Self-compassion is not an excuse: why being kind to yourself after failing makes people try harder

Try this: recall the last time you messed something up, and recall exactly what you said to yourself. "Idiot." "Typical." "Can't even get that right." Then ask: if your closest friend had made the same mistake, would you say those words to them?

Almost everyone says no. The gap between those two answers is what this piece is about.

The commonest fear

The usual reason people hesitate to be kind to themselves is: if I stop being hard on myself, I will let everything slide. Harshness feels like an engine. Many successful people are certain the unpleasant voice in their head is what got them where they are, and fear that switching it off will make everything slip.

In 2012 two psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, put that fear to the test. They gave students a vocabulary test so hard almost everyone did badly. Afterwards one group read a self-compassionate note: the test was hard, failing is normal, many people struggle with it. Another read a self-esteem boost: you must be intelligent to have got into this university. A third read nothing.

All were then told there would be a retest and given as long as they liked to study. The self-compassion group studied noticeably longer than the other two. Other experiments in the same paper found that recalling a past wrong with self-compassion made people more motivated to make amends and apologise, not less.

Why it works that way

The explanation is simple. People who punish themselves harshly avoid looking at their mistakes, because each look means another beating. Avoiding means learning nothing. People who are kind to themselves can look straight at the mistake, because looking no longer hurts unbearably. They take responsibility more easily, and try again sooner.

What it is not

• Not self-praise. Self-praise needs you to feel better than others; self-compassion needs no comparison. Notice that in the Berkeley experiment the self-esteem group studied no harder than the group who read nothing.
• Not excuse-making. An excuse says the fault was not yours. Self-compassion owns the fault without attaching a verdict on your worth as a person.
• Not softness. Often the kindest thing you can say to yourself is the hardest to hear: I did get this wrong, and I will fix it.

Three steps to try

The psychologist Kristin Neff at the University of Texas, who laid the groundwork for research on this in 2003, suggests three short steps. One: name what is happening, "this is really hard right now". Two: remind yourself that this is part of being human, that everyone goes through it, that you are not uniquely broken. Three: ask what you need right now, and give yourself that.

What stops people getting up is rarely the fall. It is usually what they say to themselves after it.

Step two is skipped most often and changes the most. The most painful part of failing is usually not the failure itself but the belief that normal people do not go through this. That belief is almost always wrong. Nobody posts that part online.

If the three steps feel too theoretical, there is a shortcut: write down what you would say to a friend in exactly your situation, then read it back to yourself. It feels awkward the first time, and stops feeling awkward sooner than you expect.