Why you need to be kinder to yourself

I've felt for a long time that the happiest and most successful people amongst us have a gentleness in which they speak to themselves, look at failure and move through adversity. Yet this past 18 months has proven to be difficult in providing that level of gentleness to myself. 

I’ve had to forgive myself a lot this past year. Pre-pandemic I navigated life from a place of mild anxiety, naturally a little trepidatious and often finding solace in my own company and with my favorite YouTubers and my dog, Ollie. Fast forward to 2021 and in the past 18 months, I’ve changed jobs, gotten promoted, lost my Dad, moved in with my Mom half of each week to support her through the grief, lost friendships, gained 15 pounds and further moved into a space mentally where things are compartmentalized in order for me to manage. Really it feels like operating in survival mode where my brain can only really be present for that which I can control and it’s caused me to simply not show up in the most present or available ways for the people in my life and caused me to numb myself from facing the reality of how overwhelmed I feel. I’m forever apologizing for taking weeks to reply to a text message, having tough conversations with the people I love to provide context into the why behind my slowness and burying myself into work and little else waiting for the day I can take a real breath and actually stop to process. Self compassion is something that feels like a novel concept to me, yet it’s something I have friends and my therapist reminding me on the regular to offer to myself. The high performing Capricorn in me can’t quite understand the concept beyond how it would benefit me at work and in achieving my goals, so I’ll explain what I’ve learned about self-compassion in a capitalistic context but will throw in a few words of wisdom that I’ve learned around how to infuse a self-compassion mindset into work and beyond and what I’m learning about the why. 

I know it’s going to sound beyond cliche and I run the risk of coming off as a surface live, laugh, love promoter, but being kind to yourself is the most fundamental thing you can do to open up the opportunity for others to do the same for you. All that negative self talk, all the times you beat yourself up for being human (who by the way should be applauded for merely surviving the global pandemic to date) and the ways in which you don’t give yourself space to make mistakes is detrimental to your progress in ways that will hold you back from accessing the places and opportunities you really deserve. There is a level of self-awareness and accountability that is required in the aim to be a good human, but it doesn’t mean you have to take all the feedback that is given to you on times you may not have shown up in your best way. You can have bad days, you can make mistakes, you can royally screw up and you are still worthy, still deserve compassion and still deserve the space to be imperfect. Your mistakes don’t define your identity.

And I’m going to drive home a point that I think is especially important for you to hear. The self care, wellness, self-compassion space has often been taken over by white women who more often than not forget to take an intersectional lens on their desire for relaxation and zen. For many of us as racialized women, we grow up in cultures that don’t create much space for self-compassion. For Black women, the strong Black woman troupe leaves little space for conversations or opportunities to provide self compassion because the world doesn’t give her space to ask for help. For Indigenous women and girls, even being seen as human or recognized as worthy of taking up space in the world is difficult. So many Indigenous girls and women go missing and are murdered and none get the same level of compassion and attention as cute, petite, white, blonde girls like Gabby Petito. Imagine the difficulty of accessing something the world refuses to give you. For women of colour, many of us are taught to suck it up, keep pushing through and we struggle with saying no, setting boundaries and taking a step back to honour ourselves and our needs before anyone else. Collectivist cultures will do that to you. Often make it difficult to learn how to put yourself first and rarely teach us how to be kind to ourselves. It will take time for you to get to a place where your kindness to yourself isn’t seen as weakness, and you have to give yourself grace and compassion knowing there is a lot of unlearning to do. 

So how do you get to a place where self-compassion becomes a natural part of your toolkit to success? I’ll frame the rest of this conversation with a necessary caveat to say I’m on the journey with you in ways that make me feel like an imposter and a fraud for even speaking this into existence. As I sit here the evening before I am meant to post this episode, knowing the week ahead of me is looming with an intensity and pressure that I’m not yet used to in my new role at work and almost of the verge of failing and falling apart, yet have such a limited ability to give myself grace or ask for help. It’s a strange reminder of the things I personally need to hear to cultivate and practise more self-compassion in my own life. I hope it serves the same purpose for you or even involves gentle reminders that you can consider.

First, know that the process of being kinder to yourself is nuanced and not a switch you can flip to suddenly be free from the critical self talk. It will take time and being overly hyper aware of your need for self-compassion can backfire in the same way that not having enough of it can harm you. It also may make some people around you uncomfortable. Those that are not as far along on the journey to realize the need for it as a part of a healing process may not understand your perspective or may see it as a fluffy, new age bs but it’s a key part of process of getting to a place where you thrive despite being flawed and where you’re not defined by your mistakes. You may have people in your life who are truth warriors and feel their job is to call out your stuff, reminding you that you need to shrink in order to fit into their limited world view. Don’t believe them and if possible, cut ties with relationships where your stuff is weaponized against you. Nothing can be more fundamentally important to put yourself on the self-compassion path.

Second, self compassion can also involve advocating for yourself and speaking up for yourself in friendships, at work and in circumstances where it takes courage for you to have to say something. I went through a really strange experience soon after I lost my Dad where I had friends who did limited things to understand my grief. Beyond the basic condolences and the disappearance of people who didn’t know how to show up, there was this strange phenomena of more than one person making things about themselves and not thinking about the layered experiences that grief comes with. It required some moments of letting go and trusting that there was beauty in being removed from someone's life who couldn’t see past their own stuff to understand the depth of pain you were navigating through. It also required some moments of advocating for myself to remind people that as strong as I may seem on the outside, having an off moment didn’t suddenly make me a bad friend or a bad person. It forced me to see me in a much kinder way. When it wasn’t afforded to me through such a devastating time it meant steeping further into the knowing of what I deserved.

Third, you have to learn to start interrupting your thoughts and almost retrain your brain to see the beauty in the mistakes you make. With anything there is a healthy balance to how you perceive your mistakes but when you start to get better at catching yourself in the moment, interrupting the negative self talk and helping yourself reframe the negative to a human moment, things can start to drastically change. According to Dr. Emma (Seppela) Science Director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education and the author of The Happiness Track, this is mindfulness and further it’s the ability to be aware of your thoughts and feelings, and to observe them with some perspective and distance. Instead of succumbing to a torrent of emotion, such as anger at yourself, you can observe the thoughts and feelings that come up, as you would observe a storm from your window until it passes. Mindfulness does not involve suppressing or denying these feelings, but rather being with them as they really are. Imagine meeting those feelings where they are, what a beautiful reframe.

Fourth, it’s important to interrupt such perspectives in the women around you, to help create a sort of accountability to supporting and lifting others up as you climb. If you hear another racialised woman speaking unkindly to herself, interrupt it. Take the opportunity to remind her of her strength, of the systems she’s attempting to navigate through that aren’t designed for her, of the ways in which she shines bright regardless of what is in front of her. There is power in shining a bright light on someone else, in the community that is cultivated by you offering up compassion for someone who may be trying to hang on and push through. It also has the added benefit of helping you to see yourself in that moment, helping you reframe your own mistakes from the same place you would support a friend. 

I recognize none of this is a magic bullet of solutions to get to a place where being kind to yourself is the norm, but what I do hope is that it made you stop and think and that the next time you find yourself beating yourself up for a mistake, for not showing up the way you wanted to in the meeting, or forgetting to proof read that document before it went out or like me, wanting to go into apology mode when you take a little longer to respond to a friend, that you give yourself some grace, that you take a breathe and reframe the situation to the context of what you’re working with and against and that you offer up the same level of compassion and empathy as you would to a dear friend. You deserve to be the bright light for yourself.