Being Kind to Yourself Is a Professional Skill

Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych

Self-kindness can sound slightly out of place in a conversation about professional performance. In demanding environments, we are more accustomed to talking about discipline, responsibility, high standards and the ability to respond when things have not gone well. Yet after many years working with high performers, I have become increasingly interested in whether the way somebody responds internally to their own mistakes and disappointments affects how effectively they are able to learn from them.

Law provides plenty of opportunities for self-criticism. A lawyer may lose a case, overlook something they believe they should have noticed, handle a conversation poorly or simply finish a piece of work knowing that they could have done it better. For highly conscientious people, the internal response can be severe, partly because their standards have contributed to their success. They care about doing things properly, and disappointment in themselves may feel like an entirely appropriate response when they fall short.

The difficulty is that self-criticism and useful self-evaluation are not the same psychological process. Useful reflection asks what happened, what contributed to it and what needs to change. Harsh self-criticism often adds a judgement about the person themselves, and once that happens attention can move away from understanding the performance towards defending, criticising or repeatedly evaluating the self.

From a LegalPsych perspective, I think this distinction matters because learning requires enough psychological safety to look accurately at what went wrong. If acknowledging an error immediately produces a strong internal attack, there may be a natural tendency to avoid examining it, explain it away or continue thinking about it without reaching anything particularly useful. None of those responses necessarily improves the next performance.

Being kinder to ourselves does not therefore mean lowering standards or excusing poor work. In fact, I would argue almost the opposite. It means creating enough psychological distance from an outcome to examine it properly. We can acknowledge that something was not good enough without needing to conclude that we are not good enough.

A useful test is to consider how we would speak to a highly capable colleague who had made the same mistake. Most experienced professionals would probably neither reassure them that it did not matter nor tell them that they were useless. They would try to understand what happened, identify what could be learned and help them prepare to perform better next time. Applying something closer to that standard to ourselves may be a surprisingly important professional capability.

Over a long legal career, mistakes and disappointments are inevitable. The relevant performance question is not whether we can somehow avoid ever experiencing them, but whether our response leaves us better able to learn and perform again. In that sense, being kind to yourself is not simply about feeling better; it may be part of thinking better when things have gone wrong.