PNTV: Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff (#121)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Self Compassion by Kristin Neff. Self Compassion, Philosopher's Note. We're going to look at a handful of my favorite big ideas, but first we'll start by talking a little bit more about Kristen. I discovered her work through Brene Brown when I was reading Daring Greatly and the Gifts of Imperfection. We have some videos and notes coming up on those books soon and Brene's work is closely tied to Kristen's. They're all about, well, Brene's all about vulnerability and connection and compassion. And a lot of that is connected to Kristen's work. And Kristen literally created the field of self compassion. There wasn't any empirical research on the Buddhist practices of self compassion until Kristen decided to make that a reality. So really, really cool stuff. And the book is all about the scientific kind of why and how to cultivate self compassion. And I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas. We're going to start with the top or the kind of three components, the three key elements of self compassion, which are self kindness, common humanity and mindfulness. So we'll go through each of those in more detail. Self kindness, it's pretty straightforward. We have an alternative options between being self critical or self kind. If we want to cultivate self compassion, we need to cultivate the ability to be kind to ourselves. If you haven't noticed, it may not sound like a big deal, but it's actually huge. If you haven't noticed, we often have a running monologue in our head criticizing ourselves. That self critical talk. We want to be able to observe and notice, not only slow it down and stop it, but actually move toward being kind with ourselves. So if we had a dear friend who was experiencing suffering or pain, ideally we'd show up. We'd be very present with them to that we'd say, wow, I really feel what you're going through right now. And we'd have compassion for them. We would feel it with them. We want to apply that same idea to ourselves. We want to be able to notice when we're falling into the real self critical talk and see, wow, I'm just, we're in a lot of pain right now. We're struggling. I'm struggling right now. And to be able to have that compassion, that kindness for ourselves is a huge thing. So she talks about that in a lot more detail, but I'll leave it at that for now. We want to cultivate self kindness, notice when we're going into that self critical mode and cultivate more kindness. Second thing is common humanity. So the second element, and these all work together, is common humanity. So oftentimes when we fail or we fall short of our expectations or goals, we think we're the only ones and we have self pity. But if we want to have self compassion, we want to see that suffering and struggling and falling short is part of the human experience. And then rather than needing to be better than other people and looking down on people, or feeling worse than people and looking up, being envious and jealous, we can just see the sameness in our common humanity, that we all have struggles, we all experience pain. Now that the causes of that and the specific experiences will differ of course. But that common humanity that we all have times when we're struggling is a huge part of self compassion, an important thing for us to embrace. That's the second element. The third element is mindfulness. She has some great definitions on mindfulness and some great practices on how to cultivate it. But this idea that we want to be able to clearly see reality in a non judgmental way, we just want to see reality for what it is. We want to see our pain, our suffering, whatever our experience is in that moment, clearly purely for what it is. We don't want to ignore it and try to avoid it. We also don't want to dramatize it. It's make it bigger than it is. We want to observe it. So we're going to talk a lot more about mindfulness in the weeks and months and years ahead. I've been really passionate about neuroscience and mindfulness and how do we get our minds right. But that's the basic idea with mindfulness. And you cannot have self compassion if your mind is spinning out of control. You just can't. And again, all these things work together. If you don't have mindfulness and you can't notice where your mind is, you might get locked into the self critical mode. You're going to have a tough time practicing self kindness. You're not going to be able to see that this is a common experience, that we all have suffering, we all fall short at different times and make mistakes and fail, etc. We want to be able to cultivate our mindfulness, be able to put our attention where we want when we want to see reality cleanly. Big idea. Now that leads to our fourth idea here, a noting practice. So this is a way to cultivate mindfulness that I think is really, really cool. Dan Siegel in Mindsight we did an episode on Dan not too long ago. He likes to say that we need to be able to name it to tame it. We have to be able to name it to tame it. So if we can't see the experience we're having, write that down. Name it, name it. That is an N. Name it. To tame it. You have to be able to name it to tame it. If you can't identify what you're experiencing, it's just running the show. It's kind of like that metaphor that great meditation teachers use, that if you're underneath the waterfall and your thoughts are just cascading on your head, you can have an unpleasant experience. If you can swim over to the bank and look at the waterfall going, you can actually see and observe what's happening. Another way to think about it is imagining leaves going, flowing through a stream. Now, those are your thoughts. Those are your experiences going through. Now if you're sitting on the bank, you can watch the stream, you can see the leaves, you can see the twigs going in this stream. But sometimes you get pulled into the current and you just are going, well, if you can't see what's happening, if you can't witness it, if you can't observe it, you can't name it, then you can't tame it. And noting is a cool way to name what you're experiencing. So it's very simple but very powerful. In my meditation practice, for example, oftentimes, not all the time, but oftentimes, if I find myself nice and grounded, following my breath, enjoying that process, and all of a sudden I'll go off on a little tangent and I'll start strategizing. Okay, that's nice. I want to notice that. Gently bring myself back and I can just name that. I can note it. I can say strategizing to myself. Softly mellow. Just a little mental note. I was strategizing. Okay, cool. Back to my breath. Maybe I'll get into planning and I'll say, what am I going to do today? And how's this going to happen? What about this? Oh, that's nice. I noticed that. I can name it, I can note it. I'm planning, right? Maybe my back's a little bit sore while I'm sitting down all day. Well, I can notice that. I can note it. And what happens when we can note things is we can choose a wise response. So the moment you can observe something, you're experiencing an emotion or a pain or whatever, you can do something about it. Noting, practice. It's a big idea. You can Use this to cultivate your mindfulness. If you're feeling it, remember you need to be able to name it if you want to tame it. There you go. Final big idea. Self efficacy beliefs. She walks through our self kindness, common humanity, mindfulness unpacks those, then applies them to different aspects of our life. She talks about motivational theory and this idea of self efficacy which is kind of synonymous with self confidence. It's your ability to trust yourself, essentially your belief in yourself to achieve your dreams. Self efficacy. She talks about an amazing research study on wrestlers, high school wrestlers who they were observed over I think a 12 month period of time and they observed and noted their self efficacy beliefs. Then they looked at how they performed and what they found was that regardless of their prior success, the wrestlers who believed in themselves, who had high levels of self efficacy, outperformed those who didn't believe in themselves. That's pretty cool. And then she saw that in particular events over time, sudden death, where the next wrestler who gets the next point wins, that the only thing that predicted who won in that sudden death. And this is when the wrestlers are most exhausted. They're very evenly matched because they've tied throughout the match, they're going into overtime. The only thing that predicted whether they won or not who won was their self efficacy. Did they believe in themselves? Now what does this have to do with self compassion? What it has to do with self compassion is if you criticize yourself all the time, that's not going to help you build your self efficacy. Self criticism creates anxiety which creates something they call self handicapping. Handicapping behaviors. Right. So you have anxiety, then you do things to handicap your success. You don't try as hard, you procrastinate. Then you always have an excuse. Oh, I didn't try that hard. You know, if I really tried, I would have been able to do it. Not effective. If we want to achieve our our dreams and live our highest potential. So cultivating self efficacy is best done through self compassion. Again, this is what the research shows. When you're able to be kind to yourself, to see that we all struggle common humanity and to bring mindfulness, you can cultivate self efficacy which is huge for us as we go out and aspire to live our dreams. So there you go. That's a quick look at self compassion. We talked about self kindness. Looking at that voice and moving from critical to actually kind of like a friend would talk to their friend who was struggling. Common humanity. We all experience challenges. Quit trying to think. It's just you see the connectedness we're all in this together. Mindfulness. We can cultivate that through the noting practice. Name it Containment and self efficacy. Do you believe that you can achieve your dreams? It's a very important thing. And self compassion to help us get there. So what idea jumped out at you? Think about that and think about how you can apply that to your life on a more consistent, consistent basis. Hope you dug it and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.