How About Being More Kind to Yourself?
When we are positive, our brains are more engaged, productive, energetic and resilient at work and in our personal lives – this has been rigorously researched in psychology and neuroscience.
This leads to greater happiness, less stress and higher performance.
One essential area (too often overlooked by busy professionals) is boosting your positive emotions by looking inward, and being more kind to yourself.
Regardless of your best intentions, sometimes things go wrong. For instance, you miss an important deadline, fail to get a big client, make a mistake, get ill, feel overwhelmed, and the like.
How do you usually react to such things? It’s far too common to feel ashamed, guilty, or criticize yourself: “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? Why me?”.
A negative judgment is often an automatic response to failure, whereas forgiveness and compassion are missing. It is exactly this compassion that is of extreme importance because it has the power to transform all that negativity.
What is self-compassion?
To understand the meaning of self-compassion, it is important to first understand the meaning of compassion in general. Compassion means that we recognize when someone is suffering and that we acknowledge his or her suffering as well.
There is no judgment or pity in compassion, only the realization that bad things happen, that we all make mistakes, and that everyone feels down sometimes.
Self-compassion simply means showing the same compassion toward yourself that you would show to others.
When you injure your finger, you want to nurture the wound, put a band-aid on it, and let it heal. Oddly enough though, when you’re mentally or emotionally “hurt,” you might react in a completely different way.
If you fail or doubt yourself about something, your internal critical voice might put you down. That critical voice in your head is a one with little kindness, which creates an internal conflict.
That voice emphasizes the gap between who you think you are and who you think you are supposed to be. This can result in negative emotions, such as guilt (because I’m not good enough) or fear (what if I’m not good enough?), frustration, and the like.
Thus, without compassion, conflict is almost inevitable.
Self-compassion means that you instead respond with kindness and understanding. You take care of yourself like you would take care of a cut on your finger, or someone who is very dear to you.
While the uncompassionate voice says, “What’s wrong with me? How could I ever have let this happen?”, the compassionate voice says, “What happened, has happened. You are human, just like everyone else. Another lesson learned, next time I’ll try things differently.”
Compassion opens the doors to looking at an experience from the bright side.
And when you do not get caught up in a cycle of negative thoughts and emotions you can begin to see that every failure also carries the possibility of success. You can always learn from the things you have done. Every moment is another moment to start all over again.
Showing more compassion to yourself and others, boosts your positive emotions and leads to greater happiness, less stress and higher performance, both professionally and personally.
Here are four simple, effective ways to practice self-compassion:
Become aware of the critical voice in your head this week. Whenever you notice this critical voice, take a moment to notice the tone of this voice. Ask yourself these questions: How do I feel now? What would a dear friend say to me now? See if you can be kinder to yourself.
When you find yourself being critical of yourself, step out of it and ask yourself: If a colleague were thinking and feeling this way, what would I tell them? Most often you would tell them to be kinder to themselves and see more of the positive. We typically hold ourselves to the highest expectations. Now, give yourself that same advice.
Send kind thoughts to someone else you know or a stranger (you don’t have to actually tell them). This might seem a bit hokey, but it’s been well-proven to build your “compassion muscle” that helps you to be kinder to yourself and others.
If you practice meditation, you can integrate compassion. For example, start or end your meditation with words of compassion and kindness to yourself and to someone else.
The focused attention during these exercises calms your mind. Research on compassion shows a clear pattern. People who have more self-compassion feel less fearful, more confident, and they report less stress and higher performance.
What next?
What is one thing you can commit to practice each day to show yourself and others more compassion, especially when that critical internal voice gets going? I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments.
Dealing with stress well — no matter what’s going on or the challenge — is a crucial skill for leaders and other professionals.
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All the best,
What Next?
You can sign up for Stacey's masterclass, The Confident "No" here.
Stacey L. Olson is a Leadership and Certified Positive Psychology Coach, has 15 years of corporate experience and has gone through her own transformational change from burning out to balanced in life while performing at a high level (both in her corporate career and own business). She works with professionals who want to work less, live more and be their best even with all the demands, high expectations and messiness of everyday life. Stacey is the founder of The Balanced Leader™ program and offers executive and leadership coaching, workshops, and speaking.
