8 Things you can do to practice self-love and compassion
In the last post I talked about 4 steps to be able to create and maintain good habits in your life. The third step is related to the reflection of the previous week, to understand what went well and wrong so that, afterwards, you can define how you can improve to make habits easier to achieve.
This third step only works if you can reflect on yourself constructively. You have to get what you could improve and not just what you did wrong.
Ddeconstructing because we cannot reach a certain goal without having a judgmental thought about ourselves, is the only option so that we are not afraid to try with the fear of failing.
Self-compassion
“Self compassion is being kind and understanding when confronted with personal failings…” — Dr. Kristin Neff
Wong, warned that if on the one hand self-confidence can be seen as something positive because it makes us feel good about our abilities, it can lead to overestimating those same abilities. Self compassion teaches us to be more aware of our faults leading to think of ourselves in a more objective and realistic way
Studies in self-compassion theorize that there are 3 major areas that make up this theme
- Self-kindness — prevents you from criticizing and punishing yourself when you make a mistake.
- Common humanity — refers to the acceptance that is in the human essence fails and that can happen frequently when you try something.
- Mindfulness (Neff & Dahm, 2015) — is what allows us to be aware of what we say to ourselves and to be able to confront these feelings with kindness before ourselves.
Self-Love
“Self-love begins when we observe our actions and words with compassion as if we were our own best friend.” — Sara M Bosworth
The concept of self-love has changed over the past few decades. If it was initially seen as something negative, relating to selfishness and narcissism, it is now associated with something positive.
Self-love is an appreciation of ourselves and is focused on ourselves. Narcissism is to prove to everyone that we are better than them, so it is based on what others think of us.
In 1956, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm proposed that the concept of self-love differs from being arrogant and self-centred. He suggested that for a person to really love another person, he must first love himself, being able to respect himself and get to know himself.
8 Tips to help you practice self-love and compassion
1. Become more aware during the day-to-day (Mindfulness)
A few years ago, I was the type of person who, before a holiday, was stressed out planning all the hours of the trip, during the trip I was agitated if I didn’t keep every minute of what I had planned and then because they were already ending the holiday. I couldn’t enjoy either the pre-vacation excitement or the euphoria during.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
2. Control your evil elf and feed your good elf (self-compassion and self-love)
I usually tell my boyfriend that I have a bad and a good elf inside my brain. The bad one, for example, when I’m running, he says, “You weren’t made to run”, “It’s too hot to run”, “You won’t be able to do it”.
I saw a podcast between Joe Rogan and David Goggins where he talked about running with phones and that for him this is cheating because at a time when you are pushing yourself to the limit it should be you against your mind and music was a way to shut up your mind. I saw running with music a way to shut up my bad elf. One day, I decided to run without phones to test if I was going to quit in the middle, but before I left the house I said to myself, “You can do it, you don’t need music to motivate you, you have to learn to motivate yourself”. It wasn’t my best time, but it wasn’t my worst either, and nowadays, I can run without music or listen to a book.
“We all have the ability to come from nothing to something” — David Goggins
3. It gives you the pleasure of building healthy habits (self-love)
From meditation, improving your diet, increasing the practice of physical exercise, starting to dedicate more time to yourself, these are just a few points that you can promote to create healthy habits that will make you feel better with you.
4. Learn to forgive yourself (self-kindness)
Has it ever happened to you, a friend of yours doing something wrong, and you comfort him and say “Don’t worry, it could happen to anyone” and then go through something similar but now are you the ones who made a mistake and can’t help being critical of you?
If, on the one hand, we are told that we have to take responsibility for our actions, on the other, they say that we cannot punish ourselves for making mistakes. As in almost everything in life, the trick is to find the ideal balance (sweat spot).
We have to learn to see failures as a learning process. You can only consider a failure if you have not learned anything, and I highly doubt that there is ever a failure that you have not learned anything from the process or the result.
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” — Thomas J. Watson
Remember how you would treat a friend or family member if it were you. In the book 12 Rules for the Life of Jordan Peterson, he mentions:
“Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else.” — Rule 2 of the book “The 12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson
He says that we have to think of ourselves as someone who is in the world to fulfil a mission and that for this reason we are obliged to take care of ourselves.
5. Find your sense of life (self-love)
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” by Nietzsche and mentioned in the book “Man in search of meaning” Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
A clear sense of where you want to go makes you focus your time and energy on what is most important to you, makes you able to take more risks even if it doesn’t seem like an easy route at first.
“If we want to feel an undying passion for our work, if we want to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY.” — Simon Sinek, in Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team
6. Compare with yourself from the past, not with others
Free yourself from unrealistic expectations and comparisons
If, on the one hand, competitions and some comparisons can be healthy, social networks have raised the unrealistic comparisons we make. Comparisons in terms of our physical appearance or even professional level. This can lead to demotivation for thinking you are fighting for something unattainable.
I give you a very concrete example: When I started the blog, I understood very little about how to build a website and when researching how it was conceived and compared it with the websites of people who have an entire IT team working on it. But even though I thought it was just one person, we never know all the circumstances, I might already have some computer skills, I could have a friend who helped, I may have decided to invest in sub-contracting the construction of the site. These are all factors that I will not know and that have a huge influence on the results.
Rule 4: Judge yourself by your own goals, not by others ’. Book 12 Rules for life by Jordan Peterson
7. Don’t pay so much attention to what other people think of you (self-compassion and self-love)
- Don’t try to please everyone: have you ever wanted to say no but are afraid of social pressure after taking that position? Have you ever realized something you were doing where you were clearly unwilling to do it (either because you had other more important things to do or simply because you didn’t want to)? To me yes, but it made me felt bad before, during and after the task.
Life is all about choices, and when we choose to do something we don’t want to miss the opportunity to do something we want to do.
2. Please yourself: another point that we need to change is to do only what is “normal” for society. Trying to do something that we don’t want or to be something that we are not to be accepted by society means that we are not true to our true essence.
The world deserves you to be your best version, so that you can contribute to improving it.
8. Surround yourself with good friends (self-love)
The relationship you have with those around you will obviously have an influence on your life, especially those you consider friends who give more value to what they advise you or what motivates them.
“You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve. ” Rule 3: Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed from Jordan Peterson’s “12 Rules for Life”
You just read another post from Mafalda Lima | SuperUS: a health and fitness blog dedicated to sharing knowledge to make you become the best version of yourself.
