Kristen Bell on delivering honesty with empathy

Kristen Bell on delivering honesty with empathy

From ReThinking by TED

April 21, 2026 · 41 min

About this episode

Kristen Bell discusses overcoming people pleasing tendencies and the importance of honesty with empathy.

You probably know Kristen Bell as the star behind characters like Veronica Mars, Princess Anna from Frozen, and Eleanor from The Good Place. In this episode, Adam sits down with Kristen live at BetterUp’s Uplift leadership summit to examine how she’s learning to overcome her people pleasing tendencies and stop internalizing other people’s emotions. Kristen gets in character to demonstrate how to be honest without being unkind. She also makes the case that compliments are underrated, opens up about her strategies for dealing with envy, and offers a surprising theory of why we overexplain. Featured guest Follow Kristen Bell on Instagram Connect with the team Follow Adam on Instagram , LinkedIn , and at adamgrant.net/ Subscribe to Adam’s substack Watch ReThinking videos on YouTube at TEDAudioCollective Follow TED on X , Instagram , Facebook , LinkedIn , and TikTok ReThinking is produced by Cosmic Standard . Our Senior Producer is Jessica Glazer, our Engineer is Aja Simpson, our Technical Director is Jacob Winik, and our Executive Producer is Eliza Smith. For the full text transcript, visit ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant-transcripts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy…

People in this episode

Host: Adam

Guest: Kristen Bell

Topics covered

  • honesty
  • empathy
  • people pleasing
  • self-awareness
  • compliments
  • envy
  • communication

Keywords

  • Kristen Bell
  • honesty
  • empathy
  • people pleasing
  • envy
  • communication
  • compliments

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: BetterUp, TED, Cosmic Standard

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