Hello and welcome to the Calmar You podcast. This is your host, Chloe Brotheridge. I'm a coach, a

hypnotologist, and I'm the author of The Anxiety Solution and Brave New Girl. And this podcast is all

about helping you to become your calmest, happiest and most confident self. Welcome to today's

episode. I'm talking to the incredible

Kristen Neff, author of the new book, Fierce Self-Compassion, How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up,

claim their power and thrive. If you don't know who Kristen is, she's kind of a big deal in the

self-compassion world. She's one of the leading voices, and I quoted her several times in my book, The Anxiety Solution, and we get into talking about why the words fierce and kind don't often come together and why she thinks that they should come together and why she's written a whole book about this.

She shares her own journey to self-compassion because it hasn't always been easy for Kristen

and this is the reality of self-compassion. It is it's something that should be so simple,

just being kind to ourselves and yet so many of us seem to struggle with it and she shares her own

story around this. She discusses why she wrote this book specifically for women. Now, if you are a man listening to

this, or if you're non-binary, you can absolutely gain so much from this episode, but there is a

slight slant towards talking about women because that's what the book is about. We get into this

question, which I often ask myself and often ask other people, which is, why is it so hard for us to be kind to

ourselves? Is it something that is learned? Is it something that's innate? And Kristen just gives

the perfect answer to this. And we also get into why anger can actually be a good thing and why it's

not often acceptable for us to be angry in our culture. And, you know, why and how we can start to tap into that

and use that as a force for good. She also answers this question. Again, this is something that I often

hear people saying. I hear people say, you know, if I'm kind to myself, will I just sit on the

sofa all day and want to eat ice cream? And that's what I think is going to happen if I'm too

kind to myself.

If I stop beating myself up, then I will just be lazy and nothing will get done. And she just shares such a brilliant perspective on this that if you're thinking this well,

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