Serena Chen

And don't be too hard on yourself.

In fact, I want to close this with a study done by Juliana Brains and Serena Chen.

And this was...

Let me just pull it up.

It'll actually encourage us to make the change and to do better in the future whereas being harsh actually doesn't really work.

And there's data behind it.

Julianne Brands and Serena Chen did this study and they found that to be the case.

And it's actually what I found in my own personal life.

Someone else's deception or abuse is their responsibility.

A small experimental study by Julia Brines and Serena Chen found that self-compassion after wrongdoing increased people's reported motivation to make amends.

It measured motivation, not whether they changed their behaviors over time.

I'm including it because taking responsibility doesn't require us to keep insulting ourselves.

And the third piece of research is about you.

Nathaniel Fast at USC and Serena Chen, UC Berkeley, ran four studies on people in positions of power.

When people in a power role felt incompetent in that role, they became more aggressive toward the people below them.

When the researchers boosted their sense of self-worth, the aggression went away.

A lot of us have relied on self-criticism for so long that we think it is the part of us enforcing our moral standards.

If I stop attacking myself, who will make sure I will never do this again? But research by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen found the opposite of what many people expect.

In their experiments, people who responded to a mistake with self-compassion reported greater motivation to make amends and avoid repeating it.

They didn't become less responsible, they become more interested in improving.

It's something else.

Julia Brenes and Serena Chen ran four experiments in 2012.

People who were given a self-compassionate response to their own failure were more motivated to fix the weakness and spent longer studying after failing a test than people given the self-esteem boost.

If we name the fear directly, if we just ease up on ourself, it never costs us our edge.