Hi sweet friends. Last week I talked about one of the components of self-compassion and I just figured I would continue on! This week I wanted to talk about self-kindness– which is being nice to yourself or treating yourself as you would a friend. Self-kindness is kind of hard to explain unless I discuss its opposite; self-criticism.
For a general example of self-criticism in action, let’s say we have a plan to start exercising (relatable, right?). Before this decision, we have not been exercising regularly and when we start we have some metric in our mind of what would mean success. We go and we are successful a couple times. Then we do something that’s maybe not up to our standards in our mind, and ohh we end up criticizing ourselves very heavily and feeling very bad about ourselves. How bad we feel about ourselves convinces us to stop exercising, or we continue to do so heavily, almost punitively, and we in no way feel in sync with our bodies.
This is a good example of what Neff called “the carrot and the stick” phenomenon. It’s when we’re chasing the carrot because we want to get the reward. We want to be good, we want to change, we want to improve, we want to be healthy. But when we show the slightest indication that we might not be progressing as much as we’d like, we criticize ourselves so heavily and we are soooo mean to ourselves. This mental punishment is the “stick,” and as long as we use self-criticism to motivate ourselves, we are stuck between the two.
The good news is that there is a way out of this carrot and stick pattern, and that is self-kindness, or more generally, self-compassion. I’ve found it’s one of the only things that can expand your idea of who you are when your thoughts of yourself have a tight grip. Self-kindness is a hand on your shoulder encouraging you with warm confidence and a larger knowing that you are trying to be better. Self-criticism is a contemptful, scary authority figure who does not see all the ways that you are trying and cuts you down before you can even begin. Who could function under such a rigid ruler?
When I first started to wrap my mind around this idea, my brain kind of felt like that was too much space to give. Who was I if I wasn’t constantly criticizing myself? There is discomfort in stepping away from the carrot and stick model, but it is worth it. It can help us see that instead of criticizing ourselves for being failures there are other courses of actions like learning other skills, asking for help, or lowering our expectations and more gradually raising them, etc. Working with ourselves instead of proclaiming ourselves as failures. Acknowledging we are humans and not robots.
You might not think of self-kindness as a good motivator because for some reason we’ve been taught that being kind to ourselves will induce laziness and self-complacency. But it’s actually been shown in psychological research that people who have high self-compassion are more able to admit when they have failed and make plans to adjust and continue on.
So how do you cultivate self-kindness? I think the first step is to realize that your relationship with your “self” is no different than the relationship that you have with others. It takes understanding and trust and time and continual effort. Just like other relationships when you don’t treat other people nicely it drains the energy and connection out of the relationship, and the same is true with ourselves. Which means continuing to be self-critical keeps us at odds with our own success.
The second thing I would say can help is mindfulness, which is the third component of self-compassion and I plan on going over that next week!