I must say it has been an interesting few days. After reading "On Discipline, Intelligence and Stoicism: It's Tough to Be Smart, but Smart to Be Tough", by @stufffromsam, I kept hearing this word in my mind..."resilience". I also heard other words like practice, improvisation, and philosophy.
From every need springs an action. All actions, taken by every animal, stem from a need. A need to eat, a need to sleep, a need to drink, a need to preserve oneself, a need for love and belonging. How we satisfy our needs depends on the skills we have learned and how those skills are taught. As I read Sam's article, I was looking for the word skill. I knew it would come and eventually, I saw it in his quote from author Amy Morin. Read Sam's article for it is well worth your time to do so.
For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest to understand who and what I am. Am I the sum of what others think of me? No. But everything I know about myself I learned from someone else. This knowledge is called "feedback". I live in a culture of people and everyone I contact gives me feedback. How I respond to that feedback is dependent on the skills I have.
I have been exploring the relationship between skills and behavior specifically since I read two fascinating books by Dr. Ross W. Greene. I started with "The Explosive Child" to better understand how kids behave (I have two kids myself). Then I read "Raising Human Beings". Both books frame the knowledge shared in the context of parent child relationships. The basic premise of both books is that kids would do better if they could, if they had the skills. I believe that these two books represent not just a way of raising kids, they describe a lifestyle change that can be adapted by anyone in their pursuit of happiness.
Sam's article describes a hypothetical kid named Suzie who has the skills to excel at school. Suzie had learned how to delay gratification and the resilience to apply herself to master the materials taught at her school. Sam's example of Suzie didn't learn these skills in a vacuum. She most likely had a mentor, a parent or someone else she could trust to teach her those skills. Everything we do in life depends on our skills.
Since I finished reading Sam's article, I read a very interesting scholarly paper, Self-Compassion, Self-Esteem, and Well-Being, by Kristin D. Neff, a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin. Here I see the first mention of something called, "Self-compassion". In my reading of Neff's article, I found many nuggets, but the best one, the one that seems to sum it up is here:
In summary, research suggests that self-compassion provides greater emotional resilience and stability than self-esteem. It also involves less intense self-evaluation, ego-defensiveness, and self-enhancement than self-esteem. One might say that with self-compassion, the ego moves from the foreground into the background. Instead of evaluating oneself as a distinct, separate individual, with boundaries that are clearly defined in contrast to others, the self is seen as part of a greater, interconnected whole. Self-compassionate individuals do not have to be successful or feel superior to others in order to experience positive feelings about themselves. In fact, self-compassion is relevant precisely when people feel inadequate or fall flat on their face.
Huh. There's that word again. "Resilience". Resilience is what we develop when we practice a skill until we master it. Resilience allows us to fail when we practice a skill and still recover. I used to teach a computer class for people who were just learning computers and I would tell them, "Don't worry about making a mistake here. I want you to make the mistakes here so that you don't have to do the same thing on the job." I was teaching resilience and self-compassion in that class, too. We practice a skill to learn from our mistakes on the path to mastery. Self-compassion gives us the ability to practice a skill without judging ourselves, or the need to be better than someone else. The joy is in the mastery of the skill, regardless of our relations to anyone else.
To put it differently, self-compassion gives us the resilience we need to perform under stress, to continue working even when we fail. Practice of a skill to mastery leads to improvisation with that skill. I used to take improvisation classes just for fun. I did it because on the first night, my cheeks were sore and my throat was hoarse from laughing so hard. My improvisation teacher would often say, "Don't worry about making a mistake. By next week, no one will remember." He was teaching resilience. Improvisation classes are a great way to learn about resilience. Improvisation is the foundation *skill* of acting. All of the famous actors you know and love in popular culture know how to improvise. All great actors have resilience.
Self-compassion gives us the courage to improvise when things go awry. Self-compassion allows to take a wider view of our mistakes and weaknesses, to see ourselves as a part of a greater whole, as a part of humanity. The differences between self-compassion and self-esteem as shown in Kristin Neff's paper make the schisms in modern American culture all the more clear to me now.
Self-compassion is a skill. It cannot be bought, it must be taught. We may be able to teach it to ourselves, but once we have mastered the skill of self-compassion, we can bring a little more peace to the earth by teaching that skill to someone else.