Blog Posts Tagged "Self-Compassion".

If you’re a reasonably conscientious person (and if you’re reading a self improvement blog, you probably are!), reducing self-criticism is likely to help you achieve more success and happiness both personally and in your social relationships. A happier you is better for you and for the world (proof of this).

The technique below is adapted from a technique developed by Dr Kristin Neff (Kristin’s version- see Exercise 3).

If you’re a practical person like I am, what I’m suggesting below will probably sound kooky but if you actually try it, you might be surprised by how much it makes you feel better.

Directions

You’re going to take on three roles (i.e., act like you’re 3 people).

1. Your self critical voice.
2. The “you” that gets criticized.
3. A compassionate, wise observer.

Speak to yourself in your self critical voice

e.g., “You’re doing a bad job at … you’re so useless.”

Speak back to your self critical voice describing what it feels like to be criticized.

e.g., “When you tell me I’m useless, my chest gets tight and I feel like crying. I start to think ‘I don’t think I can ever be a successful person.’ I feel really anxious.”

Good descriptions of what it feels like to be criticized are likely to include: thought, feeling, and physical components. Can you spot these components in my example above?

- Go a few more rounds. What might your self critical voice say next?

- Once again, reply as the you who is being criticized. Describe to the critical you what it feels like to be criticized so harshly.

Next, take on the role of a compassionate, wise observer. What might a compassionate, wise observer say?

e.g., “Your critical self and your criticized self both want you to be successful and happy, but holy crap your critical self goes about it the wrong way. Harsh criticism causes you to feel frozen with fear. Using fear to try to motivate yourself would’ve worked by now if it was going to work. If you need emotional soothing, can you give yourself that? If you’re ruminating about the causes or consequences of your distress, can you choose either giving yourself emotional soothing or taking a tiny problem solving action, rather than self criticism?”

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Today’s New Thing:

I’m really good at providing a service, but I’m less good at running a business. Today I decided to take some small problem solving actions in the direction of “Search Engine Optimization.” I’m not planning on doing anything weird (!) but, it was time I invested some time in this.

SEO basically just means making it easier for my blog content to be found on Google. For example, I’ve tended to write my blog post titles with people who are already regular readers in mind, without really thinking about whether the titles will rank well in search engine results and entice people who are scanning Google search pages to want to read the article.

As usual, taking problem solving action prompted me to try to identify what specific thoughts have been causing me to avoid doing this.

The two thoughts that I came up with were:

“You’re probably not going to be very good at it”

and

“What if you put a ton of time into it and it makes your search rankings worse rather than better, or doesn’t improve them at all”.

Balanced / Self-Compassionate Alternative:

“Well, no wonder you’ve been putting it off if you’ve been having those thoughts. That’s understandable. But – those thoughts might not be true. They’re just thoughts and might not be reality.

The right thing to do is to give it a go. You might not be good at it, or you might be. If you’re not good at it – no one can be good at everything – but there is every chance you can be good at it.”

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Yesterday I wrote about how people do avoidant coping to avoid difficult thoughts and emotions getting triggered, or to escape from them once they are already occurring.

I wrote that the first step to overcoming avoidant coping is nutting out the function of the avoidance i.e., which specific thoughts and emotions the avoidant coping is helping you avoid.

Procrastination is a very common type of avoidant coping. A simple way you can figure out the function of your procrastination is to pick your most-procrastinated activity (e.g., some type of paperwork), and commit to doing that activity for a short period of time. Let’s say 30 minutes. During that 30 minutes, take a piece of paper and note down what difficult thoughts and feelings arrive while you are doing the task. Just very briefly note down the thoughts and emotions on paper as they arrive, and then return to doing the procrastinated activity until the 30 mins is up.

Examples Of What You Might Find:

- You might uncover that doing the procrastinated activity leads you to experience more thoughts about other activities that you need to do, and that causes you anxiety.
- You might feel overwhelmed.
- You might have self-criticism related thoughts. Note what the specific thoughts are e.g., “My self-critical thoughts are that I should’ve done this ages ago. I have no self-discipline, I’m such a loser.”
- You might have self-doubt. Note the specific self-doubt related thoughts.
- You might have negative thoughts about the future e.g. “I’m never going to be a success” or “It’s impossible for me to ever do a good job at this.”
- You might feel irritated/annoyed. (If this is the case, try to figure out the thoughts behind the feelings of anger).
- You might thoughts of being unsupported.
- You might have thoughts like “It’s not fair that I have to do this”.
- You might have thoughts of worthlessness or powerlessness.
- You might find that doing the procrastinated task brings up seemingly unrelated worries (e.g., you start worrying about your relationship or your health). Note these down.

You have lots of great options for what you can do once you identified what thoughts and feelings are being avoided, such as using self-compassion therapy techniques to learn how to cope with self-critical thoughts without avoidant coping.

The trap of avoidant coping is that it might work in decreasing difficult thoughts and emotions temporarily, but it typically increases your problems with the avoided thoughts and emotions overall. It makes you more scared of those thoughts and emotions, and increases the size of your reaction when those thoughts and emotions do get triggered. Avoidant coping also tends to be “stress generating” which means that avoidant coping tends to create more real problems in your life (e.g., you avoid something about your finances and end up with a bigger problem).

A tip: Emotions/feelings are the specific emotions words like anxious, angry etc., and thoughts are pretty much everything else. Try to understand the emotions caused by your thoughts, and the thoughts behind your emotions.

Doing your most-procrastinated activity might trigger happier, calmer feelings & thoughts too, but you’re likely to find you have a mixture of positive and negative thoughts/feelings, and the negative thoughts/feelings will help you determine why you are avoidant coping.

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