The radical realism of compassion
by Françoise Gallet, coach & facilitator (with wordsmithing support from Perplexity AI)
November, 2025
Compassion is a necessity — as important to our physical and emotional wellbeing as clean water or air, nourishing food, and a sense of purpose and belonging. Often dismissed as indulgent, genuine compassion is also far from being ‘soft’. It’s a courageous stance and a radical realism the fuels resilience and helps organisations turn “being human” into a strategic advantage.
Living and working
in a polycrisis
Each year, record-breaking heatwaves, intensifying floods and fires, and accelerating biodiversity loss push climate disruption deeper into daily life. At the same time, widening inequality, social fragmentation and political distrust are eroding the social fabric that would help us face these shocks together.
As we live and work through this time of polycrisis — the tangle of economic, ecological, geopolitical and social shocks that don’t just happen at the same time but also collide and amplify one another — compassion helps us navigate our times.
Compassion as radical realism
This is as true for each of us as individuals as it is for businesses and organisations. Compassion fosters not only individual well-being but also strengthens the resilience and adaptive capacity of groups facing adversity.
- Compassion refuses denial or despair.
- Compassion turns toward suffering — of people, species, and ecosystems — rather than look away.
- Compassion seeks to understand the complex causes and conditions fuelling suffering.
- Compassion commits to reducing harm and responding wisely.
- Plus, compassion supports tough, sustained action.
Courageous care, wisdom, ethical action… This is a powerful prescription.
Training the muscle of care
Luckily, compassion can be systematically trained, much like attention or physical fitness. Meanwhile, compassion training is consistently linked with greater resilience both for individuals and groups, especially in high‑stress contexts, including high-stress work sectors such as healthcare.
Early research on Compassion-Based Cognitive Training® (CBCT), training we offer at thrivelife, showed something powerful: when people deliberately practice compassion, they become better at bouncing back from stress and emotional setbacks.
Training boosts wellbeing,
'rewires' teams
As the science of compassion has expanded, a consistent picture has emerged — training in compassion is linked with healthier emotion regulation and greater wellbeing. People who engage in these practices tend to ruminate less, experience more positive emotion, report higher levels of happiness, and communicate in ways that are more optimistic and supportive. Over time, compassion practice can even act as a buffer against burnout, especially in high‑stress roles such as leadership or healthcare providers.
Meanwhile, Tania Singer, German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, found that when groups train compassion together, there are measurable changes in brain networks associated with socio-emotional capacity, greater empathy, and increased altruism within group settings.
Compassion: The most
underrated skill at work
Compassion training also builds psychological safety, which is the foundation for resilient teamwork, collective problem-solving, and recovery from setbacks (a growth mindset) and gives people concrete skills to apply in life’s trickiest situations.
Consider the following common challenges of any workplace:
- Burnout
Compassion training helps individuals and managers to notice early signs of overload, respond with kindness rather than harsh criticism, and yet still set sustainable boundaries.
- Leadership and culture
In addition to lowering stress, improving resilience and emotion regulation, compassion training helps managers pair clear accountability with genuine care: checking in on people’s wellbeing, acknowledging pressure, and offering practical support while exploring potential for growth and improvement.
- Collaboration and conflict handling
Team-based compassion practices — like brief guided check‑ins, perspective‑taking exercises, and shared reflection on difficult cases — support more empathic communication and reduce unhelpful rumination about colleagues’ motives.
These skills also help groups stay regulated during conflict, listen more openly, and find solutions that honour both task and relationship needs, which is especially valuable in high‑stakes teams.
- Giving and receiving tough feedback
Compassion skills (perspective‑taking, non‑judgmental awareness, self‑kind inner talk) make it easier for people to receive tough feedback without collapsing into shame or defensiveness, which improves learning and performance conversations.
- Taking responsibility for mistakes and learning from them
Meanwhile, teams trained to respond constructively to errors — focusing on learning and repair rather than shame and blame — tend to report higher psychological safety and more innovation. People are less afraid to surface problems early.
- Ethics and sustainable business
Lastly, compassionate (individuals) and businesses tend to be more ethical. At the crux of decisions is the consideration of how to help and reduce harm, not just what will maximise short-term profit.
When leaders and teams are trained to notice suffering, take others’ perspectives and act with care, they are more likely to prioritise fair labour practices, transparent communication, environmental responsibility and honest products and services.
In a world shaped by overlapping crises — climate disruption, inequality, political instability and fragile social trust — this kind of ethics is not a “nice-to-have”; it is a survival strategy that protects reputation, strengthens stakeholder loyalty and, most importantly, helps organisations contribute to collective resilience instead of deepening the problems they operate within.
Compassion: ancient instinct
and most modern skill
Compassion, then, is both our most ancient instinct and our most modern skill — a vital technology for the age of interdependence. In cultivating it, we strengthen not only our own capacity to weather uncertainty but also the connective tissue that allows communities and organisations to adapt, repair and thrive amid complexity. Far from a soft sentiment, compassion is practical wisdom in motion — a force that grounds courage, fuels ethical action, and reminds us that our humanity itself is our greatest source of resilience.
What is Cognitively Based Compassion Training®?
Compassion is trained by repeatedly activating and reinforcing the systems that notice suffering, regulate threat, and generate care, until these become more automatic traits rather than rare states. Effective interventions combine attention training, emotion regulation, and motivational and cognitive reframing so that caring feels safe and actionable.
Meanwhile, training in compassion has long been a focus of the mind training or lo jong tradition of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.
More recently compassion has also attracted the attention of contemporary scientists in the field of of psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. Many of their findings offer support for the ancient wisdom teachings and practices of lo jong.
Cognitively Based Compassion Training (CBCT)® represents the synthesis of the rich lo jong tradition and contemporary science in compassion, offering a programme that is accessible to people of any faith of no faith at all. It’s also a programme that combines attention training, emotion regulation and cognitive reappraisal.
Offered in a variety of settings and with many different populations, thrivelife offers CBCT® programmes to the public and organisations.
Businesses and organisations wishing to weave compassion into team dynamics and day-to-day operations are welcome to reach out to discuss CBCT® training for your organisation or other compassion-based training programmes offered by thrivelife.
