From the outside our lives may look great, fun, and perfect! But sometimes, our lives get messy, complicated, and hard to handle because unexpected things happen. On top of that, some contextual situations make things extra hard for us: struggles with mental health, being of a different race, having a different gender identity, belonging to a different religious group, and many more.

In this conversation I chat with Rae Senarighi an international fine artist, designer, and muralist; transgender, and cancer survivor. You will listen directly to how Rae practices self-compassion, self-acceptance and self-love and how Rae celebrate authentically their community.

Many of us grew up in a world that told us that we should be fearless, jump off the cliff, and eliminate fear from our lives. In a very intimate conversation, I chat with Steve Hayes, Ph.D., a co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, about his relationship to fear, anxieties, and worries and how his personal experience and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy unfolded simultaneously.

This is part 1 of a very personal conversation with Steve, and it gives us a peek into the life behind the scenes of a person that published hundreds of academic papers and academic books, trained hundreds of clinicians, presented at countless of international conferences and developed a model of psychological science that has exploded in the last 30 years.

Key Takeaways

What to listen for:

• What was difficult for Dr. Hayes dealing with fear.
• How Steve made a pivot from struggling with fear since very early in his life to learning to live with it.
• How Steve practices self-compassion when struggling with fears.
• How Steve learned to stay present with his fears, be curious about them, and appreciate them.
• How Steve determined his values and how they helped him to navigate through daily life.
• How Steve handled his fears about his first TEDx talk.
• How Steve’s personal experience shaped the development of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

About Steve

Steve is a Nevada Foundation Professor of Psychology in the Behavior Analysis program at the University of Nevada. He is an author of 47 books and nearly 670 scientific articles, his career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. He is the developer of Relational Frame Theory, an account of human higher cognition, and has guided its extension to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based methods. He is a co-developer of Process-Based Therapy (PBT), a new approach to evidence-based therapies more generally.

I never have heard a person say “I’m concerned about how kind, caring and compassionate I am with myself.“

Most of us, may go into a judgmental mode when making a mistake, saying the wrong thing, or looking back at actions we took in the past.

Sometimes, we may even hold onto beliefs that, “by being tough with ourselves, we’re keeping ourselves in check so we don’t make the same mistakes again.”

We do have tricky minds!

Here is what I can tell you: the science of self-compassion has shown us that “kindness takes us far, really far.”