Self-compassion Revisited

Mindfulness, meaning, engagement, and employee happiness are terms encountered with increasing frequency in management and business articles. Probably related to each of these is a concept rarely mentioned: self-compassion. How do you feel about yourself? You may show compassion to others but do you show compassion to yourself? If you backed your car into a garage post, how would you feel? Dr. Kristin Neff, a leading scholar and researcher of self-compassion, offers an online test to determine how self-compassionate we are.
 
Several years ago I blogged about self-compassion and Dr. Neff’s work. From her website: “Self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings” and has three elements:

• Being kind to ourselves: Be “warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.” 
• Accepting our common humanity: Recognize that “suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience – something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to ‘me’ alone.”  
• Being mindful: Observe one’s “thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them,” being non-judgmental.

I was reminded of the importance of self-compassion while reading the May/June issue of Explore. Dr. Roberto Benzo and colleagues reported a questionnaire study of 400 healthcare workers examining the relationships among self-compassion and a variety of other measures, such as happiness, mindfulness, stress, and exercise. They found:

• self-compassion was highly related to happiness (r = .63)
• “self-compassion was associated with decreased feelings of isolation”
• accepting our humanity and being mindful were “the most predictive of happiness”
• Self-compassion had a far greater impact on happiness than exercise.

My take-aways:
 
1. The study by Benzo and associates was at one hospital. It would be interesting to compare employees at different organizations using the same measures, that is self-compassion, happiness, and such, but add measures for engagement, job satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. My guess is organizations with employees who score higher on self-compassion would also be score higher on engagement and organizationally customer satisfaction would be greater.
 
2. This study and others underscore the value of self-compassion and mindfulness training in corporate settings. While such training may seem “touchy-feely,” the potential to affect the bottom-line and customer care may be significant.
 
3. I recommend spending some time at Dr. Neff’s self-compassion website. Watch videos and listen to the exercises. Take time to take care of you.
 
Benzo, R. P., Kirsch, J. L., & Nelson, C. (2017). Compassion, mindfulness, and the happiness of healthcare workers. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 13(3), 201-206.
 
Neff, K. (2017) Self-compassion. http://self-compassion.org
 
Image, “Garage Post.”  © John Ballard, 2017
 
© John Ballard, PhD,  2017. All rights reserved.
 
Author, Decoding the Workplace, BEST CAREER BOOK Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2016.
Please visit www.decodingtheworkplace.com.

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