LinkedIn Presents.

I'm Maura Arons-Mili, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories for business leaders who've dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down,

how they pick themselves up, and how they hope work will change in the future.

Today, we're going to talk about the idea of self-compassion. According to one of our guests,

compassion is something that's easy for a lot of us to conceptualize and practice when it comes to

other people, not so much for ourselves, especially for those of us prone to ruminating, stewing,

being self-critical, being anxious.

In a moment, we'll talk to Dr. Kristen Neff, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and an expert on self-compassion.

But first, we'll hear from Mark Goldstein, someone who up until recently lacked any little bit of that self-compassion.

He started his career where, unfortunately, a lot of us do.

I felt a sense of pressure, not necessarily that, you know, my family imposed upon me,

but just growing up in Westchester County in New York, there was just certain expectations that you're going to be an accountant,

a doctor, a lawyer. You know, you're not going to branch off into something outside of one of

those or related profession. My father, my brother, doctors, I hate blood. That wasn't on the table.

I did not want to go into accounting, so it kind of just left being a lawyer.

Thankfully, I learned quickly that I love doing it, but it was really out of a sense of

I need to choose a profession that my community would approve of.

Today, Mark is a lawyer at the firm Reed Smith, where he focuses on labor and

employment, and there are a lot of parts of his job that he loves. But he also didn't realize

until recently that he struggles with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD. Things you maybe

don't usually equate with a high-powered law gig. And as someone who spent his life trying to achieve, and

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