What is compassion?
What exactly is compassion and why it is important for our mental health, and how we can develop and maintain it in the face of challenges?
What it is, why it is central to our individual and collective mental health, and how we can develop and maintain it in the face of challenges.
Compassion is:
- More than just warmth, kindness or gentleness
- Sensitivity to our own and others’ distress, together with the commitment to try and do something about it. This includes motivation (‘our commitment to do something about it’); sensitivity (paying attention, the opposite of ‘turning a blind eye’); sympathy (our emotional response); distress tolerance (our ability to bear distress); empathy (recognising and making sense of feelings) and being non-judgmental.
- Self-compassion is also key, and includes the same elements. It is different to self-esteem, which is conditional, competitive and related to our drive system (our motivation ). Studies suggest that compassion is more key to success than self-esteem.
Learning outcomes
We will have a chance to discuss compassion and what this might mean in practice in our own situations.
Why is it important?
A central ability that our species evolved in order to survive and function as social groups. Key to our soothing system which balances our other two systems, namely our drive and defence systems
Compassion at work
Within organisations, studies suggest that genuine compassion, reflected in policies is key to organisational flourishing and performance as well as to staff mental health and wellbeing.
Get in touch
All of our workplace wellbeing programmes are developed from the ground up to meet the needs of the organisation we are working with. We will build a bespoke programme based on your requirements and our experiences.
Get in touch with our team of workplace wellbeing experts and see how we can help your organisation.