Are You Too Hard On Yourself? This Is What's Missing

Are you harder on yourself than you would ever be on a friend? Jim describes the inner critic, the voice that jumps on you when you make a mistake, and explains why it can feel like it is trying to help even though it makes things harder. He shares ways to create some distance from it and to respond with self-compassion, including picturing how you would treat a loved one who made the same mistake, writing a list of your strengths and practicing loving kindness meditation. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one to one professional care.

Transcript

I want to talk a bit today about basically ways in which we are very hard on ourselves, Ways in which we actually create a lot of suffering for ourselves that we do have the ability to change. I'm just going to start by giving an overview of basically compassion. Compassion is fairly straightforward. It's being moved by someone else's suffering or pain to feel, You know, Empathy or in some respects trigger your heart so that you feel something for the person. When we look at self-compassion, It's the same except that our own personal Pain or suffering then triggers compassion towards ourselves. And the reason I'm leading into this is this is where the breakdowns generally happens, Is people are lacking in self-compassion and having a strong, What we call inner critic, Which then creates this situation where they're very hard on themselves, They're not very forgiving, And leads to a lot of suffering. Some people may not be familiar with this term, The inner critic. So the inner critic is basically that voice that's inside of you that when you make a mistake, It's inside your head, It's when you make a mistake, Have something go wrong, It kind of jumps on you and says you screwed up, You made a mistake, You should have been thinking properly about this, Planning better, Should have anticipated this. It might go to the extent of saying, What's wrong with you? It might even go even further and say, Like, You're an idiot, You're a fool. Most people at one time or another have experienced that sort of, If you identify with the being hard on yourself phrase, Then that's really what that is. That's where the being hard on yourselves comes from. I want people to understand basically what the inner critic is. The inner critic is that term that we use, Which is a very appropriate term. It's an inner critic, Which is highly critical of self. But that is basically its purpose is to, It's trying to push you to do well, To succeed, To be successful, To, Very basic, To survive, But also to have a, You know, To have a good life. To meet your goals, To achieve things, To be content, Happy, Whatever you use to describe that. The problem is how it goes about it. And a lot of times I would relate this to even a parent or someone who or boss who is triggered by fear. And then becomes very harsh with the child or with the employee because of fear. They're scared that they're going to have a negative outcome, So they respond very strongly to and harshly. And that's what's happening with the inner critic. The inner critic wants you to do well. Wants you to be successful, Typically, But when something happens. . . It triggers fear. Most people are not aware of this, But it's triggering fear and then the response is then, You idiot, You fool, How could you do this? Which makes sense when you look at it as being driven by this strong emotion, But doesn't make sense in terms of helping you be successful. How is that helpful in the situation? It's not, Of course. We need to understand more about this inner critic, What's going on with it. We need to start to learn to distance ourselves from it. Sometimes people will find that the inner critic sounds a lot like a parent, Like a father or mother, Or some caregiver or relative that was very active in their childhood in some way, Often very critical. Very demanding. And so then sometimes the Unfortunately, This childhood voice can become our inner voice as an adult. It doesn't happen to everyone, But it can happen. If that's something that makes sense to you, That seems happening to you. Then it's great to kind of be able to label it as that's my mom or that's my dad talking. It distance yourself a bit from the voice. And a lot of the strategies we use for the inner critic are about creating some distance. Sometimes people will yell at the inner critic to be quiet. Sometimes we label the inner critic or we give it a name like Joe or Fred or something. And it's like, Joe, Be quiet. Stop picking on me. It may sound odd to do that, But it does create distance from the inner critic. So one of the things to remember about your thinking is The more credibility you give to your thoughts, The more power they have over you. If you reduce the credibility your thoughts have, If it's just like, Oh, My brain just keeps nattering on about things. It makes a big difference in terms of how you're affected by it. I think the brain often is just having this endless kind of chatter, Most of which is meaningless. And then in turn, I don't give a lot of credit, Credibility or credit to. Of some of the thoughts that come up, Which helps me just kind of move past them. We're talking about this inner critic, And so the way to work through the inner critic, Aside from some of the things I mentioned, Is we cultivate and develop more self-compassion. Which means instead of jumping on ourselves when we make a mistake, We respond with compassion. And one of the things I like about this is, And one of the things that I use often is to look at it from the perspective of we're human, We're not perfect, Everyone makes mistakes. And this, This is the sort of, For me, The core of how I approach it. In that, You know, I've made a mistake instead of being, How can you make a mistake? The inner critic is just like. You're a complete moron. How could you do this? The perspective is I make mistakes. Everyone make mistakes. I'm not perfect. I did my best, But it didn't work out, But I'm going to learn from it and move forward. Cultivating this compassion towards self is something for some people that's not easy. They sometimes are still stuck in this idea that I have to be hard on myself or I won't be successful. But we know that's not true. If we look at our history, If we look at our childhood, We look at teachers that influenced us or people that had a powerful sort of influence over us. In terms of moving us forward in our challenges, Whether it's a sports team or our schooling. These people that we remember fondly. That were there for us, These teachers or coaches or people like that. They weren't yelling at us. They weren't hard on us. They weren't being critical of us. They were encouraging us because they believed in us. They were saying, Jim, You can do this. Jim, You can do this. Try again. You've got the ability to do this. So. We should be doing that, And the reason I bring that up is we should be doing that with ourselves. We should be encouraging. And comforting and you know, Being there for ourselves, Not so that we don't try and succeed, But no, So that we. At least feel Encouraged to move forward and we not spending so much time suffering under this sort of weight of the inner critic That's like calling us names or just running us down One of the other exercises that we do with self-compassion I find very effective is it highlights for us the difference between how we treat others and how we treat ourselves. What I usually ask people to do is think about a loved one and think about how you would respond to them if they made a mistake. And people think about that and they visualize that. And then I say, Well, Then think about how you respond to yourself if you make the same mistake. And then it's very apparent to them the distance between I think about my daughter making a mistake. I'd be like, Everyone makes mistakes. You tried your best, You're not perfect, But you'll get them next time, Whatever. With myself, You know, How could you do this? How could you not see this? How could you be so clueless? And you realize that there's this harsh, Really no-margin-for-error perspective that happens with ourselves sometimes. I don't think I've ever talked to somebody about this and I'm not agreed that they're much harder on themselves than they are on other people. It's just the nature. Of how this works and it's really rooted in the fact that we want to be successful in our life. So I could be easy on someone else and their life trajectory doesn't affect me. But if I'm easy on myself. . . I may feel that then I'm not going to succeed in some way. But understanding what's going on is very helpful, But we need to learn how to change it. So I was going back to this exercise. This exercise illuminates the difference between how we treat others and how we treat ourselves. Then we can start to shift towards, What would it be like if I treated myself like I treated my daughter or a friend? I could start doing that. So that's really important as a strategy. And the other things that we do now in mindfulness Compassion is really important and it's very important in terms of cultivating a stance. We like prefer the term stance, A stance of compassion towards myself rather than attitude. We like the term stance. So I'm making a conscious choice to be more compassionate with myself. I'm approaching myself with compassion. And ideally because I care for myself and I love myself. And it really does make a big difference. There is a loving kindness meditation that we often encourage that encourages you to visualize loving and caring for others and then caring for yourself during the meditation. That's very helpful. If you're not interested in meditation then even just making a decision to be more compassionate with yourself. And being conscious of that, Writing up a list of your positive attributes and your strengths would be helpful. Listing ways that you could be more compassionate with yourself or compassionate to other people. Because one of the things we find is that If I'm more compassionate with me, It'll be much easier for me to be more compassionate with others. If I'm very judgmental and harsh and critical of myself, It makes it hard to be compassionate for others, As you probably are aware. I might tend to judge them more harshly, Not accept their feelings in some way because of that. So it's a win-win in terms of the more compassionate I am with myself, The kinder I am to myself. It does flow to other people. Certainly being in my skin. Being in my head. Is a much more enjoyable place to be when I'm being compassionate with myself. That's important. These are some exercises you can try, But I really think it starts with Taking a position of I'm going to try and be more compassionate with myself. And understanding that this being hard on yourself. Is counterproductive and it's not helpful. And it's not only not helpful, It just leads to a lot of this day-to-day suffering, Which is. . . Quite frankly, Very unnecessary. Even though at times, Because we're in our automatic patterns, We're not paying attention, We feel that somehow this is happening. As you think about it, We just automatically do this because it's what we've always done. And it's time to stop that. It's time to step outside of that automatic pattern. Make a choice about something better. And the thing that you'll notice is you'll be far more productive. And be much happier. In your life if you can cultivate more self-compassion.