Self-Compassion in Relation to Personal Initiativeness, Curiosity and Exploration among Young Adults

The present study is an attempt to explore the relationship of self-compassion with few positive attributes, viz., personal initiativeness and curiosity and exploration among young adults. Self-compassion stands for the quality of the human-being, which makes him kind and understanding towards oneself, even in the face of adverse situations. It suggests the perception of one's experiences as a part of the broader human experience. Selfcompassion has various implications in academic and professional life. As it provides an intrinsic motivation to an individual; it facilitates a self-initiated behavior and curiosity and exploratory behavior. The present study has been conducted on 100 college students using Neff's (2003a) self-compassion scale, personal growth initiative scale (Robitschek, 1998), and curiosity and exploration inventory (Kashdan et al., 2004). In order to analyze the results product moment correlation method has been employed. The results reflect a positive correlation between self-compassion and personal initiativeness as well as with both dimensions of curiosity and exploratory behavior, i.e. self-exploration and absorption. This suggests that having an open and accepting stance toward oneself is related to being open to the world, in general.