Howdy fellow readers and personal development enthusiasts! As spring comes and blossoms the trees (poetic, right?) we start to go out more and enjoy time in the sun - or so we should.
At the same time, most of us are hopelessly engaged in self-improvement and development. Which sometimes takes us away from the sun & the outside. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you treat yourself more kindly in the process.
Today’s substack will focus on some cool pieces to familiarize yourself with another (easier, perhaps) method to boost your development- self-compassion.
If you just rolled your eyes, that’s ok. Most of us do that at first. Just bear with us today and keep in mind that:
self-compassion is not about self-love or letting yourself off the hook, it’s more about treating yourself as less of an asshole.
Let’s go:
I. About self-compassion - it’s not about self-love; it’s more about how to be less of an asshole to yourself
This cool article was written by one of my fave therapists and takes you through the nuts and bolts of improvement and self-development without the added idea that you are not good enough (a sin I believe most self-help articles suffer from).
The problem with most improvement pieces is that:
they ignore the barriers to self-improvement
they make you think that you are not doing enough
they ignore the social factors that may hinder or help
And the more you try, the worse it is.
“In my own work as a therapist, I see people’s best intentions and plans for improvement fall victim to the same problem: They can’t sustain their progress, in large part because they lack self-compassion.” Nick Wignall
Spend too much time focused solely on improvement and you lose the self. And without a solid sense of self, all steps toward improvement are bound to collapse eventually.
II. How self-compassion actually boosts your performance
For all you geeks out there who search for academia when hearing something interesting (this is not about me, noo), here is a great study about how the practice of self-compassion (Yes. It is a process, a skill, just like any other skill) will help you become better at what you do.
What the study basically says is that if students used compassion-based skills after they failed an exam, they were more likely to approach the next exam by preparing, than to avoid studying and instead go drinking & partying.
Cool stuff, right?
III. About you.
Self-improvement is never an easy task. It implies a lot of failures, getting back up and trying again, or quitting. These are all hard things. Don’t make it harder on yourself by treating yourself like a beaten horse. Even if that’s what you were taught. Maybe you were taught wrong :)