Dr. Kristin Neff is a pioneer in the study of self-compassion and has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential research psychologists. She is the first to operationally define and measure the construct of self-compassion almost twenty years ago. As an undergraduate student at UCLA, Dr. Neff was a communications major but near the end of her undergraduate career she studied cultural anthropology and became fascinated with the issue of cultural relativism versus universalism. She took many different courses and fell in love with psychological anthropology. She continued her education by earning her master's and doctorate in educational psychology (human development) from UC-Berkeley.

During the last year of graduate school, Dr. Neff became interested in Buddhism and has been practicing meditation in the Insight Meditation tradition ever since. While doing her post-doctoral work, she decided to conduct research on self-compassion – a central construct in Buddhist psychology – as it had not yet been examined empirically. In this podcast, Dr. Neff shares her academic and professional journey highlighting when she became interested in self-compassion and discusses how she turned her passion into a career helping people improve their mental and physical well-being. She also discusses how she and her colleague, Dr. Chris Germer, co-founded the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion (CMSC) and developed an empirically supported training program called Mindful Self-Compassion, an eight-week program which is taught by thousands of teachers worldwide.

Dr. Neff is an accomplished author and she briefly discusses her enormously popular first book, Self-Compassion, which offers expert advice on how to limit self-criticism and offset its negative effects. This extraordinary book provides exercises and action plans for dealing with many different types of emotional struggles each and every one of us faces on a daily basis. Dr. Neff also discusses her most recent book Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive which expands on her previous work and research by exploring new ideas that further develop and broaden our notion of self-kindness and its capacity to transform our lives. Fierce Self-Compassion shows women how to balance tender self-acceptance with fierce action to claim their power and change the world.

As a pioneer in the study of self-compassion, Dr. Neff does a lot of media interviews and has a TED talk where she talks about the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion. She states, “I have a TED talk where I joke that I’m a self-compassion evangelist, you know, kind of my goal is to spread the good word that there is a different way to relate to yourself that actually makes a dramatic difference in your ability to cope with difficulty and your happiness and well-being.” She further explains “self-compassion works. It transforms lives. It’s not like an abstract, theoretical idea. It’s something you can actually do. It’s a practice…anyone can just try it out and see immediately for themselves how it changes the way you relate to difficulty.”

Dr. Neff offers advice to those interested in the field of psychology and one of the pieces of advice she offers is “the thing I love about psychology and the thing I love about what I do is the ability to help people. The ability to change lives. Ironically, you’re not going to change as many lives if you’re a researcher. I mean, I was kind of fortunate in that my research happened to be in a niche that you know, and sometimes you do find applied applications of the research that makes a big difference, but realistically, you’re more likely to be able to change lives if you are a counselor or if you are a social worker, or if you’re a teacher.”

One of the unique things Dr. Neff shared with me is that she was in a documentary called “The Horse Boy” which is a film about her autistic son, Rowan,