You Need a Coach B*tch
In this weekly podcast, Certifed Coach Instructor Chris Hale keeps it real and sassy to help you claim your own authority and put the biggest, brightest, most unapologetic version of yourself out into the world.
You Need a Coach B*tch
Self-compassion Is Not Self-pity
In this episode, let's explore the crucial distinction between self-compassion and self-pity, inspired by Dr. Kristen Neff's transformative work, "Self-Compassion." I dive into how to treat ourselves with the same kindness we'd extend to a dear friend or a child, especially when life throws its inevitable struggles our way. Learn practical strategies to cultivate self-compassion and understand why it's essential for our well-being. This episode is a heartfelt invitation to embrace kindness towards ourselves, even when the going gets tough.
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Hey, bestie, I'm back. How are you? It's been a minute. I did not know how long it was going to be when I decided to take a little break from podcasting. It was sort of a forced break.
Speaker 1:I mentioned a while back that my dog had gotten sick Two months ago. We nearly lost him and he started needing full-time care and I basically spent every hour here at home tending to his needs, being his full-time caregiver. I mean, my husband obviously was here and helped, but I haven't really been working outside the home, so I was able to be here with him all the time and, I'm gonna be honest, I was not prepared for what it would take out of me. My husband also had some work trips during that time, so I was quite literally alone and there were times when, like, I would not leave the house for like five days in a row because there was nobody else here to take care of him. It kind of reminded me of COVID, actually, where I was just like forced to be in the house. And anyway, I talked to a friend about it and I was saying that my purpose was just being of service to him and that I never realized that not all service feels good. We think about serving as being this lovely, beautiful thing that we do, but in this situation it came with a lot of pain. I know I talk a lot about service with my clients, like when they're putting out material online or they're producing freebies, that we're really doing it, you know, to serve other people and yes, it's part of our marketing plans and whatever but, like, the top priority is serving our client base right and serving the world, and that always feels really nice to think about, and so it was just a really interesting, I guess, wake up call. That, like being of service, can feel painful. It can. It can really take a lot out of you.
Speaker 1:In that regard, I think I was also grieving him and the dog that he was before. Things kind of went south and I was doing some anticipatory grieving for what I knew was the inevitable. I knew that we were coming close to the end. So I'm sad to report that he did pass away just a week ago and we are so heartbroken. But we're also very grateful for the 19 years that we got with him. We got to celebrate one last birthday and we got to love on him, knowing how close he was to the end, and just appreciate every single day that we had with him. He passed here at home. I was by his side rubbing his little head, and I could not be just more thankful for that experience to help him on to the other side. So that's what I've been up to for the last two months. Thank you to those of you who reached out, knowing that he was sick. It meant a lot to me to feel your care coming my way, and thank you all listeners for your understanding for why I had to take a little break.
Speaker 1:I had very little bandwidth for much else and I was just really doing my best to take care of him and myself throughout this time take care of him and myself throughout this time. So today I want to talk about self-compassion, because I really needed to lean heavily into this over the past two months, and I want to talk about the difference between self-compassion and self-pity, because I think some of y'all out there think that they're the same thing and therefore do not show yourselves enough of self-compassion, or any self-compassion at all, ever. So I love the way that Dr Kristen Neff, the author of Self-Compassion, talks about this. It is literally the focus of her work and her book Self-Compassion was actually one of the first books that my therapist recommended to me, because I was literally so hard on myself all the time. And so Dr Neff says self-compassion is being kind to ourselves when we make mistakes or fail or are imperfect.
Speaker 1:And the easiest way to understand it is to think about how you would talk to your best friend or to like a nine-year-old if they were to make a mistake. So you know, it would sound something like it's okay, everyone makes mistakes. You're not a bad person, right, because mistakes are not moral. This is not a moral issue. We're not good or bad. We're all going to do things in our lives where we mess up, we screw up. We're not perfect and that's okay. So think about that, just like. Even take a moment to pause here and think about how you would talk to your best friend if they called you and they were like oh my God, I did this thing and I feel so awful.
Speaker 1:You know, the problem is is that we don't talk to ourselves that way, we don't give ourselves that same level of care, right? We're so much more harsh. We're like I fucked up, I'm so stupid. Or we like over identify with the mistake and we call ourselves a failure instead of saying that we failed. And we do this because we think that if we don't, we're being too easy on ourselves. And this is something that's reinforced Like as children, as adults.
Speaker 1:I know for sure, being a dancer mistakes were always seen as, like this, really bad thing. So I got into this habit of really talking to myself in a really negative light, and I think that's really common for most artists especially. And I think really what we're doing is we're trying to shame ourselves into never screwing up again. We're trying to transcend our humanness, and we do this for the same reason we do everything else our feelings. Everything we do is to either create a feeling we want or to avoid a feeling we don't want. So by using shame to avoid making mistakes, we think we can avoid the guilt, embarrassment or disappointment that comes with the mistake, the failures and the imperfection. This harsh criticism is really just perfectionism rearing its ugly head again, thinking that it's the most useful thing for us.
Speaker 1:But it has been proven that self-compassion is a way better motivator than self-criticism. Being kind to yourself and acknowledging that you are human and won't always get it right helps to take you out of being so self-focused and instead places you in the world with others, and you can't simultaneously think about yourself and think about others. It's not possible. You can't be a total narcissist and be all about you and also be like the most caring, compassionate person in the world. So we have to pick a lane here.
Speaker 1:And so, aside from thinking that self-compassion will make us less effective, we also conflate self-compassion with self-pity and, like we definitely don't want to be self-pitying right, like God forbid, we pity ourselves and listen. It's going to happen from time to time and again. This does not make us bad people. Self-pity is just not the most useful thing. It's not a bad thing, it's just not useful. But it's definitely not the same thing as self-compassion. So we don't want to confuse the two and we don't want to think that any time that we're like acknowledging our feelings, especially the negative ones, around being imperfect and making mistakes, we don't want to confuse that with self-pity, because they are not the same thing. We need to be able to feel into the spaces where we're not always getting it right and acknowledge that pain, and so this is straight from Dr Neff's website, which is a great resource if you want more information on self-compassion.
Speaker 1:Self-pity involves why me thinking and is self-focused. While self-compassion frames the experience of imperfection in light of the shared human experience, and research shows that self-compassion reduces self-focus, increases perspective-taking and helps us feel connected to others when we struggle, I think that self-pity is being concerned more with the things we cannot control than the things we can, concerned more with the things we cannot control than the things we can. When we're self-focused and we're in that, why me place, we tell ourselves stories about what is being done to us, we get overly fixated on the circumstances of which we can rarely ever control, and then we isolate ourselves by overly focusing on our own experience and forget that we exist alongside others also going through things in their lives and we're less connected to them and the greater world. So if I think about, right, the passing of my dog, like I could focus on, like how unfair it is that he got sick, and I could go on about his last two months and how hard they were, but instead I choose to focus on the fact that this is something we all have to go through as pet owners. Right, I'm not isolating myself from the rest of the world. Our pets usually do not outlive us and while that might seem unfair, which I can acknowledge my feelings around, that I can acknowledge the pain. It's not this thing that I alone am going through. And if it's unfair, it's unfair to all of us. It's not just unfair to me, it's not this me thing. And there are so many things that people are going through all the time right that we could say are unfair. And, yeah, no one should have to feel that pain. But it is a pain that many of us go through and it's okay to be sad and to grieve and to cry and to do all of those things. And this is where that acknowledgement for our humanness also comes in, and not just in the making of mistakes or the being imperfect, but in the ability to hold space for ourselves while we're feeling bad about these things. And this helps us become less self-focused and less selfish when we contextualize it with the rest of the world and other people and the fact that we're not going through all of this alone. That is the compassionate way and it is not self-pitying Like I couldn't control his health.
Speaker 1:All I could do was to make sure that he got the best care possible, which we did. We went to the vet a lot in the last two months to make sure that he was doing okay and getting like the treatments and the medications, et cetera. Self-pity would have me focused on the why it was happening, which really didn't matter. It was happening and I needed to be able to show myself the same compassion that I showed him. I couldn't beat myself up for not being a good enough caregiver and I couldn't lament the fact that we were in this situation, because that would not have allowed me to take care of him the way that I needed to right See how that self-pitying would have made me really focused on only myself and my experience. And the point of the last two months was to really make sure that he had the best possible experience that he could, knowing where we were.
Speaker 1:And I'm going to be honest, it was not always easy to choose self-compassion and it still isn't. But I am making a conscious choice to interrupt the thought patterns that would have me slip into being overly harsh or to isolate myself from the rest of humanity and somehow make my situation like unique, because I don't want to live in that like very self-isolating place mentally and emotionally. You know, I really had to catch myself over the last two months from telling myself that I should be able to do more than I was doing, that I should be able to continue to produce a podcast and to be online every day and to be serving the world, when really my only purpose was to serve this little tiny baby that I needed to take care of Like I was entrusted with his life and I needed to put all of my energy and focus into him. But don't kid that that voice in my head wasn't coming down on me really harshly, in a really negative way, telling me that I was spending too much time devoted to him and that I needed to be able to, like, balance things a little bit better. And I really had to do a lot of work to silence that voice. It wasn't easy, and so I'm not coming to you from this place of like being on the other side of like.
Speaker 1:I'm always in this self compassionate place Like I. It's a very current real thing that I'm working through, that I might always be working through. I don't know if I'll ever be on the other side of it. Like I'm hoping to create new neural pathways and to make those changes neurologically. But I'm not there today and I'm going to let it be okay that I'm not there today and I'm gonna let it be okay that I'm not there today and still come here and share this with you with hopes that it helps you a little bit on your journey with finding more self-compassion.
Speaker 1:I also don't want to put unreasonable demands on myself and tell myself that I should be able to handle all things at all times, that like I should be unaffected by sad things, or that I should for some reason be better at handling things, for whatever reason. This is also discompassionate. This is not the way forward and it's not self-indulgent or letting myself off the hook to be kind and caring to myself and I have to remember that daily right, this is a daily practice. This is a minute to minute practice. I need to go back and remember that I have a little nine-year-old inside of me that needs to hear nice things and I want to not repeat the patterns of those who talk to me too harshly as a way to motivate myself. I need to take care of that little kid.
Speaker 1:So if you find that your self-inner critic comes out a lot and is really taking over the show and not allowing you to connect deeply with yourself in a loving, kind way. This is just a good moment to check in with that and start to think a little bit about how you want to start talking to yourself and what's going to be the best way to cultivate self-compassion and challenge all the myths about it, about how it's self-pity or it's letting yourself off the hook or it's self-indulgent or selfish. Knock that off, we don't need that, it's not helping and lean more into kindness and caring and softness. We want to live a life where we can be soft with ourselves, which is different than being easy on ourselves. All right, friends, that's what I got for you for now. I hope that you have an amazing week and we'll talk soon. Bye.