The Compassion Alphabet: C to L
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 9
- Confidence
- —
A ten-letter mnemonic Doty built for a white-coat ceremony address to incoming medical students, designed as a portable rule for how to walk in the world. It runs from C to L: compassion, dignity, equanimity, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, integrity, justice, kindness — all contained by love. He chose a mnemonic deliberately because medical students already think in them. Each letter carries a specific distinction rather than a slogan: dignity is defined against pity, equanimity against attachment to outcome, forgiveness against the fantasy that resentment harms the other person. Doty presents it as the lens that reveals happiness to be an internal event you decide, made durable by acting in service of others.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Learn the sequence as a mnemonic
Ten letters of the alphabet, starting at C and ending at L. Doty built it this way so it could be recalled and run as a check on your own conduct rather than admired once and forgotten.
- 2
C and D — compassion, then dignity
Compassion for self and others first. Then recognise the dignity of every person. Doty draws a hard line here: we often look at people with pity, which is looking down from a perceived superior position, in a way that does not treat the other person as your equal.
Watch out Pity feels like compassion from the inside and is not; the tell is whether you are positioned above the person.
- 3
E — practise equanimity
Evenness of temperament. Doty roots suffering in attachment to outcome and craving. Achievement gives a lift, but its nature is transitory. So are the downs — yet people settle into a feeling that a bad state is permanent. Appreciate both extremes without getting lost in either.
Pro tip The down experiences often give the greatest insight and wisdom about yourself and the world.
- 4
F — forgive
Carrying anger and hostility towards someone stimulates your sympathetic nervous system every time you see or think about them. Doty's image is drinking poison and expecting it to affect the other person. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting, and it does not mean dropping your protection from harmful people.
Watch out Forgiveness is not permission; you still protect yourself from those individuals.
- 5
G — practise gratitude concretely
Doty anchors gratitude in scale: half the world's population lives on two dollars fifty a day. The practice he names is writing down three things a day you are grateful for, which he says has a large positive effect on your physiology in and of itself.
Pro tip Three things, written, daily — the specificity is the point, not a general sense of thankfulness.
- 6
H — stay humble about your importance
Doty's test for a good doctor: they walk onto the floor, know the nurses by name, and greet the people who sweep the floors and change the bedpans, because they recognise those people are critical to their success. They may be captain of the ship, but the ship sinks without the others.
Pro tip Use the name test on yourself — who in your building do you not know by name?
- 7
I and K — integrity and kindness
Integrity means having values that bound your behaviour and determine how you act and walk in the world. Kindness Doty separates out deliberately: unlike compassion, it has nothing to do with suffering, so it is available in every ordinary interaction.
- 8
J — justice
Doty defines justice as your responsibility for those who are vulnerable. It is the letter that pushes the mnemonic beyond private wellbeing and into what you owe people with less power than you.
- 9
L — let love contain all of it
Love is not one item on the list, it is the container for the other nine. Doty says looking at your life through this whole lens makes you realise success is not an outward event and that happiness is an internal event you decide — one that paradoxically deepens when your actions are about service to others.
In the wild
Doty says he can identify good doctors immediately from how they move through a hospital floor. They know the nurses and call them by name. They greet the people who sweep the floors and change the bedpans. It is not manners — Doty's reading is that these doctors recognise those people are critical to their own success. The surgeon may be the captain of the ship, but the ship sinks without the input of everyone else on it. The humility is accurate rather than performed, and it is the letter H of the mnemonic in practice.
→ A single observable behaviour that reliably separates humble clinicians from entitled ones.
A founder running a small team keeps a notebook by the bed and writes three specific things she is grateful for each night — not abstractions, but the colleague who covered a call, a conversation with her father, the fact she chose her own hours that day. She started it after hearing Doty's framing that half the world lives on two dollars fifty a day. Six weeks in she notices the reflex has spread outside the notebook: she catches herself registering good things during the day because she knows she will be looking for three of them later.
→ Gratitude shifts from an occasional feeling to a daily habit with a measurable physiological upside.
Common mistakes
Mistaking pity for compassion
Doty is explicit that pity is looking down at someone from a perceived superior position, which denies them equal standing. It can feel generous while quietly confirming a hierarchy, which is exactly what the D in the mnemonic exists to catch.
Thinking forgiveness means forgetting
Doty separates the two. Forgiveness is about not letting a person keep triggering your stress response and take away your calm nature. It does not require forgetting what happened or removing the protections you need from that individual.
Treating a low state as permanent
The equanimity letter cuts both ways. People chase the transitory lift of achievement, but they also settle into the belief that a bad period is simply how things now are, which carries all the negative consequences of that mental state.
From the transcript
“it came down to a mnemonic because of course mnemonics are very helpful for medical students so it was 10 letters of the alphabet and…”
“anyway so Equanimity f is forgiveness I mean one of the greatest challenges is you carry anger and hostility towards another person”
“and then another incredibly important thing is gratitude the nature of you and I sitting here today we are incredibly blessed”
From the episode
Jim Doty: Cure Negative Self-Talk, Be More Mindful & Build Compassion
Jim Doty