01/08/2024
Love this post from Connect Us Psychology. Practising self-compassion as an adult also lets us model this skill to children who are developing their identity and beginning to understand their own strengths and challenges. Let’s practice this ourselves so children can observe self-compassion in action. 🌻✨
How can we build our self-compassion?
It sounds easy enough?
Right?
Just be compassionate to yourself!
But over the years, it is likely you have built up your critical self far more than you have built up your compassionate self.
Social expectations, particularly when your brain doesn't find those things easy, have probably also given your critical self a whole range of things to tell yourself.
If you just tried harder.
If you just did it this way.
If you weren't so lazy.
So, building your self-compassion is usually *not* as easy as it sounds.
In fact, the start of building self-compassion can simply be choosing that it's something worth doing. That's a huge step. To decide you're worth it.
Some other things that may help you on your quest (I think quest makes it sound more fun!):
- Learn about your brain and how it works. Learn about your support needs.
- Learn about what expectations are realistic for your brain, and what expectations are just never going to be realistic.
- Question whether your expectations are your own (are they important to you?), or are they *shoulds* based on what others expect of you?
- Ask yourself what you might tell a friend or your child if they were in your position.
- Ask yourself what you need (or what you need to hear) right now.
And above all, *practice*.
Self-compassion is something we have to choose to put in place every single time.
It is usually not the easiest choice.
Over time, we can build our compassionate voice to be loud and proud.
But it takes time.
And you have to keep deciding that you're worth it.
Which isn't easy to do.
My lovely friends Monique Mitchellson and Jennifer Kemp have also written an amazing book on this topic which I would *highly* recommend. I'll pop the link in the comments.
Let me know if you'd like to hear more about developing self-compassion.
