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Tune in this week to discover the importance of self-compassion. Instead of beating yourself up and stuffing your emotions away when you fail, feel inadequate or face hardship, I will teach you how to treat yourself with kindness. There are two cycles women get stuck in when they feel inadequate, and I will explain how to identify and ultimately get yourself out of them so that you can keep moving forward without all the lingering emotion.
Topics in this episode:
• As I reflected on my recent birthday, the top lesson I learned that changed everything.
• Why we get into the beat-up cycle and can’t seem to let go of our failures.
• What happens when you ignore your actual feelings and thoughts and how to avoid it.
• How self-compassion and being ambitious are connected.
• What exactly is self-compassion?
• A 3-step process to develop your own self-compassion process
Show Notes:
• Join the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective – This is a group coaching program for working moms looking to create the building blocks to work-life balance. The program teaches you a 5-step process, includes weekly group coaching and a private community of working moms all determined to create a balanced life. Find out more information here: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective
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Transcription
Intro
This week on the podcast I'm going to be sharing the number one lesson that I have learned over the last year. I just recently celebrated my birthday and have been reflecting on lessons learned and this one has been the biggest, self compassion. Learning how to love myself and be kind to myself when I'm facing hardship or when I fail or when I'm feeling inadequate, this has been a game changer for me and I'm going to share all about how to end all the negative chatter in your brain and develop your own self compassion practice. Ready? Let’s get to it.
Welcome to the ambitious and balanced working mom podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you’re looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home then this is the place for you. I’m your host Rebecca Olson, let’s get to it!
I am recording this podcast just a couple of days after my birthday. Every year I take some time to reflect on the past year, the various things that I learned, the highlights, the overall themes, and then make some predictions on what I think the year ahead may look like. This year I got to do that while being completely unplugged in the middle of the Sierra Nevada’s, sitting inches from a river, under a blanket, with a warm cup of team and my amazing and wonderful husband sitting next to me.
Looking back over the past year.
This past year as it is for almost everyone was defined a lot by C0VID and a lack of childcare, very little travel, seeing little to no family for about a year and not eating out or being able to go places. There was a daily grind to my 38th year. But even so there was a lot to be gained in this past year. I started this podcast which was a dream of mine for the past three years, I created the ambitious and balanced working moms collective which I am overwhelmingly proud of - not just the fact that I created it and I put so much work into the content and creating over 30 videos and 15 workbooks and everything that I had to do to get that program up and running – that is all amazing and I am proud of it - but more than that, I'm proud of the lives that I am changing of the women in the program and in the lives of the women I will change who join the program in the future. Another big accomplishment from the year was how my immediate family came together - my husband, my 6 year old daughter, my 4 year old son and me. We were really together for a long time, for many many months, my kids didn't play with anyone but each other and I didn't see many other adults except for my husband. And I look fondly at some of the memories and experiences we created during the past year.
Learning resilience and self compassion through tough times.
But really my 38th year was an internal journey. I learned resiliency - as C0VID dragged on and on and on. I learned that I can operate with a lot less personal time, variety, time with friends. I have the ability to keep moving forward despite hardship. That is what this past year taught me.
But probably the biggest lesson of this past year and where I'm going to focus the rest of this podcast today is learning self compassion. It’s learning to treat myself with kindness in the midst of hardship – like C0VID, failure when I didn't meet goals & inadequacy – when it felt like I couldn’t say enough, be enough or do enough to make me, my kids or my husband happy.
Self-compassion is extending kindness to yourself in times of inadequacy, failure & hardship. That’s what it means. But I think to really understand self-compassion, it’s easiest to think about compassion for others. So, let’s start there.
I want you to think about what it means to show compassion to a friend who just lost their job. How do you treat them? What do you do for them? What words do you use to console them?
Compassion starts with a desire or a pull toward helping someone. A desire to lessen their burden.
Compassion is not about fixing it's just simply about being.
A lot of times the goal when we're extending compassion to someone is to just simply understand and listen to where they're at. To help them know that they're not alone. That what they're experiencing is normal and OK. Sometimes compassion leads us to help them fix their problems, to help them find a new job or process through a failure but at the core of it, compassion is not about fixing it's just simply about being. Your friend who just lost their job just simply wants to know that they are still loved, that they still have value, that they will get through this and all of it without any judgment.
Self-compassion looks virtually the same. Think of a really simple example that every mother can relate to, is yelling at your kids. Or if it's not yelling it's getting overly exacerbated and frustrated and angry. We have all been there and we have all done it and we all walk away feeling terrible about it afterward because no one wants to be a mom that yells. Self compassion in a moment like this, in a moment where you failed on some level as a parent (now just as an aside I don't really believe that yelling at your kid means you're a terrible parent otherwise we would all be terrible parents but none of us want to yell at our kids and so failure here is simply not meeting the goal of remaining calm under intense emotion). OK so self compassion in a moment like this where you failed to remain calm and when you likely feel inadequate as a parent - self compassion looks like understanding that you're not perfect and that yelling happens at times and that you're not a terrible parent because of it. It looks like telling yourself that you are loved, that you love your kids. It looks like allowing yourself to cry and how frustrating parenting is, and reminding yourself that you're not always going to get it right. Just like with a friend who loses their job the goal is to listen and love yourself without any judgment.
This past year was a year of learning how to do that.
Do you beat yourself up and judge yourself for not being the perfect mom?
Because what I used to do instead, and this is so common among women, I spent a lot of time beating myself up. Judging myself as being a horrible parent, that I don't know what I'm doing, that I'm messing up my kid. I'd think about the incident over and over and over again, almost like I was reliving it. I would cry and be emotionally drained and have a hard time being focused at work and at home. I would retreat inside myself or retreat into my to-do list. Compare myself – assume others were better than me, that I was doing this parenting thing wrong, that I could never figure it out…I call this the judgment cycle.
I call it that because at the heart of it you are taking your hardship or failure and judging yourself because of it. You are judging yourself as being inadequate, not good enough – as if the hardship or failure is a comment on you as a human, as a person.
Here is how you know that you are in a judgment cycle:
Endless chatter in your mind.
Have a hard time being present because you are thinking about what you haven’t accomplished.
Constant comparison.
Do more to make up for inadequacy.
Don’t experience a lot of highs – always cutting yourself down.
Feeling guilty.
Takes too much blame – too much ownership.
One thing goes wrong – everything goes wrong.
There is a second cycle that I call the ignore cycle.
This is when you push through or ignore the hardship, failure, and moments of inadequacy rather than deal with them.
The judgment cycle is full of emotions while the ignore cycle is almost numb to them. I had a client who defaulted to the ignore cycle. She would work 60+ hour weeks, self-sacrifice for everyone else’s needs and in our very first call she told me that the problem wasn’t her, it was the company. The company was overworking her, demanding too much from her. When I asked what part she played in the overworking she said “none”. She denied that it was her at all, and at first, was unwilling to even examine it. She didn’t want to admit or face her own overworking tendencies. She didn’t want to face her own failures and the way she contributed to her own imbalance.
I see this a lot with women who default to the ignore cycle. They blame their circumstances for their issues. It’s the company, their husband, their lack of income, no childcare, no time…these are the cause of their failure, hardship or inadequacy.
If you were giving yourself self-compassion, it would sound like, “There is too much work to do and not enough time, that sucks. I don’t want to disappoint anyone. I worry about what they think. I feel a lot of pressure & stress to say yes and do more. This is really hard.” There would be some good deep breaths, likely a few tears, and from there probably a decision on what you want to do about it.
Self compassion is a lot of just honesty. Acknowledgment of what you are actually feeling/thinking and being ok with it. It’s extending kindness to yourself. Being gentle, not harsh.
Here are some of the signs that you are in an ignore cycle:
Fill every moment – don’t stop. Because when you do finally stop – you’ll be flooded with feelings and thoughts and emotions.
Little things can set you off – volatile.
Blame others/circumstances – hard time seeing their own contribution/faults.
Wait until circumstances change – keep pushing through.
Both the judgment and ignore cycles tend to exacerbate the problem, rather than fix it. It makes those icky feelings of inadequacy, frustration & failure just linger on and on.
I know for me, I would get to a point where I’d say, “why can’t I just get over this?!”. An incident that happened with my 4 year old in the morning still seemed to have a lingering effect in the evening. Or a call with a client that was challenging seems to still be on my mind while I’m falling asleep.
When judging or ignoring your feelings, you are not processing your emotions.
That’s because when you are in the judging and ignoring cycles, you are not actually dealing with all the emotions and thoughts. You are not acknowledging and processing your emotions. And a lot of self-compassion is just that. Acknowledging and processing emotions. Go back to the example of your friends who just lost their job, when you are sitting with your friend and have compassion for them, what they are doing is acknowledging their thoughts and their feelings and processing them with you out loud, and you are letting them do that without judgment. So in self compassion we're allowing ourselves to say what we actually feel and think and process through it.
So allowing yourself to say what it is you think and feel, that's actually step number 2 in developing what I like to call a self-compassion practice.
I'll talk about that and a little bit more in just a moment but let's go back to really what step one is. What comes before allowing yourself to think and feel is just giving yourself space and that's sort of its own step. Because so many working moms don't ever allow space to think and feel, we are just so busy and space to think and feel as important as the client in front of us or something on a to-do list… that this really has to be its own step.
Give yourself a moment to think and feel.
This is actually probably the hardest step, now that I'm really talking about it. But here's what happens when we don't give ourselves space, that tantrum that your toddler had and then the yelling that took place after that, you bring those feelings with you into work. You bring them into your interactions with your colleagues and your clients. When you sit down and try to write an email or presentation they're still there affecting you. All of the icky feelings that we experience when we're feeling inadequate and like a failure or when circumstances are hard, all of those feelings that come with that, they linger with us unless we do something about it. And I'm about to tell you what you should do with those emotions but the very first step is just deciding to give yourself some space to do something with them. And we like to think this can take a really long time but in reality, it's just a couple of minutes. I had a pretty harsh moment with my 4 year old this morning when I was trying to get him dressed and then after I dropped the kids off and I came home I sat down to try to write this podcast but I couldn't because that incident with my son was still on my mind hadn't done anything with that experience. I hadn’t processed through the emotions and let myself have a moment with them. So instead of writing, I sat with my journal and the last of my cup of tea and I just simply free wrote out the thoughts and feelings I was having; not just about my morning but everything that was on my mind. Now in my case, I took close to 20 minutes but that was because I made the time for that, sometimes all I have is 5 and that is good enough.
Get out of your head and into your body.
OK so I'm sort of getting into step two now which is after you've allowed yourself some space, what do you do with that space. Well, the goal here is really just to get out of your body and your head whatever is in there period to literally just purge. For me, I like to do that in writing, but if I don't have a journal like if I'm just driving home from dropping the kids off at school with it which is literally just two minutes from my house I might just talk to myself out loud, but it is literally acknowledging the pure thoughts and emotions no matter how ugly it is. So for me this morning that looked like saying I feel like a horrible mom. I can't believe I yelled at him like that. And why can't he just get his darn shirt on when I am there to help him? Why does that have to be so hard? It's so frustrating that getting dressed feels like a game. And then the tears started to flow and I started talking about other things that were on my mind from the morning. There is really no right or wrong to how you get your thoughts and feelings out of you just get them out of you. The goal is to feel a release or relief as you honestly say what you feel.
Don’t judge yourself for what happened. Take a breath and accept it.
Step 3 is probably the most important of them all, so I want you to lean into this one, take 3 deep breaths because breath is a natural way to center yourself, so take 3 deep breaths and help you to be very present in the moment and say yeah, it makes sense that you're feeling that way. Period. No judgment, just acceptance. Yes it is really frustrating that my 4 year old can't get dressed on his own yet. Yes it is frustrating to be running late and having to chase him to get his clothes on almost every single day. That is frustrating and I know probably every mom out there that's listening knows exactly what I'm talking about. And it also makes sense how it pushed too many buttons this morning and it caused you to yell. Your brain was an overload this morning and you had a hard time staying patient, yep it makes sense. Deep breath. The goal in this step is to accept and allow. I have a colleague, Danielle Savory, that has developed a self compassion practice, wherein this step she would put her hand over her heart, touch her skin if possible and take a couple of deep breaths and say it's OK baby girl, you're all OK. Almost like you would a small infant you're holding in your hand. You would never yell at a tiny baby for crying and feeling upset and frustrated and angry, you would just simply hold them in your arms and snuggle them and love them and tell them it was going to be OK.
And that is what we're trying to do here. Give yourself love, and grace, helping your brain and your body to know whatever you feel and think is OK, that you are still lovable, that you have value, and you have so much to offer.
Try these practices now, for 1 minute.
If you don't practice self compassion I encourage you to just take a moment right now to go through these three steps, give yourself one minute, set a timer if you want, then purge of whatever thoughts and feelings are in your head at this moment, and then take a couple of deep breaths and remind yourself that you're OK and that you are loved.
Real life benefits of a self compassion practice.
Since working at getting out of my judgment cycle developing and self compassion, the benefits have been exponential! I'm less affected by negative interactions with my kids, I'm simply more patient, I don't let interactions with clients or colleagues have a lingering effect with me, I spend less time comparing myself to other coaches and their business, I make more focused decisions because I'm not really thinking about anybody else, I genuinely feel lighter and more present because I'm not so bogged down with emotion, when I have big ideas like starting a podcast or developing a program, I go for it without question, self compassion has allowed me to live more fully into the ambitious life that I dream of.
Conclusion
Now let me tell you it's not perfect, I can't always catch myself in the judgment cycle or the ignoring cycle, but as soon as I do I can get myself out, sometimes within minutes.
Hey working moms that is all I have for you today, go develop those self compassion practices and keep living your best life!
