"If I went easy on myself, I'd never improve"

This is the fear at the bottom of it. Suppose you stopped. Suppose that when you got something wrong you spoke to yourself as you spoke to Anna. You think you'd shrug the mistake off, and with no pain there'd be nothing to make you do better. You'd become one of those people who are very comfortable with their own failings.

This is the most tested question in the area, and the results run against the fear.

In the last of Leary's studies, the researchers asked people to recall a real failure, rejection or loss that had made them feel bad about themselves. Some were then led through a short exercise in responding to it with kindness. They wrote about how other people go through similar things, and wrote to themselves as they would to a friend in the same position. Others did different exercises or none. Those who'd taken the kinder view were afterwards more willing to acknowledge their own part in what had happened. They also felt less overwhelmed by it. Kindness didn't lead them to let themselves off. It made it possible for them to look.

Jia Wei Zhang and Serena Chen, at Berkeley, asked the question about improvement directly. They studied regrets, which are mistakes people know they made. In their first study they analysed regrets that people had posted anonymously on a website. The people who described their regret with more kindness towards themselves were also judged by independent readers to have learned and grown more from it. In another study, people who were generally kinder to themselves reported more personal improvement from their regrets, and observers who read their accounts agreed. In a third, the researchers asked one group to write about a regret from a compassionate, understanding point of view. That group reported more acceptance of what had happened and more personal improvement than the comparison groups. The route, as far as the researchers could trace it, ran through acceptance. People who could admit the regret fully, without flinching, were the ones who changed.

I think that's the mechanism, and it's worth spelling out. To learn from a mistake you have to look at it closely. You have to ask what you did, why, and what you'd do differently. If looking at the mistake sets off an attack on your whole worth as a person, then looking is painful and dangerous. So you don't look, or you look for half a second and flinch away, or you defend yourself by blaming someone else. The harsher the commentary, the more it costs to admit an error and the fewer you'll admit. When a mistake costs you only the mistake, you can afford to examine it.

The picture of the person who's comfortable with their failings deserves a moment, because it's the bogeyman that keeps the discipline story going. Such people exist. But their ease doesn't come from kindness to themselves. It comes from not caring much about other people or about doing things well. You care a great deal, and you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't. Caring is what drives you to improve, and it won't disappear when the abuse stops. It'll carry on without the beating.

Think of the best teacher or coach you ever had. They almost certainly held you to a high standard and told you plainly when your work fell short. They did it in a way that left you wanting to try again. They'd have said, "That's not right yet. Look at this part. You can do this." They didn't call you an idiot, and you improved faster for them than for anyone who did.