33· Dialling Down The Negativity with Self-Compassion
Podcast show notes
Today we're diving into a topic that's close to my heart yet challenging for me, and likely for many of you—self-compassion.
We're often our own worst critics, quick to extend kindness to others but not to ourselves.
We'll explore the meaning of self-compassion and discuss practical steps to treat ourselves with the same care and understanding we offer others.
It’s about recognising our imperfections, giving ourselves permission to be human, and understanding that no one, including us, needs to be perfect.
Here are the highlights
(2:07) Self-compassion and accepting imperfections.
(6:01) Recognising mistakes.
(8:05) Practicing empathy towards yourself.
(12:17) Self-compassion and resilience for personal growth.
Links:
Dr Kristen Neff–Fierce Self-Compassion
Get the 5 Day Resilience Kickstarter here
Connect with Ruth
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Welcome to Frustrated and Exhausted, the podcast for women in leadership, where I help you fulfil your ambitions without sacrificing your sanity, or your resilience.
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Frustrated and Exhausted, I'm really happy that you've joined me for this one, because I love this topic. And I think it's really important. It's something that I work on that I need to work on, and I'm not that good at it to be perfectly honest. And I think that's true for a lot of us. So today, we're going to be thinking about, we're going to be exploring, we're going to be working on - self compassion.
What do we mean by self-compassion? Well, really what we're talking about when we think about self-compassion, I mean, compassion is about showing understanding for other people, and then helping them to do something about it. We're showing kindness, we're showing our humanity to somebody else, and we're helping. And so many of us do this for other people, all the time, whether it's your children, whether it's your parents, whether it's friends, or other family members, or colleagues or coworkers, we show other people compassion, often relatively easily, maybe not all the time. But you know, it comes much more naturally often.
Showing ourselves compassion is much harder. And that is because we are often programmed to think more about the negative parts of ourselves, and our internal voice or inner voice is often talking to us in less than helpful way, especially when we are in difficult situations. So when we're thinking about self-compassion, what we're thinking about is being supportive to ourselves, when we're facing difficulties, when we're faced with our own feelings, you know, whatever that might look like. Maybe it's a crazy parenting moment where you've just kind of lost the plot a bit. Or maybe it's something at work that just hasn't gone really well. But whatever it is, it's when you feel less than actually accepting that we're all imperfect. No one is perfect. Just to sort of emphasise that point, I'm going to quote a lady called Dr. Kristin Neff, who's done a ton of work around compassion, lots of research around it, and you know her writing is really interesting. Again, I'll put some links in the show notes if anybody wants to kind of read on. She says that “instead of mercilessly judging and criticising yourself for various inadequacies or shortcomings, self-compassion means you are kind and understanding when confronted with your own feelings. After all, who ever said that you were supposed to be perfect?”
Now, that's a really interesting one to me, because “whoever said you were supposed to be perfect?”. Well, sometimes we might feel like those voices that tell us we have to be perfect all the time come from ourselves. But very often, again, especially for women who are supposed to be compliant and quiet and perfect, often, and we're brought up in that way. And we hear it at school, and we hear it at work. And we hear it from our parents when we're small, and we internalise all of these voices. And so our own expectations of ourselves are often really high.
Now, I know that I regularly beat myself up a bit about different things. And I know that I have lots of clients who do that and friends that do that. And you know, loads of people I know kind of can really focus on sort of those negative sides and you can kind of get this inner monologue going on. And, you know, that might look like I'm just not good enough at this or I'm not doing enough, I need to do more. Or we get into comparing ourselves with other people - “Look at her over there. She's got it all sorted. She's amazing.” And we can get into this negative cycle that just makes us feel worse than we would already feel.
So the idea of bringing some self compassion into our lives, is that sense of supporting ourselves, being your own inner cheerleaders accepting our imperfections. Isn't that a radical thought?
It's not easy to do that necessarily. And what I'm going to do today is we're going to talk around this a little bit, and then I'm going to offer a few thoughts about how we can start to shift the dial a little bit out of the negativity and into a more compassionate place for ourselves, because we do really need it.
You know, if you think about how you talk to a good friend, for example, this is something that I found really helpful, you know, for friends just had a crap day at work and, you know, not got a promotion or had some negative feedback or whatever, it might be something that they're finding challenging. What would you be saying to them? Is that sense of talking to yourself, the way that you would talk to a good friend going through something difficult? You know, it's okay, what have you learned from it? What could you do differently next time? Sometimes it's, like just sympathising, and going, Oh, what do they know?
Or sometimes it's about saying, well, actually, I did stuff that up. That wasn't my best deal ever. But actually, I'll do better next time, it almost comes down to growth mindset, again, you know, I think these things really reinforce each other. It's about that taking the learning from it.
But knowing that it's, it's a thing that happened, it's not a judgement on who you are as a human being. And I think that's the other thing, you know, when we hear negative critiques or something goes wrong, we don't do something well, or we look at how somebody else is handling a difficult situation, we think, “Oh, she's so much better than me”. We often kind of can take that sort of self-critique, as we're not good enough as human beings, not that the thing that we did maybe wasn't good enough. And I think if we can practice separating those things out, that when there is some sort of critique, whether we're critiquing ourselves, or whether we're being critiqued by somebody else, even when someone else is saying, “You're not good enough”, or “you failed”, it's not about you, it's about the thing that has happened or that you've done. And often, you know, we take that right into ourselves right into a critique of who we actually are as human beings. And then, of course, that negativity can be extremely painful. But actually, what we're talking about are two different things. We're talking about the thing that maybe wasn't done so well that we can learn from, not that that makes us any less. So there's something there about noticing actually what is going on in the moment, and how you are receiving the difficult thing? You are you taking it as a critique of you as a human being? Or are you taking it as a critique of the thing that happened, or you did. So that's really important. You know, we all make mistakes, we all sometimes behave in ways that are out of character for us, you know, we're human. So this is partly kind of really tried to accept our own humanity in a way, except that we can't be perfect all of the time.
So, really starting to kind of notice our own self talk. Notice our kind of thinking and the way that we speak to ourselves, you know, starting to speak to ourselves more as we would speak to a friend, as opposed to, in that kind of really sort of self-belief and beating ourselves up is kind of really the first thing to focus on starting to notice when these things are happening.
And then we want to kind of really start to think about changing that self-talk. Your what could you be saying to yourself instead instead of, I'm not good enough. Or that person is so much better than me? Thinking about actually, I am enough. I'm doing the best that I can in the situation that I'm in right now.
In a way we often feel torn between giving our best at home, and giving our best at work, pulled in all these different directions. There is a reason that this podcast is called Frustrated and Exhausted. And this is it. This is really what's at the heart of it is that sense of frustration that we can just, we never feel like we're enough. We never feel like there's enough of us to go around and do our absolute best all the time.
But that's not even possible, you know, we're not superhuman, it's not possible. So self-compassion is really important to this because it's about allowing ourselves to be imperfect. And it's about recognising that when all gets a bit much, that frustration is really high and we're frustrated with ourselves, and we're frustrated with the situation that we're in, and it is about recognising that we're doing the best that we can, in the situation that we're in. And that is enough.
That's all we can do - the best that we can in the situation we're in. And if we've stuffed up something, then we reflect on it, and we learn from it and we move on.
So there's that substantive change that self-talk is really important, you know, being empathetic to ourselves and the way that we would to others. If you saw someone else feeling the way that you're feeling, when you're in that scenario, how would you respond to them? What words would you use? And how would that shift the way that you speak to yourself? The other thing is, is really going back to something that I've talked about in earlier episodes, and that's self-appreciation.
You know, it's appreciating that we are doing the best that we can with what we've got, at this particular point in time. And that things, ebb and flow and change. And that actually, when you look in the round at everything that you are, and all that you do, when you come at that, from a positive perspective, it's a lot. So beginning to work on appreciating how much you do, rather than focusing on what you don't do, is really important.
The other thing in this, probably the last big point in terms of things to think about around self-compassion, and bringing it into our lives, is that compassion is action orientated. It's about helping ourselves. So you know, when we're compassionate to other people, empathy is showing up and trying to show some understanding of how someone else might be feeling and using that to kind of connect. But compassion is actually then taking that empathy and doing something with it to help. And that applies when we're thinking about ourselves as well.
So really, what we need to be doing in that scenario is thinking about, Okay, what do I need at the moment, to help shift this negative self talk? What do I need at the moment is missing in order to feel better about myself?
You it might be better at self-talk, it might be just taking a bit of a break, stepping away and resetting.
Do something different, do something that you love to do, just to give yourself some positivity and come back to with a new perspective. It might be picking up the phone to a friend and having a conversation just saying I'm feeling like this. This is what's going on? What can I do about this and get them someone else's input again, to shift your perspective, it's really about giving yourself a gift. When you're being compassionate to yourself, you're giving yourself something you're nurturing yourself in some way. And I guess you know, how you want to do that is going to be different for everyone. Maybe it's an extra yoga class, maybe it's a bit of meditation, maybe it's a walk outside, maybe it's a laugh with a friend, maybe it's going to the cinema or whatever it might be for you to just sit and absorb. Or it might just be some time with a journal and some reflecting. It depends what works for you. So part of this self compassion is, is really understanding what that may be for you. In order to help you accept your imperfections, maybe step away and come back, go do something else, and then come back to it.
You might want other people's perspectives. But really, I think primarily this is about shifting your own kind of mindset and starting to forgive yourself a little for not being perfect. You know, whose expectation is that? Do you know anybody that's perfect? And I say this as a recovering perfectionist, you know, I kind of have some really unrealistic expectations of myself often. And often, that's when I try to kind of come back to self-compassion, you know, I usually have a list as as long as my arm of things that I should be doing. But sometimes I just need to stop and watch some crap TV for a while or, you know, go for a walk or just switch off somehow read a book that doesn't relate to work or anything, you know, do love a trashy novel for, for switching off. And it really, really matters because when we, when we don't give ourselves self-compassion, we get really stuck.
It can really prevent us it can impact our confidence and it can really prevent us moving forward and taking risks and performing in the way that we should be able to. So if we can kind of bring ourselves that that self-compassion, that understanding of ourselves, that positive self-talk, you think about all the athletes that you know, out there who do amazing things at the Olympics and all the rest of it, you know, they don't stand there before the meet, go, and “that person next to me is going to be better at this than me”. You know, they think about, “I've done my best, I've done everything to lead to this moment, I'm going to give it my best shot. And I might not win, but it might be better than the last time I did it”. So again, it's is that growth mindset is thinking about the learning from it and applying that and loosening or focus on the negative aspects, not getting into that spiral of negative self-talk.
It also, you know, when we can get out of that, that spiral, and we can start to speak to ourselves in a more positive, compassionate way, it also really, you know, it boosts our resilience in lots of ways. If we see things more positively, we can have draw more energy from that we learn and change from the mistakes, but we don't take it as a feeling of ourselves. It's something it's a thing that we didn't do well as a thing that we're struggling with, is not that we are in some way, lesser beings as a result.
I hope that's been helpful. I really think this is important because we get so stuck in our own heads sometimes. And we can really blame ourselves and criticise ourselves so often for things that potentially aren't within our control, and potentially, we have too high expectations of ourselves. And actually, if we can bring ourselves into a place where we have more compassion for ourselves, and we just say those words, I am enough, and I am doing the best that I can in the situation that I'm in right now. And say it like you mean it to yourself and let it go. Let the negativity go.
Thank you for joining me this week. I hope that helps to shift you and to help you think about ways in which that you can be more compassionate to yourself. If you think your resilience needs a little bit of a boost, and you kind of want to think about these things a little bit more, sign up for my five day resilience Kickstarter, the link is in the show notes, completely free. And it'll take you through a process to just think about some of this and how you can take care of yourself and look after your own needs. Because there's nothing more important than that. Take care
Thanks for listening to this episode of Frustrated and Exhausted. Hit the Follow button for future episodes. You can also follow me on Instagram at resonate leadership and LinkedIn at Ruth Alexandra Wood. I’d absolutely love to hear from you. Frustrated and Exhausted is brought to you by Resonate Leadership and the wonderful team at the Podcast Boutique. I'm your host, Ruth Wood. Take care and speak to you soon.
