I'm Maura Arons-Mili, and this is The Anxious Achiever. We look at stories from 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. 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 who measured

success in billable hours, it wasn't so easy to think about taking time off for mental health. Mark wrote

a blog about his experience, and so I wanted to talk to him about his journey.

Did you always feel looking back, I mean, do you think you always had some depression and other things in your profile or did it really come on all of a sudden?

So in looking back, I think what was most prevalent over the course of my life was the obsessive compulsive disorder.

And I didn't recognize this until a few years ago.

I remember it was a few weeks before my bar mitz.

Now dated myself 23 years, I think.

But I was obsessively chanting my haf Torah for the weeks leading up to it.

...