“I say this because I want you to do better, be better.”
“I’m telling you this because you need to hear the ugly truth.”
Chances are you’ve heard variations of this message inside your own head – talking to you, about you – and generally with much more astringent language. Something along the lines of:
- “My God, how dumb can you be?”
- “What a freaking idiot!”
- “That was the stupidest thing you’ve done in a long time.”
- “I can’t believe you said/did that!”
- “You really showed your ass that time!”
Even motivational speaker Zig Ziglar pushes the tough-love approach: “When you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you.”
We all know how awful it is to get beat up by others, emotionally and psychologically, and yet we women think nothing of throwing on the old hair shirt and berating ourselves for slights and screw-ups, real and imagined.
Controlling your inner bitch
The sad thing is I don’t know a single woman who has said, “If I hadn’t cussed myself out, I’d never be where I am today. I owe it all to my inner bitch.”
You know what they say about having to love yourself first, before you can love others? Same thing holds true with being kind and compassionate. Chances are excellent if you’re shrewish to yourself, you’re a shrew to others, too.
Of course you need to be dedicated, hard-working and honest with yourself, and coaching yourself (or being coached) to keep moving forward. But beating yourself up is not only counterproductive, but it can mess up your physical health as well.
Self-compassion means being honest about your own shortcomings and how they contributed to failure but it doesn’t mean castigating yourself over them. People with high self-compassion recognize their mistakes as a part of learning and life, and see it as a chance to grow, in their careers and in business.
People with high levels of self-compassion are more interested in mastery as opposed to performance. Mastery is about learning; performance is about being the best, which of necessity means comparing oneself with others. When you focus exclusively on performance, any setback by definition makes you feel inferior (or more inferior), more pessimistic and less productive.
Being compassionate with yourself changes the way your body reacts to stress, too. A study by psychologists at Brandeis University showed that after participants were exposed to stressful situations, those with high self-compassion displayed fewer physical signs of stress (high blood pressure, low energy, headaches, upset stomach and other gastrointestinal issues and insomnia, among others).
Not only that, but people with higher levels of self-compassion have a greater feeling of well-being, lower levels of depression and anxiety, are more resilient, optimistic and curious, and have higher emotional intelligence (EQ).
If you tend to cuss yourself out, there is good news: As with any other skill, you can learn to treat yourself better. In order to install those skills properly, I recommend doing some foundation work first: Define for yourself what it means to be successful.
If you believe the only way you can be a success is by holding yourself to impossible standards of unattainable perfection, then you are dooming yourself to a life filled with dissatisfaction, regret, misery and ill health.
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone puts off difficult (or unpalatable) tasks. Everyone occasionally says the wrong thing at the wrong time or slips on a step or transposes numbers or whatever it is. Stop being so hard on yourself!
Once you’ve truly accepted that you’re not perfect and never will be, try some of these exercises developed by Dr. Kristin Neff to improve your self-compassion level:
- Pretend you are your own best friend (how’s that for a novel concept?) and speak to yourself the way you would talk to a friend who had the exact same experience
- Become aware of the harridan in your head and reframe her message to be more compassionate and forgiving
- Take short “self-compassion” breaks, where you think about past stressful events and put a more forgiving spin on them
- Forgive yourself for being human
- Learn from your experiences and vow to do better moving forward
What’s your best tip for being kind to yourself? Please share in the comments below.