5. Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff

Focuses on: Anxiety and Depression
Type(s): Greater Understanding/Research and Exercises/Action

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck  (yes, I had to find a way to plug my own shit here), I made the point that true self-esteem can’t be a measure of how someone feels about their successes, it must be a measure of how we feel about our failures .

This isn’t a terribly original idea. People have been shitting on self-esteem for a couple decades now. But Neff is the first psychologist to conceptualize an alternative metric for self-esteem: self-compassion .