there's not much.
Self-compassion is getting all the air time.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, no, no, there's not much.
It's not going to be, I mean, apologies in advance to those who work on it, if there are ones.
I can't imagine that it's particularly rigorous,
to be honest.
It's gonna be a lot of correlational stuff
of whatever's out there, which is great as a start.
But, you know, I'm in the business of trying
to establish cause and effect and so forth.
So, you know, it's not gonna make it
to your social psychology textbook, for example, because it's just a lot of correlations, probably.
My suspicion is that this is because we don't have a good definition of love. And we do
have a pretty good definition of compassion. But love in our culture is generally meant,
you know, is the word is used, I sometimes joke it's used on your romantic partner, your
kid and gluten free snickerdoodles. It's like we, so it's, it's a, for me as a storyteller,
I see that as an opportunity. But if I was a scientist, it would drive me fucking crazy.
Well listen, actually, there's this, there's actually a large literature on love, love not self-love, on love.
But again, I use this as an example.
I am a co-author on a social psychology textbook.
Like, if you picked up a textbook, like the early textbooks in social psychology,
in the chapter on relationships, you're going to have these theories about love.
And there are typologies, okay?
Like companion love, passionate love, you know, whatever.
Totally fine researchers if anyone out there is listening, but it's not in our textbook
anymore.
The close relationships literature got a lot more rigorous.
Near when I was finishing up graduate school, like in the 2000s and beyond, and it supplanted
just these typologies,
which are really descriptive.
Nothing wrong with that.
And they probably resonate a lot.
The kind of love I feel for my best friend
is not the same kind of love I feel for my kids.
I get that.
Everyone gets that.
But there's no, what do you do with that?
You correlate it with what?
A whole bunch of stuff.
And look, they're correlated. Then now what? What do we do? What do we
do? So I don't know how far it's really gone. And it's not in the
journals that I'm, I'm reading often or seeking to publish them.
But you know, there was, and probably still is a lot of love.
I'm just not tracking it. But it's not self love, I don't think
that I'm aware of. You know, to be fair, there's, there is a I mean, love, I mean, we're sociallove, I don't think, that I'm aware of. To be fair, there is a lot.
I mean, love, I mean, we're social psychologists.
We care, that's something we should care about.
Yeah, but it's also, it's a hard construct.
Everybody defines it a little bit differently.
It's slippery, it's slippery.
And it's woo-woo, it's a little woo-woo.
Yeah, I would, and again, I don't have a research agenda here, but as a storyteller who works
kind of in the sphere of public health, mental health, I would like to get people to think
about love in a more holistic, capacious manner and see that it isn't just your romantic relationships,
it's everything from your romantic relationships to family relationships to friendships to
work to micro-interactions,
people you interact with that you don't know that well,
to your relationship to yourself,
and that these are skills worth developing
and that the literature shows, from what I can tell,
that people with the best relationships are the healthiest,
live the longest, and are the happiest.
So that's my thrust.
Yeah, no, I mean, Dan, joking aside,
like I am really gonna think about this.
I think that's really interesting.
It's absurd that there isn't more in some ways
or that I'm aware of because it's everything.
And we all believe that it's about survival.
It's biological, all of this.
And also love is biological, too.
But I guess it's been slippery.
I'd love to talk.
I, you know, I have, you know, friends who have been in the close relationships field
for a long time.
I've won my department.
I'm going to pick his ear.
He's the, maybe you've heard of him, Art Aron.
He's the one that developed that 37 questions test to get to know people that's about forging
connections. Anyway, he's about forging connections.
Anyway, he's known for this, but also for many other things in the close relationships
literature.
I'm going to ask him.
I'm going to mention this to him and see what he says.
Yeah, he's been around a long time.
Yeah.
You also mentioned authenticity.
Jennifer Egan is a great novelist that came on the show a while ago.
We were talking about realness, authenticity, and she made
a great point, because people talk about it all the time. Just be yourself, be real, keep
it real, and, or authenticity is just a word, it's a kind of become jargon. And she said,
we fetishize it because it's so rare. And so I just want to be curious, what do you
mean as a rigorous person by authenticity
and what would the connection be to self-compassion?
She thinks it's so rare.
I'd love to hear more about why she thinks that.
I mean, that's problematic and worrisome.
Not that she thinks that, but if that were true,
look, it's a complicated field and I'm in it.
You know, there's conferences on authenticity.
There's a chapter I need to write a whole volume on authenticity and so forth.
So, but I am a little bit strategic in how I study authenticity in that I try to stay
away from all the debates about whether there is a capital T true self.
Because again, I come from a scientific or scholarly perspective.
I don't really know or want to debate people about whether there's a capital T true self.
I don't even know what that means.
Is it one that's validated by other people?
I don't know.
But it's my subjective sense of authenticity, my subjective sense
of being genuine and comfortable in my own skin. That's what I mean by authenticity.
That's what I mean. It's about answering in a really highly favorable way. I feel very
authentic today. Okay, I mean, it's just really the face of it, what it looks like to you, to each individual.
So that's what I study.
And it doesn't require that you have to say exactly what's on your mind.
Okay?
When your mother-in-law gives you a gift you do not like, being authentic doesn't require
you to say, I hate this and you should know that, okay?
That's not what authenticity is about.
It's about, because you could be being true to yourself,
so to speak, because it matters to you, this relationship.
So you're going to do the correct thing and say,
thank you so much, I love it or whatever.
It's again, it's this subjective sense,
your own calculation of whether you're being authentic
or not.
And I'm not alone in taking this approach to studying authenticity at all.
At all.
It's not like Serena trying to do something really convenient.
Many people take this sort of subjective approach to understanding what authenticity is.
And looking at what encourages it and looking at typically positive consequences of being
authentic.
How would self-compassion help in this genuineness?
Yeah.
Oh, I love this.
And we have a paper looking at this in just sort of regular language. I mean, self-compassion, treating yourself with kindness,
with non-judgment, okay?
This is creating atmosphere for yourself that feels safe.
You know, it's not the end of the world
to have these flaws and shortcomings.
And part of being authentic is that mindfulness, right?
Acknowledging who you are, your warts and your strengths. And self-compassion
encourages that, which allows you to feel safe enough to go ahead and be
yourself, so to speak. Okay? Because everybody has shortcomings, okay? And it's
not the end of the world to have shortcomings.
You can feel bad about it, but you know what?
You're not alone.
And you're not judging yourself.
You're not judging yourself about it.
You're being kind to yourself.
So in that environment, it just feels safer.
Just like if somebody were to treat you that way,
you would feel safe around them.
Oh, this is a friend I can feel safe with.
I can admit my vulnerabilities too.
But here it's yourself providing
that safety when you're self-compassionate.
And it just makes sense in that environment,
more willing to just take a deep breath.
You know, what is it?
Take our masks off and just be who we want to be.
Take that risk, so to speak, which being our true selves often feels like it comes with,
this big risk.
What if they think I'm a loser?
What if they laugh at me?
I've got a middle school or teenage daughter.
Wow, do I know about those risks.
And boy, do I wish there could be more risk taking on the authenticity realm for her.
So self-compassion, you know, hey, everyone's going through this.
You know, I can take this risk.
It's okay.
That's how I think it in sort of, you know, lay language, how I think self-compassion
helps with authenticity.
Before we go further into your research, can you describe some of the practices of self-compassion
for folks who might want to try this in their own lives?
Yeah.
Well, there's certainly great resources on the internet of very simple practices, and
I'll give a couple examples.
And then there are these workshops, intervention programs, three, six, eight week kind of programs,
some of which, you know, Kristin Neff has developed with colleagues and so forth.
But I am more into the everyday kinds of things one could practice that with practice could
become habitual.
And it is not rocket scientists, because you know what, most of us are really good at being compassionate toward a friend
It's no problem. We're pretty good at most of us. I know not all of us, but most of us
Oh, can you just be nice to so-and-so your friend and you don't even need to be told your friend
It's upset about something you're nice
You show compassion and it's really just about directing that toward yourself
And if it helps to put yourself in a third-person perspective and say, Serena, pretending you're
a friend talking to yourself, so be it.
And this could be all just in your head, taking a self-compassion break, the term some people
like to use, pause, maybe go through the different elements of self-compassion or whichever one speaks
to you the most.
Like for example, common humanity speaks really particularly strongly to me.
So when I practice self-compassion or when I try to nudge my children to, that's the
one I feel like resonates with them.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Come on.
Okay. You know, you're not alone
at all in this. So it could involve just mental exercises, going through self-kindness, recognizing
the negativity, recognizing you're not alone. Okay. Taking literally, it could be as quick
as three minutes or one minute. Some people, it's more effective if you write it out.
You might write yourself, hey, how would you
respond to a friend if they came to you feeling really
negatively about themselves and about the situation
they're confronting?
They just ended their three-year relationship.
Write to yourself about this.
For some people that's better.
Not unlike a gratitude journal, you
might have a self-compassion journal
where you write your, sort of commit yourself
to these different elements of self-compassion.
I am working right now with a clinical psychology graduate
student who is looking at something that's out there
in the literature already, compassionate self-touch.
So, you know, this is something Chris and Nef and others also talk about.
You know, it could be hugging yourself, like you would hug a friend.
If you wanted a sort of more rigorous, you know, soothing yourself,
you might put a hand over your heart.
So others and we are looking at, this is a 20 second exercise, okay?
It should be accompanied ideally with these self-compassionate thoughts,
but if you try this, there is something really soothing about it, just like when you receive a hug
or gentle touch from a friend or something like that, except here, because we're talking about
self-compassion, you're doing it to yourself.
And it's such a simple thing that you can do even while having a conversation with someone
if you're spiraling inside your head.
So these are all simple little self-compassion exercises that don't take a lot of time.
They don't take monetary resources or needing to sign up for a workshop, but they do take
practice, right?
I mean, anything that you want to get good at and become automatic,
not laborious, a default, so to speak.
You got to practice, right?
Just like you want to have a good three-point shot,
you got to practice it if you want it to become the default.
Like you can always get it.
Well, you got to practice this particular habit too, but they're not hard, they're accessible. And
that excites me how accessible it could be to get better at this.
What do we know about the impact of compassionate self-touch? I will say this was the thing
that I bumped on the most. I remember my first interview with Kristin Neff, I mean,
it must have been like 2010 or something like that, and she was talking, she was trying
to get me to hug myself or whatever, and I was like, no fucking way.
This is ridiculous.
I would have said that back then, but would you say it now?
No, no, no.
I gave a whole TED Talk not long ago where I told people, put your hand on your heart
and talk to yourself the way you would talk to a friend.
It is astonishingly helpful.
It's embarrassingly helpful.
I can't believe how well it works.
That's my self-report.
What do we know from the data?
Yeah.
So, you know what?
Where I thought you were going and what I can't help but think about is the biology
behind it.
You know, I can't help but think there are biological things happening that are
helping you cope with the negativity, I believe.
And my colleague who you know probably, I think he's probably been on the show,
Dacher Keltner.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I love that guy.
Yeah, he's like my big brother.
He, you know, he's really interested in touch and has data on it, not in relation to self-compassion
necessarily, but for example, the communicative power of touch, right, which intuitively we
believe, we know there's okay touch and there's not okay touch, for example.
But the data that I know about in terms of it's, you know, as a self-compassion tool.
And this is a paper that we're working on and is close to getting accepted,
is showing that training people once with this, it's a very simple exercise,
and then asking them to practice it over the course of a month.
Among those who do practice this daily, again, it doesn't take long, and paired with self-compassionate
thoughts.
It's paired with reductions in stress, for example.
Of course, it's paired with higher self-compassion reports at the end of the month, the 28 days,
and it's correlated with lower psychopathology, for example, like depression.
So this is just one study.
I think the literature is a little bit messy still.
I think there are some studies that find positive results, some don't find any results.
I would be surprised if there are studies that find negative results and so negative
results here would be no results or something like that.
So I don't think there's a ton on self-touch per se that isolates self-touch,
compassionate self-touch and its effects.
But I think it's a really promising area of research.
And we're trying to contribute to it in part because it's such an easily accessible kind
of practice.
Doesn't involve even a pencil or paper, right?
But I don't know if you were intimating about biology or what's going on.
I don't know. There might be stuff out there, but I don't know it.
I believe I've heard Kristin say that it activates in the mammalian care system.
I don't even know what those words actually mean, but I like the sound of it.
Yeah, so she's talking about maybe hormonal changes like oxytocin, or she's talking about vagus nerve
differences and so forth, things like that. But I don't know it in detail enough to tell you.
I mean, that term, mammalian, she could mean a whole bunch of different things by that.
Coming up, Serena talks about how self-compassion influences your desire for self-improvement,
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Let me steer you on to Terra firma for you personally.
Let's talk about what your research has shown about the benefits and impacts of self-compassion.
I'd love to hear briefly about some of the experiments you've run and what the results
are.
One area I know you've looked at is the impact of self-compassion on a growth mindset.
So maybe you could tell us what the experiments have looked like, what you've found, and it would be helpful probably for some of us to define a growth mindset. So maybe you could tell us what the experiments have looked like, what you've found, and it would be helpful probably for some of us to define a growth
mindset.
Yeah. Can I actually frame that a little bit more broader?
Of course.
Yes, we've looked at growth mindset for sure. But growth mindset is, I see it as one sign
or one index of the desire to improve the self, to learn and to grow.
I mean, that's what a growth mindset is.
A growth mindset is the belief that people's attributes and abilities are not set in stone.
You're not just born with a particular hand in life, that there's things you can do, strategies,
things you can learn to better your hand, that is to improve in your attributes
and abilities.
That's what a growth mindset means specifically, and there's an enormous literature on that.
But we think of it as just one way to measure or one way to get at people's desire to improve
themselves.
And this is often contrasted with the desire to improve the self with the desire to enhance
the self.
People like to be viewed favorably.
People like to get positive evaluations.
I like them.
I'm sure you like them.
But you know, that doesn't, it is not mutually exclusive with also wanting to get better,
to improve the self.
That's sort of my first foray into doing work on self-compassion to look at how it influences
the desire to improve the self.
And one of the reasons we looked at that was because when people hear about self-compassion,
they often or they did often have the same reaction I had, which is that that sounds really luxurious
and really maybe not conducive to learning and growth to be self-compassionate to yourself
because it has this flavor of, oh, you know, this negative thing happened to you, you failed
the test or whatever, don't worry about it. It has this flavor of potentially like letting people
off the hook, you know, as if it has nothing to do with them.
And that worried me and that, you know, bugs people
when they hear about self-compassion.
I'm sure it still bugs a lot of people.
And so we wanted to tackle the opposite notion
and demonstrate the opposite notion and demonstrate the opposite possibility that actually,
self-compassion rather than decreasing the desire for people to improve themselves,
to be complacent or lazy even, because whatever, everyone has mistakes or,
you know, don't worry about it, you know, not a big deal.
It actually motivates people to, why, I'm gonna do better next time.
I'm gonna learn from this.
I'm not gonna worry about being seen favorably.
I'm not gonna perseverate
about everyone thinking I'm awesome.
I'm gonna focus on how I can do better next time.
And so in this paper published over a decade ago now,
we showed using a whole bunch of different
ways to measure self-improvement.
We assessed either people who score highly in self-compassion in a trait or dispositional
sense.
So these are people who walk around pretty high.
They're pretty highly self-compassionate.
That's their default response.
Or we nudged people.
We experimentally manipulated.
We got them momentarily in the lab
to view something negative about themselves
in a self-compassionate way.
And we showed across all these different studies evidence
that look what happens when you have self-compassion.
You actually get people, for example,
to talk about their personal weaknesses, spontaneously
using growth mindset language to talk about their personal weaknesses, to sort of say,
hey, that's okay, I can do better.
So conveying the belief that attributes and abilities aren't set in stone, that they can
actually do better.
That's one study showing their spontaneous descriptions of
their personal weaknesses, their connoting growth mindset beliefs. We showed that people
are more likely to persist after a failure on a subsequent task if they're induced to feel self-compassionate, and persistence. Task
persistence has been a long-standing way to measure self-improvement. If you don't
care about improving the self, you're not going to persist and try to get
better on a subsequent task that is similar to the one you just failed, okay?
So people, for example, who have growth mindset beliefs, when they fail a task,
they want to do it again,
and they want to study for it because they want to do better.
If you don't have a growth mindset, you're not interested in self-improvement.
For example, you're feeling like you've got to protect the self,
you can avoid that test, or you're going to derogate that test,
you're not going to persist.
So we show that if you nudge people to be self-compassionate after they failed on a
test that was some version of a GRE we created for them that was designed to be really difficult,
so everybody failed.
We got some people to think in a more self-compassionate way.
Others actually, we had them think about how great they are, sort of a self-esteem control
condition.
And guess who studies harder for the next test that they have to take that's like the
one they took?
Study X seconds longer, 30 seconds a minute longer, the self-compassionate folks do versus
the self-esteem people do.
So just two examples.
I'm just going to give you one more because I like this study.
It's sort of subtle
measure of self-improvement. You nudge people to be self-compassionate or you nudge them to feel good about themselves, self-esteem, and then you give them the opportunity to interact with another
person. So they're being self-compassionate or thinking about how great they are in relation
to a personal weakness. Again, that's when
self-compassion is relevant when you're thinking about something negative about yourself.
And then you're being given the option to hang out with somebody else.
And these options include somebody who has
that same personal weakness you do, but has overcome it.
Somebody you're told has that personal weakness, so sort of neutral,
or somebody who has that personal weakness that you have but a much worse version of it.
And we know from a huge literature, established literature, that when you're wanting to feel good
about yourself, you want to hang out with and compare yourself to someone who's worse off than
you are. So you want to, what we call a downward social comparison, you want to hang out with and compare yourself to someone who's worse off than you are. So you want to, what we call a downward social comparison, you want to hang out with that
person who has that weakness that's worse than yours because it makes you feel better.
You know, it's like, hey, I got to be plus, but at least I didn't get a C, okay, that
kind of thing.
It makes you feel better.
But when you want to improve the self, you want to shoot upward.
You want to hang out with that person who has that personal weakness and is finding
ways to overcome it.
It's a little bit threatening because you have it and you haven't overcome it and they
have but if you're in a growth mindset, in a self-improvement mindset, that's who you
want to hang out with.
And lo and behold, that's what we find using this more subtle measure.
There's no mention of comparison target.
We're just like, who do you want to hang out with?
And people are choosing in greater proportion the upward comparison versus the downward
comparison when so often people typically want to be around people who are worse off
than they are, right?
Because it makes you feel better.
Totally human to want that, but not when you nudge people to feel self-compassionate.
So that's just a few examples from that first paper, but since then we've shown this desire
for self-improvement in a variety of other studies in relation to regrets people have,
in relation to romantic breakups, highly trait self-compassionate people or people you nudge
in some way to be self-compassionate. or people you nudge in some way to be self-compassionate,
they want to learn from their regrets.
They want to make sure they do better in their next relationship.
They don't want to commit the same mistakes.
They face the negativity that this is a regret I have.
I'm not happy about it.
I wish it hadn't happened.
I wish I hadn't done that.
I wish I had done something, depending on the nature of the regret.
Or look, this romantic breakup, it's my fault.
I'm facing it.
And instead of derogating that person or making excuses,
self-compassionate people, they want
to do better in their next relationship.
So we've shown it in all different kinds of domains
that contrary to any sense that self-compassion
makes people lazy or complacent,
it actually makes people more interested
in learning and growing.
And that's exciting to us.
That's exciting.
These are not heavy-handed nudges.
Okay, they're nudges.
And people are showing these more,
I would say adaptive responses to setbacks and failures.
That was a lot of talking.
I know, sorry about that, but it's exciting to me.
Yeah.
It was great, and it's fun to listen to you talk about this because you clearly are excited
in it.
As a researcher, I'm sure it's fun to get clear results and also results that help other
people lead happier lives.
One of the things I believe you've found
might be surprising to people who are new to self-compassion.
You know, a cursory glance at the subject
might seem to indicate that,
okay, fine, you're having a better relationship with yourself,
but it could fall into the bucket of navel gazing.
But what I believe you've demonstrated
is that having more compassion
for your own foibles and weaknesses
leads to more understanding of other people.
Yeah, this is such a fun work.
And I really want to give credit to a former student of mine
who's now a tenured professor
at the University of Memphis, Joway Zhang.
So much of this work has been done with him
in recent years, including the study
or the set of studies that you're talking about.
So, so much of the literature on self-compassion, in recent years, including the study or the set of studies that you're talking about.
So much of the literature on self-compassion, the scientific literature, then, whatever
it was, seven years ago, six years ago, and still now, has really focused on, hey, self-compassion
is good for you.
So I'm going to use jargon.
It has intrapersonal benefits, like within me.
It's good for me.
That's great.
Self-compassion is good for the person
practicing self-compassion.
So in the set of studies that you're referring to,
we were interested in looking at the interpersonal benefits
of self-compassion.
What does me treating myself compassionately
have to do with how I interact with and treat
other people?
You know, I am interested in that, right?
I'm interested in whether its benefits of compassion extend beyond the person engaging
in it.
And, you know, this is not rocket science.
It's very intuitive.
I mean, I don't have to use jargon to explain what we found here, which is that, hey, you know, self-compassion
makes you more open to acknowledging and accepting of your own flaws and shortcomings. That's by definition. Hey, look, I'm really not good at that. I'm accepting that. I'm going to try to get better
at that. So you have this sense of self-acceptance that's very well established, that self-compassion
boosts self-acceptance.
But what that also does when you sort of are accepting of your own flaws and shortcomings,
it makes you more prone to be accepting of other people's shortcomings.
And we've shown it's not just close others who you could say you have a motivation to
think favorably of, you know,
oh, my romantic partner or my kid, they're flaws, you know, I'm very accepting of them.
They're fine.
They're great.
We've also shown it extends to acquaintances, people you don't even know that well.
So it's not as if it's just something reserved for your inner circle, that self-compassion,
whether we're measuring it as you're just a highly dispositionally self-compassion, whether we're measuring it as you're just a highly
dispositionally self-compassionate person, or we're again nudging you experimentally
to be self-compassionate, you're more accepting of your flaws and shortcomings, and that spreads
to both close others and acquaintances.
But probably the most exciting study in that set of studies is the last one where we brought in
both participants, we call them, right, research subjects, and also were in contact with their
romantic partners. Okay. So both participants and their romantic partners filled out questionnaires
about their own personal flaw they have. And they also rated or filled out items about their own personal flaw they have, and they also rated or filled out items
about their partner's flaw,
and they also indicated how they felt
their partners viewed their own flaw.
So in English, what we found was that
self-compassion is associated not only
with being accepting of my own flaw,
but also my partner's flaw.
Okay, and this happens for both partners, all directions.
But the most important finding, I think,
those are important to me too,
but is that the partner feels accepted
to the degree you're high in self-compassion.
So to the degree I'm high in self-compassion,
not only am I accepting my own flaw in my partner's flaws
more, but my partner picks that up, feels it.
And that's huge, right?
I mean, I could be all accepting all by myself,
but my partner doesn't feel that way.
It's not going to have relational benefits.
Now, we didn't measure, for example,
relationship outcomes like the longevity of the relationship.
We didn't, okay?
But it's good to feel that your partner accepts you, okay?
I'm going to, you know, go on a limb there, that that's a good thing.
And I just love that study because of course you have, you know, both partners in there
talking.
It's not all just in my head.
My partner is feeling my acceptance of their flaw, which bodes very well for the
relationship.
So self-compassion is spreading to have interpersonal benefits and self-benefits as much research
has shown.
This may be obvious, but what do you think the mechanism is as I become more self-compassionate
and I'm more compassionate toward other people?
How would you describe that mechanism?
Mechanism is always an important question in our research, and we don't always get at it.
We first establish it. But I think the mechanism is not complicated here.
I think it has to do with a bit of common humanity going on.
Hey, I got this flaw, I'm accepting it, and everyone has flaws,
so I'm going to be more
open to your flaws as well.
It's a mindset that leaks to other people.
It's that simple.
Did we measure that exactly?
No, we measured how much my acceptance of my own flaw predicts my acceptance of your
flaw.
What is the exact mechanism or mechanisms that creates that link, I think
could be as simple as, I'm sort of recognizing everyone's got flaws.
I mean, that's what's helped me accept my own.
So I'm going to accept it by the people.
With that mindfulness paired there too, you're stepping back and sort of think, okay, let's
just be generous about other people. I'm being generous toward myself. It only makes
sense to be generous toward other people as well. The same sort of mindset being
applied to other people's flaws and shortcomings.
Yeah, I mean that tracks with how it's, I experienced it, which is like the more
friendly I become toward my own weaknesses, ugliness, et cetera, et cetera.
You just inexorably lead you to understand
that everybody else has their shit too.
I mean, hopefully.
I mean, it's almost like, you know,
there's a level of empathy here.
We've never measured that kind of thing,
but you get it more.
You're sitting there recognizing your flaw.
They got a flaw too, and you're sort of empathizing.
Yeah, okay, yeah, we all got flaws.
It's gonna be fine, you know? That's okay. You're human, I'm human, we're all human. Yes. So I think
it could be as simple as that. Another area I believe you've studied is leadership. So what
can you say about the impact of self-compassion on one's ability to be a good leader? Yeah, you know,
I haven't studied it directly.
I've definitely put pieces together from other people's work.
You know, I teach in our executive education program,
so it's a lot of times it's women leaders,
and it's just, it's fun to bring sort of these soft skills
into the workplace, which is, you know,
not my typical area of expertise.
So there, leadership, it matters a lot.
Authentic leadership is talked about so much in that world.
So I've pieced together things, but self-compassion and its effects on making you more improvement-oriented,
when leaders show that kind of behavior, first of all, I think it
serves as a role model for others because part of self-compassion and part of being
more inclined to improve is acknowledging your mistakes. And leaders who acknowledge
their mistakes, who are willing to acknowledge their mistakes, This communicates to their subordinates
that it's a safe place to do that.
Oh, they acknowledge their mistakes, so I can too.
So your self-compassion induced tendency
to want to improve yourself and see yourself warts and all
has an impact on those who follow you.
And the data show that leaders who have a growth mindset, and again, self-compassion
is something that nudges people toward having a stronger growth mindset, they treat their
subordinates in a different way.
For example, they are more inclined to track the ups and downs of their subordinates'
performance, presumably instead of writing them off.
For example, when they do poorly,
if you don't have a growth mindset
and you sort of believe people's abilities and attributes are
just what they are, there's not much you can do about it,
when someone does badly, you might just write them off
and look
them over for promotions. But if you have a growth mindset as a leader or manager, you're
more likely to recognize that there are ups and downs in people's performance because
you believe that growth is possible, that improvement is possible. You're going to be
more likely to invest your time in these subordinates, to give them the chance, to give them strategies
on how to improve and so forth.
And the data show, again, not my data,
but other people's data show that when
you act this way towards subordinates, they notice.
People can pick up.
If you ask employees at a company
to rate whether their managers managers or leaders, are growth mindset
oriented, they can do that with a decent degree of accuracy. It shows. Okay. And that's good
for everyone. It's a win-win. And it's a win for the company too, right? Because people
feel more motivated to improve themselves. And all of this, I would argue, is more likely
to happen to the degree those leaders are
practicing self-compassion.
Because self-compassion is making it safe for yourself to acknowledge your weaknesses,
to have that growth mindset for yourself, and then to have it leak over to how you view
and treat your employees and so forth.
Is there another aspect of your research
that you wanna talk about that we haven't gotten to?
Yeah, I love the idea that self-compassion
is relatively easy to learn how to do,
even though it does take practice,
like so much does, to get good at it.
And I'm really interested, one, as a parent,
I'm very cognizant of wanting to model self-compassion
for my children, particularly my daughter, you know, who's at a stage in life where there's
a lot of self-critical talk going on.
So I'm interested in learning more about self-compassion and parenting, both for the parent, but also how it can get
communicated and influence the children. And then another area that I'm really
interested in and have started work on is looking at how self-compassion might
be applied to the educational realm. In particular, interested in how self-compassion might be used as a tool to boost student engagement
in the classroom, which has really taken a hit probably even before the pandemic, but
is really salient to us post-pandemic.
And I mean really concrete things like, well, showing up for class.
I don't actually mean that.
I mean once you get to class, how much you participate, how much you ask questions, how
much you seek help.
These are sort of engagement related academic behaviors that are associated with, guess
what, doing better in school. And these are at record lows potentially, right now, in K-12 and college classrooms.
And as we all know intuitively, and the data also show, a lot of times people don't participate in class
or don't ask for help because they're afraid of how they're going to look,
fear of being negatively evaluated by other people, fear of how they're going to look. Okay, fear of being negatively evaluated by other people,
fear of how they're going to look dumb.
And or they don't feel a sense of belonging.
You know, like, who are these people?
I'm too afraid, I don't belong here.
And guess what?
Those two things, those fears you have
are being negatively evaluated.
The sense of not being connected to others.
Self-compassion can tackle those things, okay? We already know that. or being negatively evaluated, the sense of not being connected to others.
Self-compassion can tackle those things, okay?
We already know that.
And self-compassion is related to self-improvement, which is related to asking questions, seeking
help.
Like, how am I going to get better?
Why I got to go ask for help?
So I'm really, we've started looking at this notion that self-compassion, because it hits at those psychological tendencies,
it can in turn maybe increase engagement-related academic behaviors like raising my hand, go
ahead and saying what you think in the classroom discussion, that can one, not only make learning
more enjoyable, but also you do better in school.
A lot of these fears of being negatively evaluated,
these deficits in feeling belonging,
you know, a lot of times it's people
from marginalized backgrounds that feel this way, you know?
And so in some ways, I hope it works for everybody,
self-compassion, it encourages engagement for everybody,
but boy, wouldn't that be great if it helped people
who particularly struggle with worrying about
how they're going to be evaluated in an environment in which they might not feel like they belong.
That's exciting to me, and it seems pretty reasonable, you know, as something that could
help some students.
Yeah.
A friend of mine's, her highest form of praise is to call something not ludicrous.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah anyway, that's I mean, that's the future.
And I am interested in the self touching idea.
This is again, a student in the clinical psychology program who is spearheading this Eli Sussman
and yeah, it's delightful to be learning about that kind of work, which I hadn't before.
Well when you've got more results, come back and we'll talk about them. I'm delightful to be learning about that kind of work, which I hadn't before.
Well, when you've got more results, come back and we'll talk about them.
Yes, sounds fun.
If people want to learn more about you, how can they do that?
I have a website. I have a self-identity and relationships lab.
You can just first just find me on the UC Berkeley psychology website,
and there'll be a link to my lab.
And all my papers are available there for academic purposes.
You can download them, et cetera.
This was a pleasure chatting with you.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do it.
Yeah, no problem. It was a pleasure.
Thanks again to Dr. Serena Chen.
We made a few mentions to Dr. Kristin Neff in this episode.
I've put some links to my previous conversations with Kristin in the show notes.
If you want to go back and check those out.
Hey, don't forget I do a weekly newsletter in which I talk about the most important
learnings for me from the show.
And I also list a bunch of stuff that I'm really interested in,
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The goal is that it will be both quick and amusing and useful. Go check it out. You can sign up on my website, danharris.com.
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