Welcome to the MyBuddyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wackib, founder and co-CEO of MyBuddyGreen and your host.

Dr. Kristen Neff received her PhD at UC Berkeley and is currently an associate professor in human

development at the University of Texas at Austin. She is considered a pioneer in the field of

self-compassion, which leads me to the title of her latest must-read book, Fear's Self-compassion.

How women can harness kindness to speak up, claim their power, and thrive.

Kristen, welcome. Thank you Jason. Happy to be here.

I'm so happy to have you here as I mentioned before the show. I'm surrounded by women.

I was raised by my mother and grandmother and married. I have two young daughters.

Our audience at MyBuddyGreen is mostly women. I am surrounded by women and your book

is titled Fear's Self-compassion. How women can harness kindness to speak up,

claim their power, and thrive. So it is so great to have you here. You have a tremendous

personal story. So can we start there and talk about your journey and passion or calling if you

will, you've developed for self-compassion? Yeah, sure. I certainly didn't come up with the idea,

right? Maybe it was the first to scientifically study it, but this is really an ancient idea.

I mean, it's compassion. And I learned about it actually when I learned Buddhist meditation.

So it was my last year of graduate school at UC Berkeley back in the 90s. And basically,

my life was a mess. I had just gotten out of a divorce. It was a really messy divorce. I was

feeling like self-doubt with some shame and just didn't really know where I was going. But I was

also under a lot of stress. I knew I'd probably get my PhD, but after devoting six years of my

life, there was absolutely no guarantee of a job. And it's like, oh my gosh, am I going to be able

to pay the bills and pay it back with loans? And so I was a case. And so I learned that Buddhist

meditation was good for stress. And I was at Berkeley. I went to UC Berkeley. And so literally,

...