Unabridged Interview: Kristin Neff

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
This is No Small Endeavor, I'm Lee C. Camp. You're listening to our Unabridged Interview with Kristin Neff. Professor Kristin Neff is a Professor of Educational Psychology at UT Austin. She has done a lot of remarkable work on practices of kindness, kindness to oneself, self-compassion, compassion to and with oneself. Found this a remarkable interview. Glad to be releasing it again as a best of episode because it's one of those that I've gone back and listened to more than once and have recommended to quite a number of people including one or two of my sons.
Self-compassion. Hope you find this helpful.
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**Lee C. Camp** (2:26)
Kristin Neff received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.
Is currently an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Kristin is a pioneer in the field of self-compassion research. In addition to writing numerous academic articles on the topic, she's also the author of the book Self-Compassion, The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself, and most recently, Fierce Self-Compassion, How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. Welcome, Kristin.

**Kristin Neff** (2:58)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

**Lee C. Camp** (3:01)
Yeah. Thanks for joining us so much. I always like it when someone can be a little bit of a contrarian. And so you're somewhat of a contrarian to the popular pop culture celebration of self-esteem, it seems.
Tell us a little bit about that.

**Kristin Neff** (3:19)
Yes. Well, it's not just me. It's really the whole field of psychology. I'm not a lone voice in this. So if you define self-esteem as a positive judgment of worth, you know, the feeling that I'm a good person versus a bad person, there's no problem with having self-esteem. It's definitely better to have self-esteem than to hate yourself. The whole problem is how do you get your high self-esteem? What we know in psychology, there's so many research studies that show a lot of people get it in a pretty unhealthy way like feeling special and above average.
It's not okay to be average, which means we always have to be better than others, which means we're always comparing ourselves to others, which means we might get jealous, or we might bully people, or other people make us feel insecure, so we feel less connected to them.
But probably the biggest problem with self-esteem is that it tends to be contingent. In other words, we only feel good about ourselves when we succeed or when we look the way we want to look, or when people like us. But what happens when things don't go our way? Self-esteem is a fair weather friend, right? It's there for us at the good times, but it deserts us when times get tough, right? And that was my idea about self-compassion is more of a stable, unconditional friend.