Self-Compassion: Be Kind to Yourself

Self-Compassion is, for the most part, an overlooked concept in our society.

[VIDEO TRANSCRIPT]:

Self-Esteem vs. Self-Compassion

There’s a lot of talk in our society about self-esteem, but there’s not very much talk about self-compassion. I think self compassion is one of those things that’s really missing in Western society, so try this on for a second.

Compassion Exercise

Just for a moment, forget about yourself for this little exercise–let’s think about other people for a moment. Try on the point of view that everyone’s doing their best, all the time, no exceptions. See if you can look through that lens.

Now most of us are gonna resist to that a little bit, so now my question for you is that person you’re thinking of who’s not doing their best; maybe they’re not doing their physical best, but are they doing their psychological best? Are they doing their emotional best? And you probably start to see that maybe they really are doing their best.

Even somebody that comes up to me and robs me at gunpoint to take my wallet–in their mind, they’re justifying it. In their mind, that is their best based on what happened to them in the past and the way they view things.

The Turnaround

Most of us can kind of go there and think, “okay yeah I can see how maybe that is somebody’s best–even that type of action.” Now comes the hard part:  look at your past, and all of your mistakes and all the things that you’ve done, and look for ways that you did the best you could in every single one of those situations; in the emotional state that you were in, with what you knew at the time, you made the absolute best decision every single time.

It’s a lot harder, right? But this is the place for us to be. This is self-compassion.

Building Self-Worth

When we have more self compassion we start to build self worth, we start to feel better. Brené Brown, a researcher out of the University of Houston–she has her own Netflix series now, she’s been on Oprah, etc. She said it this way: “I can’t know that everybody’s doing their best all the time– I can’t know that that’s true, but when I look through that lens, when I believe that, everything’s easier, relationships are easier and everything’s a lot nicer.”

The Lens You Choose

So it’s not about something being true or false, it’s about the lens we decide to look through, because at some point, all the lenses we look through, and all the things we think are true, we made a decision about it; we chose it. So we can choose to believe that everyone’s doing their best all the time, no exceptions.

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