The main difference between individuals who show a certain level of self-compassion and the ones who show none or lower is that the first ones have the strength to stand up after having made a mistake, learn something from this mistake and be successful next time.

Self-compassion and its effect

By questioning your experiences, you are likely to become more self-compassionate. This would explain by the fact that what you actually do is discovering new things about yourself with every new experience.

Question your experiences

A sure way of practicing self-compassion is by actually trying to learn lessons from all your experiences, especially the negative ones. You should stop judging these experiences as being good or bad, but rather look for the meaning of each and every one of them.

Learning self-compassion

One of the main keys to learning self-compassion is to actually practice being patient with oneself, especially on your worst days. Remember to put yourself first, and to turn every negative emotion into a lesson learned.

Be patient with yourself

Being self-compassionate implies that one should accept his or her own limits, success and failures. Let's not forget that kindness goes a long way when practiced with everybody, especially with yourself.

Self-compassion as a mark of humanity

Self-compassion enables you to take risks while being positive about the fact that even if things do not turn out your way, everything will eventually be fine, as you are still the same person.

Self-compassion can work wonders

Learning how to understand and to work with your negative feelings can prove extremely useful to your development. It is, therefore, essential to find the source of your negative emotions and to use them as a means of introspection, in order to get to know yourself better.

Value your negative feelings

This post is part of TED's "How to Be a Better Human" series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. One of the great myths of self-compassion is that it's about lying to yourself.