Treat yourself as well as you treat the people you care about
Studies by the Center for Mindful Self Compassion demonstrate that treating ourselves as kindly as we treat the people we love is not only more fun for everyone, but also achieves higher performance results, offers protection against trauma, builds resilience, flexibility and can last a lifetime. It can also be regulating.
It’s pretty simple–whatever you’d do for a friend or loved one, make sure you extend that sort of care and behaviour to yourself as well.
There are lots of ways to do this. My favourite is to quietly, all throughout the day, give myself a reassuring pat while saying kind words to myself, like, “It’s ok, we’ll figure it out”. If I have the time, I ask myself what I’d most like to hear right now, let the answer bubble up from down deep, and then say it to myself over and over for a minute or so inside my head. It’s magic
For me, this particular tool has been hard work. I’ve been very resistant to it, and it’s taken me a few years to be ok with it. In Angela Duckworth’s famous book Grit, she identifies the two necessary ingredients for achievement: high expectations AND plenty of good support. Both.
My guess is that I find self-compassion practice challenging because I was raised mostly with the first one, enforced by criticism and a disdain for weakness or needing anything. Ugh. So boring. And, obviously, total BS. In the process of exploring this self-compassion tool, I have had to dismantle that conditioning.
One more benefit from this practice is that it resources us from the inside out to be kinder to others. There’s the saying: "You can’t give what you haven’t got”. If a person is walking around telling themselves mean stuff, and being harsh to themselves, when things get stressful, they are likely to respond to others meanly and harshly too. The inside talk comes out. But if a person is already being kind to themselves inside, when they get stressed it's more likely that they can access some kindness or understanding for others, de-escalate situations and find common ground.
