Will going easy on yourself make you lazy?
· Source: Breines & Chen, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2012
Being hard on yourself feels like the way to improve. In experiments, kindness after a failure made people work harder.
Will going easy on yourself make you lazy?
Kindness after failing made people try harder. Students who failed a test and were then encouraged to be kind to themselves studied longer for the next one than students who were told to boost their self-esteem. Tell it the way you’d tell a friend’s. What happened, what was hard about it, what you’d try next time. Out loud, in the evening. Talk to yourself like someone on your side. Halflight keeps what you said, so next month you can see how far you’ve come.