Lost in translation: When the word "compassion" falls short.

Why compassionate leadership has a branding problem and what Karuṇā can teach us about what it really means

May I take you through a word, before I take you through an argument? Because I've come to believe that the way we understand compassion matters enormously for today's busy, capable leaders.

For some, "compassionate leadership" has come to sound like the softer option, being understanding, making allowances and avoiding unnecessary discomfort. Perhaps even putting other people’s needs before their own.

In the leaders I coach, I often see the same reflex: turning away at the very mention of it. To be fair, who can blame them? When you are already carrying difficult decisions, competing demands and responsibility for other people, the last thing you need is another leadership approach that appears to ask you to care more, give more and carry more.

Compassionate leadership, I think, has a branding problem.

This isn’t only my own observation from coaching. Therapists working in Compassion Focused Therapy report the same resistance in clinical settings, where patients often equate “compassion” with pity, weakness, softness or a submissive social position. They too often miss the courage, wisdom and active motivation the term is meant to carry.¹⁰

Practitioners describe this gap between the everyday word and its clinical meaning as one of the most persistent myths people bring into the room, and one that a simple definition rarely fixes on its own.¹¹

When it comes to Compassionate Leadership - what it says on the tin and what it actually asks of us can sound like two very different things. We hear warmth, but miss the courage it also demands. We hear understanding, and miss the discernment. We hear giving, and miss the wisdom of knowing when giving actually helps, and when it doesn’t.

So we think, is it really built for the hard days of leadership?

Growing up in Sri Lanka, I inherited another way of understanding compassion. And I want to show you why, because I think the difference matters for far more than semantics.

First, a distinction about the word itself

The English word compassion does not come from Buddhism.

Its origins are Latin: com- (“with”) and pati (“to suffer”). At its root is the powerful idea of suffering with another.¹ ²

Karuṇā comes from an entirely different linguistic and philosophical tradition. It is an ancient Indic concept, central to Buddhist thought and practice, and is conventionally translated into English as “compassion”.³

The two words therefore do not share an etymology, but they do meet in an interesting place.

Much of the contemporary psychology of compassion that has influenced Paul Gilbert’s Compassion Focused approach, draws from a number of traditions and disciplines. These include evolutionary, affective, social and clinical psychology, alongside significant influences from Buddhist understandings and practices of compassion.⁸

In Gilbert’s model, compassion is defined as something considerably richer than everyday kindness: a sensitivity to suffering in ourselves and others, together with a genuine commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it.⁸ It is a useful definition to hold onto, because without it, “compassion” is left to carry whatever meaning everyday usage hands it, which is exactly the branding problem described above.

When we translate karuṇā simply as “compassion”, then, we have somewhere useful to begin, but we still do not necessarily get the whole idea.

What karuṇā actually means

In Buddhism, karuṇā (කරුණා) is commonly understood as the wish that another being be free from suffering, accompanied by a disposition to respond to that suffering.³

It is most certainly, not pity. That distinction matters more than it might first seem.

Pity can quietly place another person beneath us, and in doing so, hold them in a space that is diminished by our sympathy.

Karuṇā does the opposite. It recognises suffering without diminishing the person who is experiencing it. Further more, karuṇā also does not exist in isolation. It is one of the Four Brahmavihāras, often described as the four “immeasurables”:³

• Mettā (මේත්තා) - loving-kindness: May you be well and happy.

• Karuṇā (කරුණා) - compassion: May you be free from suffering.

• Muditā (මුදිතා) - appreciative or sympathetic joy: May I rejoice in your happiness and good fortune.

• Upekkhā (උපේක්ෂා) - equanimity: May I remain balanced and wise amid what I cannot control.

Karuṇā is therefore cultivated within a much larger psychological and ethical framework, alongside loving-kindness, the capacity to delight in another’s wellbeing, and the steadiness of equanimity. Mettā and muditā deserve their own exploration; they are not this essay’s focus.

What I want to draw out here is the pairing of karuṇā and upekkhā specifically, because I think it is that combination of compassion and steadiness that has the most to say to contemporary leadership. Seen in this fuller context, karuṇā can help us recover some of what the single English word “compassion” can too easily leave unspecified.

It’s closer than scripture, it’s in how we speak in Sinhala

Here’s what I find quietly beautiful about all this, because Karuṇā isn’t something Sinhala speakers encounter only in temples or Buddhist texts, its linguistic traces are woven into everyday language. When a Sinhala speaker says කරුණා කරළා (karuṇākaralā), the everyday expression for “please”, its roots reach back to karuṇā - kindness, compassion.⁴

We use it almost without thinking. And it goes further than that, because Karuṇā lives across the Sinhala language: karuṇāven, to do something with compassion or kindness; karuṇāvanta, to describe someone as compassionate or kind-hearted; and karuṇākaralā, our everyday “please”.

A philosophical idea that can sound rather abstract in English is, in Sinhala, quietly embedded in the language of ordinary human relationships. The language of compassion has found its way into the ordinary act of asking something of another person. And for me, that matters, because Karuṇā is not simply a Buddhist ideal encountered in scripture or contemplation. Its linguistic traces live in ordinary conversation, ordinary requests and the ways we describe how one human being treats another.

Where contemporary psychology and karuṇā meet

There is an aspect of this Buddhist understanding that I wish more of the leaders I work with had encountered in their own lives. That is, the classical descriptions of karuṇā do not ask you to 'stay at a safe distance from what you witness'.

The 5th-century commentator Buddhaghosa, in the Visuddhimagga, describes compassion in terms of the alleviation of suffering and an inability simply to tolerate the suffering of others. In its successful expression, this reduces cruelty. But more importantly, its failure can, in its self, become sorrow or personal distress.⁵

In other words, compassion is meant to move us, but being moved is not the same as being absorbed. You can be genuinely be affected by what someone is carrying, and you can turn towards that suffering, rather than away from it. You can act to alleviate it, wherever you genuinely can. But, here's the thing, you can still recognise the limits of your own responsibility, without that recognition requiring you to feel less.

This is where upekkhā, equanimity, matters. It is not a wall that keeps compassion’s intensity out, it is what allows that intensity to move through you, without capsizing you. In other words, experience full feeling, held steady by wisdom, about what is actually yours to carry. Compassion, understood this way, was never meant to be a sponge, it is a response that is warm, clear-eyed and courageous, but also bounded by wisdom about what is actually ours to carry.

When compassion is reduced simply to caring, it can begin to sound like an instruction to absorb everything: every difficult conversation, every colleague’s bad week, every problem that lands on your desk because you’re the one who will actually deal with it. No wonder capable people can start experiencing compassion as a cost rather than a strength.

And, in my experience, no wonder some leaders arrive cynical about compassionate leadership before the conversation has even begun. If compassion means taking more of everyone else’s difficulties onto ourselves, their resistance is entirely rational.

But that isn’t what compassion, when properly understood, is asking of them. Nobody can sustainably lead a team by absorbing its every difficulty into themselves, and the reality is that, Karuṇā was never asking them to do so.

The part that I think changes everything for a busy leader

If you are the person everyone turns to, the one who notices something’s wrong before anyone says a word, who quietly makes space for other people even when there’s none left for you, I suspect this already feels all too familiar.

I see it constantly in my coaching practice: sharp, capable people, trusted with the hardest problems in the room. And, all too often, they are the last person on their own list.

Psychologists have a name for one version of this pattern: unmitigated communion. That is the involvement with others to the exclusion of the self, an extreme, one-directional focus on other people’s needs.⁶ It is a pattern that has been linked to self-neglect and psychological distress.⁶ ⁷ Not because caring about others is the problem, but because the caring for others is without sufficient regard for the self.

Where I see this playing out

This is also where I find contemporary compassion psychology particularly interesting. Psychologist Paul Gilbert’s approach to compassion draws on Buddhist traditions alongside evolutionary, affective, social and clinical psychology. His model defines compassion in terms of sensitivity to suffering in ourselves and others, coupled with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent that suffering.⁸ That second half matters, because compassion is not simply noticing pain or feeling warmly towards someone who is struggling. It also requires the motivation, and sometimes the courage, to respond.

Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion offers another useful distinction: between a tender face of self-compassion, meeting suffering with warmth and acceptance, and a fierce face, which can involve protecting ourselves, meeting our own needs and taking action.⁹

These contemporary psychological approaches are not identical to Buddhist psychology, nor should we pretend that they are, but you will note, the parallels are striking. They bring us back to something much richer than compassion being understood merely as niceness. It is sensitivity to suffering. It is the courage to respond. It is the wisdom about what response is needed, and it is the steadiness not to become consumed by the suffering we encounter. It most certainly is not absorption, nor sentiment and endless accommodation. It is a clear, bounded and courageous response.

None of this makes your instinct to care about the people around you wrong. It may simply mean that the everyday understanding of compassion available to you has not given you everything you need to practise it sustainably.

In my own work, the leaders I most love working with have often already mastered noticing distress in everyone around them. However, what very few were ever taught is the other part: the wisdom to know what is actually theirs to carry, the courage to act when action is required, and the steadiness to remain themselves while doing it. That combination isn’t something you stumble into by trying harder. It’s something you learn to build deliberately, with practice, and often with support.

That is what sits at the heart of The Compassionate Leader. Over ten weeks, I work with leaders to understand compassion in this fuller sense, not simply the capacity to care, but the ability to respond courageously and wisely, to know what is ours to carry, and how to remain steady enough not to disappear into another person’s distress.

So where does that leave you?

Perhaps, then, the challenge is not that compassion is too soft for leadership. It is that the word, left undefined, can be too small for what we are asking it to mean.

Karuṇā helps us see the fuller territory: to recognise suffering, to be moved by it, to respond where we can, and to have the wisdom and steadiness not to lose ourselves in the process.

Perhaps compassion was never the soft option for today's leaders and karuṇā gives us a much bigger idea to work with.

And perhaps, compassionate leadership does not need to ask already stretched leaders to carry more. It needs to help them understand what compassion is actually asking of them.

I would love to know how this lands for you. Does “compassion” carry a different weight in a language or tradition you grew up with too?

Notes and sources

1. Etymonline. “Compassion — Etymology, Origin & Meaning.” etymonline.com/word/compassion

2. Wikipedia. “Compassion.” Etymological detail on the Latin com- (“with”) + pati (“to suffer”) root. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion

3. Encyclopedia of Buddhism. “Karuṇā.” Buddhist descriptions of karuṇā and the Brahmavihāras. encyclopediaofbuddhism.org/wiki/Karuna

4. Sinhala usage: කරුණා කරළා (karuṇākaralā) / කරුණාකර (karuṇākara) — “please/kindly”. talkpal.ai/culture/how-do-i-say-please-in-sinhala

5. Buddhaghosa. Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), IX.92–94, trans. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli. The classical account characterises compassion in relation to alleviating suffering, non-cruelty and the danger of compassion deteriorating into sorrow or distress. wisdomlib.org/buddhism/book/visuddhimagga-the-pah-of-purification

6. Fritz, H. L., & Helgeson, V. S. (1998). “Distinctions of Unmitigated Communion from Communion: Self-Neglect and Overinvolvement With Others.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1), 121–140. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9686454

7. Helgeson, V. S., & Fritz, H. L. (1998). “A Theory of Unmitigated Communion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 173–183. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15647153

8. Gilbert, P. and subsequent Compassion Focused Therapy literature. Compassion is conceptualised as sensitivity to suffering in self and others together with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it. CFT integrates evolutionary and psychological science with influences from Buddhist approaches to compassion. self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/GilbertCFT.pdf

9. Neff, K. (2021). Fierce Self-Compassion: How Women Can Harness Kindness to Speak Up, Claim Their Power, and Thrive. HarperWave.

10. McEwan, K., & Minou, L. (2023). “Defining compassion: A Delphi study of compassion therapists’ experiences when introducing patients to the term ‘compassion’.” Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10087504

11. Irons, C. “The Myths of Compassion.” Balanced Minds. balancedminds.com/the-myths-of-compassion

Rangiri Dambulla Cave Temple - Sri Lanka. Photo credit - Chintha Dissanayake

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