Why Compassion is the Secret to Trust, Love, & Fulfillment | (#052) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Why do we need compassion to live a good life? For a lot of people, compassion sounds like weakness. It sounds like pity or softness, or letting other people walk all over you. Especially in high-achieving circles, compassion is almost seen like a liability. You don’t want to be the one slowing down the team because you’re worried about someone else’s feelings. You don’t want to be the person in the relationship who gets taken advantage of because you care too much—but that’s not what compassion actually is.

Compassion isn’t sentimental. It isn’t pity. It isn’t letting yourself get used. Compassion is a recognition of our shared vulnerability. It’s seeing that you and the person across from you are both fragile in your own ways, both human, both in need of understanding—and compassion doesn’t stop there. It includes the will to respond, to move toward the suffering of others rather than away from it. [01:11.0]

Without compassion, all relationships remain transactional. At work, it means people cooperate only as long as the math works out for them. In dating, it means intimacy is always conditional. Your partner sticks around only until something better comes along, and even inside yourself, when you lack compassion, you treat your own worth as conditional. You’re valuable only when you hit the numbers, only when you look good, only when you win or hit the goals.

Compassion breaks that toxic cycle. Compassion is necessary for you to truly trust yourself, to trust others, and for others to trust you, not just that others will stay by your side when times are hard, but that you can also trust in yourself, not because of what you produce or how you perform, but because you matter intrinsically to yourself. [01:57.7]

I once had a client who was brilliant at building connections. On the surface, he was a great networker. He was very charming. He always had dates lined up. But when things got really tough, when a friend was laid up in the hospital for weeks or when a woman he was seeing faced family issues, then he pulled away. He told himself he was too busy, but the truth was he couldn’t stand being around pain. He saw it as a weakness. And what happened? His friendship stayed shallow. His relationships never lasted more than a few months. Deep down, he was lonely. What he didn’t realize was that by refusing to meet others in their suffering, he was cutting himself off from the very fulfillment he was chasing.

Compassion isn’t weakness. It’s maturity. It’s the foundation of trust, of peace of mind, and the kind of fulfillment that doesn’t vanish when circumstances change, and that’s what we’re diving into in this episode.

I’m David Tian. I’m a Brown University–certified leadership and performance coach and a certified IFS therapy practitioner, and for almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find meaning, fulfillment and success in their personal and professional lives. [03:04.1]

I’ve got four points in this episode, and here’s the first—compassion isn’t just feeling sorry for someone. That’s pity, and pity often comes with a hidden superiority, like, “I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.” That’s not what we’re talking about here with compassion. Compassion is much deeper. It’s not only feeling for someone. It’s feeling with them. It’s emotional resonance paired with the will to respond, to move toward their suffering, not away from it, and this is where compassion goes beyond empathy.

Empathy is the ability to sense and share another’s feelings. It’s when you wince as someone stubs their toe or when your heart drops hearing about a friend’s loss. Empathy is like a mirror. It reflects what the other person feels, but compassion takes the reflection and adds another step. It says, “I won’t just feel with you. I will stand with you. I will act.” [03:57.6]

Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading researchers on primates, shows this in his four-decade-long body of work. He’s watched chimpanzees console each other after fights. He’s seen bonobos share food with strangers, even when they could keep it for themselves. These aren’t abstract ideas. They’re observable, measurable behaviors in animals close to us on the evolutionary ladder. Empathy—and, by extension, compassion—is baked into our evolved biology. We’re hard-wired for it, and yet compassion isn’t automatic.

Empathy gives us the raw material, but compassion requires maturity, because to be compassionate, you first need courage. That was the subject of the previous episode. You need the courage to face another person’s pain without flinching. A lot of people avoid this. They ghost their friends when life gets messy or they pull away from their partners when things get really hard. They tell themselves they’re protecting their energy or something like that, but often they’re just running from the discomfort of sitting with the suffering. [05:07.4]

Compassion also requires restraint. If empathy means you feel what the other feels, then without restraint, you risk drowning in what the other person is feeling, because now you feel it, too. Think about nurses or doctors who work in emergency rooms. They’re surrounded by pain daily. If they felt every ounce of it without boundaries, they would collapse. True compassion means staying present without being consumed or overwhelmed.

I had a client. He was a manager in a big firm. He told me he avoided checking in with struggling employees because he didn’t want to get dragged into their problems, he says. He saw compassion as a burden. What he didn’t see was that his avoidance cost him his people’s trust. His team respected his intelligence, but they didn’t feel safe going to him, and without that safety, no one gave it their best. [06:01.3]

Later, when he practiced listening with compassion, not to fix, but first to understand and acknowledge, then his whole team dynamic changed. Over time, they trusted him a lot more, and as a result, they worked harder, and he felt a weight lift in himself, too, because he was no longer running from the very thing that could build connection.

So, compassion is not weakness. It’s one of the strongest responses you could have. It’s the maturity to face suffering and the strength to hold it without being swallowed up, and it’s the will to respond in a way that heals, builds trust, and deepens relationships. Without compassion, fulfillment is impossible, because fulfillment depends on connection, and connection depends on compassion. [06:50.8]

When we invoke the term “compassion,” a lot of people instinctively think of it as soft or impractical, or maybe even naïve. Tough-minded achievers want efficiency, strategy, performance. Compassion sounds like something you practice on the weekends, if at all—and this leads to my second point. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, compassion is not just nice. It’s necessary. It’s necessary for survival and thriving.

Humans didn’t make it to the top of the food chain by being the strongest or fastest. We survived and thrived because we worked together. Cooperation and reciprocity are baked into our DNA. In small tribes, the ones who were quick to share food, tend to wounds or defend the vulnerable built stronger alliances. Those alliances weren’t just fun friendships. They were life or death. When you got sick or injured, your survival depended on whether people cared enough to stick by you instead of just leaving you behind. [07:55.0]

That’s the first reason compassion is vital for fulfillment. It creates trust networks that are deeper than mere convenience. If every relationship in your life is transactional, you’ll never feel truly secure if you’re smart. You’ll always wonder, What happens when the math no longer works in my favor? If my partner or my colleagues or my friends are only around because of what they’re getting from me, then what happens when they see a better deal somewhere else?

That’s not true trust. That’s insecurity dressed up as temporary success, but compassion builds something different. It tells the people around you, “I see your value beyond what you can do for me,” and when that’s mutual, you no longer live in fear of abandonment the moment you falter.

The paradox is that compassion actually serves your long term self-interest, because one day you will be down. You’ll fail or you’ll get sick. You’ll get old and start to die. You’ll burn out, and in that moment, the only people still standing with you will be the ones bound by compassion, not calculation. [09:00.0]

This isn’t just about how others treat you. It’s also about how you treat yourself. Inside each of us, there are parts that carry burdens, fear, shame, anger, grief. If you only value those parts for what they can produce, like discipline or ambition or toughness, then these parts will never fully trust you. They’ll work for you, but they’ll never relax, and that inner fragmentation creates anxiety and self-doubt, and the only way those parts learn to trust you is through your compassion, not just driving them harder, but listening to them, caring for them, even or especially when they’re not useful.

This is why compassion is essential for self-trust. If you can’t extend compassion inward, you’ll always feel like an imposter, like your worth depends on constant output. That leads to burnout, shallow relationships and a life that feels empty no matter how much you achieve. Compassion towards yourself builds the inner harmony that you need to actually enjoy your success. [10:06.0]

Now some listeners might still think compassion is soft. They picture leaders who get walked over because they care too much, but that’s a caricature. Real compassion is not naïve. It’s not about saying yes to everything or letting people exploit you. Real compassion requires clarity and strength. It’s the rational strategy for long-term flourishing.

Take a relationship example. If you avoid hard conversations because you don’t want to hurt the other person, your partner, you’re not practicing compassion. You’re practicing cowardice. Compassion means caring enough to be honest even when it’s uncomfortable. It means being willing to face conflict for the sake of deeper trust and a truly authentic connection. Without compassion, courage just becomes aggression. Without courage, compassion dissolves into mere sentimentality. You need both. [10:59.6]

Or look at leadership. I’ve coached executives who thought showing compassion made them weak. They prided themselves on staying detached, but their teams didn’t really trust them. People only did the bare minimum, they mailed it in, because they knew their leader would discard them the moment their numbers started slipping, and when those same leaders learned to show compassion, not pity, but genuine concern and recognition, their teams would transform. Performance improved, not because of fear, but because of trust. Compassion turned out to be the stronger strategy in the long run.

This is why compassion is required for fulfillment. It strengthens your alliances. It deepens your relationships, and it creates the inner harmony that you need to stop living in constant self-doubt and anxiety. It protects you against the fragility of transactional living and the emptiness of self-instrumentalization, treating yourself instrumentally. [11:56.6]

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Okay, now my third point is this, compassion has always been central to how the world’s greatest traditions have defined what it means to live a good life, and what’s striking is how cultures separated by thousands of miles and centuries came to the same conclusion—compassion is not weakness. It’s strength. It’s maturity. It’s the glue of human flourishing.

In Confucian philosophy, compassion, Ren, often translated as benevolence or humaneness, is the root of all virtue. Mencius, or Mengzi, one of the great Confucian thinkers from the third century B.C., argued that every person is born with a heart that cannot bear the suffering of others. His famous example is seeing a child about to fall into a well and the spontaneous urge to rush forward, to do something to save the child, and that this urge doesn’t come from calculation of gain. It comes from compassion, an unbidden moral reflex. [13:57.5]

Mencius’ point was radical. This isn’t just for sages or saints. It’s in all of us. The difference is whether we cultivate it, or if we neglect it, our lives shrink into self-centeredness, selfishness and insecurity. But if we cultivate it through daily self-examination, through practicing kindness in small, habitual, frequent ways, then compassion matures into the foundation of character. In Confucian thought, that’s what makes us truly human.

Buddhist philosophy goes even deeper. Compassion, or karuna, is not only about helping others. It’s also the path to liberation from suffering ourselves. The Buddha taught that suffering is bound up with the illusion of separateness. We cling to the idea that we are cut off from others, fighting for survival against a hostile world. But when compassion dissolves that illusion, we begin to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves. The boundaries soften. [14:59.4]

Compassion isn’t just helping someone else out. It’s recognizing that their suffering is connected to mine and that easing theirs also eases mine. That’s why Buddhist compassion doesn’t look like pity. It looks like clarity. It’s the insight that healing others and healing ourselves are not two separate tasks. They’re the same task approached from different angles.

Then there’s Christianity, where compassion is grounded in the radical idea that every single person has intrinsic worth, because every single person is loved by God. “Love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t just a nice suggestion. It’s the second greatest commandment. The Good Samaritan parable makes this point really clear. Compassion doesn’t stop at tribe or convenience. The Samaritan had every reason to ignore the wounded man on the road, every excuse to justify just passing by, but compassion moved him to act, not because of advantage, not because of calculation, but because love sees dignity where indifference sees a burden. [16:07.8]

Now across just these three traditions, Confucian, Buddhist, Christian—and I could have picked more, but in the interest of time limited it to these—already you start to see a striking pattern. Compassion is always treated as strength, never as weakness. It’s the courage to face suffering, not avoid it. It’s the maturity to value people for more than what they produce, and it’s the wisdom to see our lives as deeply intertwined, such that flourishing is never a solo project.

If you put this lens on your own life, the implications can be profound. Without compassion, your relationships remain shallow, because no one ever feels fully seen and valued. Without compassion, your leadership becomes brittle, because people know you’ll discard them the moment they stop performing. Without compassion, even your inner life stays fragmented, because your own wounded parts never feel valued beyond their usefulness to you. [17:08.0]

But with compassion, the picture changes. You start building trust, not just alliances of convenience, but bonds of character. You’ll start to sleep easier because you’re not haunted by the suspicion that everything is conditional. You start to feel truly at peace with yourself, because you know now that your worth is no longer tied to your performance.

So, across traditions, across cultures, across the millennia, the lesson is the same: compassion is not optional. It’s the strength that holds a flourishing life and society together—and the real question is, how are you cultivating it today?

Now, the fourth and final point: compassion is the great counterbalance. Courage without compassion is dangerous. It looks strong on the surface, but without compassion, it can turn into arrogance, or worse, aggression. You probably know people like this, relentless, ambitious, willing to say whatever needs to be said in order to win. They may succeed in the short term, but usually their relationships erode. Their teams stop trusting them. People walk on eggshells around them, and eventually, they end up isolated, respected for their drive, but resented for how they treat others. [18:20.8]

Justice without compassion can be even darker. Without compassion, justice can harden into cruelty. Rules get enforced with no room for mercy. Punishments become a way of asserting power rather than restoring balance. The law without compassion has always risked becoming cold and inhuman, and in our personal lives, when we hold people to standards without compassion, we don’t actually strengthen those relationships. We end up suffocating them.

Compassion is what keeps courage from becoming arrogance and what keeps justice from becoming cruelty. It softens the sharp edges of self-assertion with care for the other. Compassion doesn’t erase courage or justice. It actually completes them. It brings harmony between standing up for what’s right and remembering the humanity of the people involved. [19:11.4]

This isn’t just philosophy. It’s practical. Compassion is required for an integrated life. Without compassion, your inner parts will fracture. The ambitious part of you bulldozes over the vulnerable part, where the rule following part of you condemns the insecure part, and you end up at war with yourself.

With compassion, those parts begin to trust one another. The ambitious part softens because it sees the vulnerable part has value, too, where the rule-following part recognizes that the insecure part isn’t evil. It’s just scared. Compassion harmonizes your inner world, and when you cultivate that inside your outer world, too, shifts. Your social bonds become more trustworthy, because now they’re built on care, not just calculation. [20:00.5]

One of my clients, let’s call him Eric, came to me after a brutal breakup. On paper, he was a perfect achiever, sharp dresser, top of his class in business school, quickly rising up in the ranks in his consulting company, but in his relationships, he carried himself like he did at work, hard-edged, uncompromising, always pushing for results.

His girlfriend left him after years of feeling unseen. His feedback at work started to turn sour. People respected his intelligence, but they didn’t really like working with him, and when we looked closer, dug deeper, we saw the same pattern. He lived with courage, but not with compassion. He could face fear, take risks and fight for his goals. Those were very important values for him, but he couldn’t meet another person’s suffering without trying to bulldoze it.

If his girlfriend felt anxious, he’d tell her to toughen up. If his team members struggled, he’d tell them to just work harder. He believed he was helping them by pushing them through their pain, but really, he was invalidating it, and he was actually scared of it himself and pushing it away from himself. [21:06.7]

As we worked more together, Eric began practicing compassion in smaller ways, and at first it was just listening without fixing. He let his girlfriend speak about her fears instead of lecturing her. He’d say, “That sounds really hard. What do you need from me?” With his team, he tried asking, “What do you need right now?” instead of just barking orders.

It was awkward for him at first, because he equated compassion with weakness, but slowly, gradually, he realized compassion didn’t take away his courage. It balanced it. The impact was immediate. His relationships deepened. His girlfriend told him she felt safer with him than ever before. At work, his team began opening up to him, trusting him more, working harder, and not out of fear, but out of loyalty—and he still had courage and conviction, but now it was softened with care, and that made a huge difference in his life. [22:03.3]

The truth is, courage without compassion creates isolation. Justice without compassion breeds cruelty, but courage balanced with compassion creates leadership people want to follow. Justice tempered with compassion creates relationships that people want to stay in, and a Self treated with compassion becomes a Self you can actually live with, a Self that feels aligned, harmonious, not at war.

The question for you is, where in your life have you leaned on courage or justice, or your edge, without compassion? Where have you cut people down in the name of being brave or right? And what might happen if you added some compassion back into the mix, not as weakness, but as strength? Because compassion isn’t optional for a fulfilling life. It’s required. It’s the counterbalance that makes courage trustworthy and justice humane. It’s the path to an integrated life where your inner world feels at peace and your outer world becomes a place of trust, love and fulfillment. [23:06.4]

So, how do you cultivate compassion? Cultivating compassion isn’t about waiting for some big, dramatic opportunity to prove how noble you are. It’s built in small, daily practices, acts so simple, they’re easy to skip, but those are the ones that rewire you. Over time, they shape the kind of person who responds to suffering naturally, not out of obligation or a lot of effort.

One practice is empathy drills. That means for just a few minutes a day, as you’re going about your day, deliberately step into someone else’s shoes, not just imagining what you’d feel in their situation, because that still centers you. It’s not “What would I do if I were in their shoes?” Instead, it’s “What would it be like to be that person with all their upbringing and background, and physical and mental capacities?” as hard as that is to imagine, of course, but try your best. [23:58.6]

The exercise is to imagine the world as them. If your colleague at work missed a deadline, don’t just jump straight to frustration and hound them out. Instead, ask yourself, “What does it feel like to be that person right now? What pressures are they under? What story might they be telling themselves?” If you’re dating and the person across the table seems distracted, don’t instantly assume they’re not into you and lash out. Try imagining what their day might have been like. This practice doesn’t mean you excuse bad behavior. It just forces you to pause judgment long enough to see another perspective.

Another practice is small, consistent acts of service. It doesn’t have to be grand gestures that cost thousands of dollars or huge chunks of time, but it’s that intentional presence, something as simple as holding the door a minute longer or a moment longer, or checking in on someone you know is struggling, or sending a message that says, “I’m thinking of you.” These things sound trivial, but they stack up and they change how you see people. The more you train yourself to act in small compassionate ways, the easier it becomes to act in big ways when it matters. [25:06.3]

Reflection is another key. Journaling is one of the most underrated tools for cultivating compassion. At the end of the day, ask yourself, “Where did I fail to empathize? Where did I actually act on compassion? What parts of me resist it?” This is where your Shadow work comes in. Often, the parts of us that resist compassion are the parts that carry shame or fear.

If you practice Internal Family System therapy, you know those parts are actually trying to protect you, but until you meet them with compassion, they’ll keep blocking you from showing it to others. Writing these moments down isn’t about beating yourself up. It’s about getting curious and getting more clarity. [25:46.4]

Finally, there’s meditation loving-kindness meditation practices, which my programs like Emotional Mastery 2.0 and the Emotional Strength Bootcamp teaches. For example, meditation where you sit quietly and repeat phrases to yourself, like, “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease,” and then extend the same wishes to someone you care about and then to someone neutral, and eventually to someone you dislike, and then to the whole world, all sentient beings. It’s uncomfortable at first, but that’s the point. You’re expanding the range of your compassion muscle.

Cultivating compassion doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you trustworthy. It makes you someone others want to follow, someone they want to build with, someone they can count on when things get hard, and perhaps most importantly, it makes you someone you can finally trust yourself to be.

So, compassion isn’t a side feature of a good life. It’s at the center of it. Compassion isn’t pity. It’s not weakness, and it isn’t something you practice only when you feel like it. Compassion is strength. It’s the counterbalance that keeps courage from becoming arrogance and justice from hardening into cruelty. It’s a daily practice that builds trust in your relationships and it’s the act of kindness that you extend inward that finally lets you live in harmony with yourself. [27:09.4]

We’ve seen how compassion grows from empathy, but it goes further. It moves you to act. We’ve seen that it’s deeply wired into our biology and confirmed by traditions across cultures and times, from Confucian benevolence to Buddhist liberation to Christian love of neighbor, and we’ve seen how cultivating it through small daily practices, like perspective taking, service, reflection and meditation, creates the kind of person others can trust and the kind of Self that you can finally trust, too.

So, the real question for you is this, where in your life are you holding back compassion? Where are you withholding it from others because their suffering might make you uncomfortable? And maybe, more importantly, where are you withholding it from yourself? Because until you can show compassion to your own wounded parts, your self-trust will always be conditional and your fulfillment will always be out of reach. [28:03.3]

As you sit with that question, remember, compassion doesn’t make you fragile. It makes you integrated, steady, secure. It’s what allows your courage and your sense of justice to actually serve life instead of cutting people down.

In the next episode, we’re going to look at one of the biggest misconceptions about moral goodness and virtue, the area where morality has been twisted the most by shame and repression. We’ll dive into the thorny topic of sexual morality and explore how much of what we’ve inherited is less about genuine virtue and a lot more about control. That’s where we’re headed next.

Thank you so much for listening. If you like this, hit a like or give a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If it helps you in any way, please send it and share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. If you have any comments or feedback, I’d love to get it. Leave me a comment or send me a message.Can’t wait to welcome you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [28:58.5]