Resilience & Self-Compassion
It is easy to see ourselves as resilient when life is chugging along nicely, but when we get slammed by big challenges or even small failures, we can get stuck in the mud. It’s difficult to move out of negative emotions and we can get caught up in a storm of self-criticism. This can impact our relationships, work, sleep, and drain our emotional energy. The antidote is self-compassion and the payoff is resilience. When we practice kindness toward ourselves, we bounce back quicker and have the resources we need to cultivate more love, purpose, and fulfillment in our lives.
When we’re having a hard time, our typical tactic is to either bottle it up (no time to deal with this now, people are counting on me) or ruminate (circling around and around, hopelessly losing all perspective). Neither strategy works to move us forward. According to Kristin Neff Ph.D. author of Fierce Self-Compassion, we must learn to be present with and “make space for our difficult feelings of sadness, fear, anger, loneliness, disappointment, grief, or frustration. Only then can we respond to our pain with love, knowing that these feelings are part of the shared human experience.” Having self-compassion means acknowledging and validating how we’re feeling, recognizing the common humanity in our experience, and being kind and gentle with ourselves in that moment. Essentially, it means responding to our own suffering the way we would to a close friend. When we’re compassionate toward ourselves in moments of struggle, we shift from being consumed by our pain to having love, kindness, and empathy, which helps us recover more quickly.
According to Neff, “the number one reason people are harsh rather than kind toward themselves is because they believe self-compassion will undermine their motivation. They think self-criticism is an effective motivator and that by calling themselves cruel and belittling names they’ll try harder next time.” We also justify self-criticism under the delusion that it will help us avoid failure in the future. Self-criticism motivates us through fear and shame which makes us afraid of failure, obstructing innovation, more inclined to procrastinate, obstructing productivity, creates performance anxiety, obstructing flow and reinforces perfectionism, obstructing authenticity. “Self-compassion [on the other hand] allows us to motivate ourselves out of love, not fear, and it’s much more effective,” says Neff. “Beating ourselves up doesn’t move us forward; it just makes us want to stop trying. If we accept ourselves for the continually evolving works-in-progress that we really are, it means we’ll get over setbacks more easily.” In other words, when life trips us up, self-compassion makes us more resilient giving us greater access to creativity, productivity, flow, and authenticity.
Next time you’re being hard on yourself, try this self-compassion mantra:
This is a difficult moment
Everyone struggles sometimes
May I give myself the kindness and compassion that I need right now
Self-compassion helps us to be intentional with our energy. When we drain our energy by bottling, ruminating, and beating ourselves up, we pull from our bucket of resources, which can leave us feeling depleted. And when we’re depleted, we don’t have the resources we need to be patient with our family, cook a healthy meal, work toward our goals, or pursue our passions. Life is going to knock us down from time to time and sometimes day to day. Self-compassion is the key to resilience and resilience is the key to living a life with more love, purpose, and fulfillment.