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Practicing Self Compassion and Learning to be Kinder to Ourselves
113 Plays2 years ago
As ambitious women and moms, we’re often our toughest critics. We can be so hard on ourselves, and often we attribute this “being tough on ourselves” to how we’ve gotten to where we are today, making it a more difficult thought pattern to want to change.
While it may be true that being tough on ourselves and beating ourselves up when we don’t meet our own (often unrealistic) expectations may have been a factor in our success in the past, it’s not the only way to reach our goals. And one could argue, it’s not the best way if we want to actually enjoy our lives. When we consciously practice being kinder to ourselves, we may find it actually unlocks so much more potential — and helps us enjoy the journey to our many success destinations.
Join host Leanna Laskey McGrath, recovering perfectionist and workaholic, as she shares the process she used to start being kinder to herself, and what she’s discovered as a result of this practice.
Full transcript available here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast, where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leigh Ann Alaski McGrath, former tech exec turned full-time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for joining me this
Understanding Self-Compassion
00:00:34
Speaker
week. Today, I want to talk about self-compassion and being a little bit more kind to ourselves because I think we talk about or we wish that there was more kindness in the world.
00:00:49
Speaker
And I think that starts with being kind to ourselves. We are so hard on ourselves, especially as high achieving women, especially as mothers. We've got that momgill to pile on top.
00:01:02
Speaker
And we have this belief often that being hard on ourselves is part of the formula that got us to where we are. That's helped to push us to be successful, right? We push ourselves. We are always challenging ourselves to be better. And that is
00:01:26
Speaker
what got us to where we are today. So then we have this belief that what if I stop being hard on myself, then what's gonna happen? Like, I'm gonna turn into this lazy couch potato who isn't gonna do anything and will be worthless to the world. So I think that it's a really good question to sit with and ask yourself, what would happen if I stopped being so hard on myself? And just sit with that question and ask yourself, like, see what comes up.
00:01:55
Speaker
because then you can kind of find out why you continue to be so hard on yourself and what beliefs you have within you that are ensuring that this behavior continues. And what are you afraid of? Are you afraid that you'll stop achieving, that you'll stop performing if you start being a little bit nicer to yourself and stop being so hard on yourself?
00:02:21
Speaker
I think it's honestly scary to let go of that because it's often how we've gotten things done in the past. We kind of beat ourselves up whenever we don't do a good job and we have this belief that that's kind of what motivates us to succeed. It's almost like sometimes our motivation is that we want to avoid getting beat up for
00:02:46
Speaker
making a mistake and who's going to be doing the most beating up, it's going to be ourselves, to ourselves. I think it's just really important to remember that we're going to have a lot of relationships in our lifetime, but there is no relationship more important than the one that we have with ourselves, because people are going to come and go out of our lives, but we have ourselves for this entire lifetime, this whole entire time that we're here on this planet.
Personal Journey to Self-Compassion
00:03:15
Speaker
And so,
00:03:16
Speaker
That relationship is a very, very important one to cultivate and focus on and consciously work to build.
00:03:26
Speaker
We can't expect to have a good relationship with ourselves by accident, especially if we've never thought about it before or focused on it at all. So I want to share a couple of anecdotes or stories to illustrate how this has shown up for me recently and the process that I have used to start to build some more self-compassion for myself.
00:03:53
Speaker
It's certainly been a process over time. It's included therapy, but I look at the relationship that I have with myself today compared to what it was a few years ago. And when I see giving myself a lot more compassion, being a lot kinder to myself,
00:04:13
Speaker
I just see how that impacts the rest of my life in so many different ways, how it allows me to be a better parent, how it has allowed me to start this podcast, because no longer am I afraid that if I say something stupid, then I'm gonna beat myself up for it. Honestly, I think self-love and self-compassion
00:04:39
Speaker
is a huge key to allowing us to do more with our lives. For the first 30 something years of my life, I got through it, white knuckling it and pushing myself to the detriment of myself, but also succeeding on paper and achieving my goals. And so kind of removing that or changing
00:05:09
Speaker
My relationship with success and changing the way that I get there has been through self-love and self-compassion and loving myself to the goals. And what I have found is that it allows me to enjoy the achievements so much more and relish in them. And then not only that,
00:05:33
Speaker
but enjoy the process a lot more rather than kind of like closing my eyes and forgetting about that time of just working my ass off to get there so that I could beat there. And then once I got there, enjoying it for two minutes and setting a new goal to get to the next thing and white knuckling it to that.
00:05:51
Speaker
I just think that that kind of makes us miss out on our lives a little bit. You know, the time passes regardless of how we're spending it and all we've got on this earth is time. And so I'm just trying now in my forties to enjoy that time a whole lot more. And I think we all deserve to do that.
Shifting from Self-Criticism to Self-Compassion
00:06:11
Speaker
So one example, this showed up for me recently. So I took my daughter to her six month dental appointment, like cleaning.
00:06:20
Speaker
And they found some cavities in between her back molars, which were really close together, and we weren't flossing. I didn't know I was supposed to floss for a four-year-old, but apparently you are. And...
00:06:35
Speaker
They found multiple cavities that they were gonna have to, one they would drill and the others they were gonna put this silver stuff on and it was gonna turn the teeth black in that area. And I realized afterwards that like I was bummed about it and I felt bad that my daughter was gonna have to go through it.
00:06:53
Speaker
But I also had this belief that I did my best with what I knew. Like I'm doing my best as a parent and I had no idea I was supposed to be flossing. Had I known, I certainly would have been doing that. And so I don't know, I just, I didn't really beat myself up about it.
00:07:12
Speaker
I found that I had some compassion for myself and, you know, just felt like, man, that sucks. And it's unfortunate that she's going to have to do that. And also, I mean, I guess I just kind of recognize that these things happen. And I also found that I was able to instead shift into a bit of gratitude that we found them really early. Like they didn't find them in the exam. It was only through the x-rays after they had said how amazing her teeth looked in the exam.
00:07:42
Speaker
And so I was just really happy that we found it early and it's in her baby teeth, not permanent teeth. And so it was an interesting situation where I didn't really do any conscious shifting from beating myself up to self-compassion. But I realized that somehow my brain has gotten to it as more of a default.
00:08:06
Speaker
And I think that's really exciting. And I think that's a result of the work that I've been doing and the process that I'm going to share with you. I also have to say that other times I do still beat myself up. I'm not perfect. None of us are perfect. I talked about that two weeks ago on my episode about the human experience.
00:08:25
Speaker
And I think it applies to circumstances that sometimes we're feeling great and sometimes we're not. And it also applies to our mindset. We aren't always in a perfect mindset to be able to receive news like that and meet it with self-compassion. Sometimes we're going to go back to the way that we
00:08:46
Speaker
have been doing it for 30 plus years and beat ourselves up a little bit. And so I think it's just important that we don't start to get into developing self-compassion. And then whenever we don't have self-compassion for ourselves, beat ourselves up about not having compassion for ourselves because that I feel like is the high achievers way of doing things. So here is the process that I have used
00:09:16
Speaker
to shift from beating myself up to giving myself some more kindness and compassion. I think whenever we have default ways of being, what happens is that our brain has neural pathways.
00:09:32
Speaker
And I think about them as going from stimulus to response. So going from realizing we did something wrong to beating ourselves up is like a super highway, very quick. There's no real conscious thought involved in getting from one place to the next. It just happens automatically. And so whenever we decide to shift our way of being,
00:09:57
Speaker
We are starting to build like a little baby dirt path from stimulus to a new response. So if we want to recognize that we did something out of alignment with our values or something that we think is we're labeling bad.
00:10:14
Speaker
And then we want to get to a place of self-compassion. It's going to take a lot of practice and repetition to build that dirt path and then into a one lane highway. And it takes a while and a lot of practice to get to the super highway. So I think it's just important to recognize that this is not an overnight thing. This for me has been a process of years.
Steps to Develop Self-Compassion
00:10:43
Speaker
And there will be small wins along the way, and there will be also many, many times along the way where our brain defaults to that superhighway that it already has programmed. And so there's another opportunity to practice some self-compassion for ourselves.
00:11:01
Speaker
So the process first is to start by noticing. This started when I started therapy in 2020, and my therapist suggested writing down for a week every time I noticed how I was talking to myself, whether it was positive or negative, but just
00:11:19
Speaker
what are the things I was saying to myself at any given point. Just starting to notice is really, really important and writing it down is key because you can notice it in the moment, but until you write it down, you don't start to notice the patterns. If you like data, you have the opportunity to kind of see, you know, how many times in a week did I say that same thing to myself?
00:11:44
Speaker
And it's just really interesting data. I don't think that you can ascertain that from just noting it in your head. I think it's really important to write it down. So write down for at least a week, just everything that you notice you're saying to yourself. Step two is to recognize and start to tell yourself, I am a human, humans are not perfect.
00:12:07
Speaker
Sometimes humans make mistakes, and this is one of those times. Starting to just recognize that all humans, for whatever reason, we know that humans aren't perfect and that everybody makes mistakes, but we aren't okay accepting the fact that we make mistakes. That's not something that we generally allow, even when we allow it for other people.
00:12:32
Speaker
And then we start to respond to ourselves as we notice ourselves making a mistake and we say, oh, God, like, how could I have done that? Then there's a sentence that I learned from a coach, Cara Lowenthal, and she says, how human of me. And I think it's a really nice way to reframe.
00:12:57
Speaker
So whenever we start to notice that we are maybe unhappy with ourselves, then we can say, how human of me that I can't find my keys. How human of me that I forgot to put that appointment on the calendar.
00:13:13
Speaker
How human of me that I am late to this meeting. How human of me that I'm having a tough time balancing this right now. How human of me that this decision feels really hard for me and I have delayed making a decision. This one and the last one go back
00:13:35
Speaker
to embracing the human experience, which I talked about in episode 11. So if you haven't listened to that one, I would also recommend that as supplementary learning. The fourth thing I would recommend is to breathe. If you don't have a breathing practice or a meditation practice, I highly recommend it. I think whenever I started doing pelvic floor physical therapy, one of my exercises was to do belly breathing.
00:14:05
Speaker
I do a lot of meditation, but not super consistently. I mean, I'll do it a lot for a while and then not for at all for a while. And until I started doing it literally every day because I had to for my PT practice, I just started noticing how much better I felt after it.
00:14:27
Speaker
I mean, it's crazy how you can just close your eyes for a minute and take 10 deep breaths and feel so different afterwards than at the beginning of that minute or two. So in so many of these situations, we have the opportunity to use breathing. It's just a really powerful tool that almost seems too
00:14:50
Speaker
simple or too easy. So maybe we're like, we discount it, but it is so easy to do and so impactful. So highly recommend learning to just breathe, just take deep breaths in these moments to literally give yourself some space. The fifth thing is something I talked about in episode 11 as well about allowing rather than resisting.
00:15:17
Speaker
And here I want to talk about it in terms of emotions. So allowing rather than resisting our emotions, I think that the way our society conditions us is to kind of push down any negative emotions and resist them.
00:15:33
Speaker
And what ends up happening is that because we recognize that we're supposed to do that, a lot of times I think beating ourselves up is kind of a defense mechanism so that we don't have to actually feel or deal with the thing that we're shaming ourselves about. But if we actually allow that emotion, allow ourselves to feel whatever we feel about the original stimulus,
00:16:02
Speaker
rather than buffering by beating ourselves up about it, that can be so powerful and it can allow it to release from our bodies much more quickly rather than staying there. But another tool is to look for the humor. I find that I laugh at myself and situations a lot more than I used to because I just don't take them as seriously anymore and
00:16:28
Speaker
now that I'm not trying to prove myself all the time, I just, when I mess up, sometimes it's kind of funny. It's kind of funny. And whenever I can say how human of me and just notice that absurdity in life becomes a whole lot more enjoyable, honestly. And then the final suggestion I have is to challenge the thoughts. So whenever you're having those thoughts where you're kind of like,
00:16:58
Speaker
beating yourself up and you try to allow the emotions and recognize that you're human and respond with how human of me and they're still kind of pervasive.
00:17:12
Speaker
I think that a good question to ask is like, what would I tell a friend in this situation? What would I tell my child in this situation? For whatever reason, we're generally able to give a lot more compassion to other people than we are to ourselves. So that's always a good question to ask too. So like in the cavity situation, had I been beating myself up about that,
00:17:34
Speaker
I know that if any of my friends called and told me about it and were really upset that I would say, like, of course you didn't know, of course you're doing your best, you know, look at all these other areas you're doing so great in and, you know, like you didn't do this one thing, you didn't have lost, you didn't know that you were supposed to.
00:17:52
Speaker
And so I think that the language that we use for other people in these situations can sometimes give us some language to use for ourselves.
Encouragement and Conclusion
00:18:04
Speaker
So that's just a really good way to pick up some new phrases instead of you should have known better, you should have done that. How did you not know that flossing is a thing for four year olds or whatever you're by default saying to yourself.
00:18:18
Speaker
So I hope that that process gives you something to kind of get started with. I certainly, as you know, I'm a huge fan of therapy and coaching. So if those are available to you, I also highly recommend those. But in summary, I say it all the time, but I'm going to say it again, we only get one life. So let's enjoy it. I feel like so much of our suffering comes from within, from beating ourselves up and
00:18:48
Speaker
just not being very kind to ourselves all the time. So let's just ease up on ourselves a little bit and be a little bit kinder. I promise you, you're still going to achieve your goals. You won't turn into a lazy couch potato. You are still going to perform and achieve at the level you are now. You're just going to get to enjoy the ride a little bit more. And I'm all about that at this stage in my life. So thank you all so much for tuning in and I hope that
00:19:16
Speaker
You can be a little bit kinder to yourself and have a wonderful week. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast. Please like, subscribe, or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.