Case study: countering negative self-talk with self-acceptance and self-compassion

Photo of a heart drawn in sand on a beach

So, day 2 of my daily blog post challenge came and went yesterday, and in the midst of a busy day, I didn’t find time to write a blog post. Once upon a time my inner critic, the voice of my negative self-talk, would have had a field day with that. It would tell me all sorts of terrible things about how I never follow through on my commitments, and how could I post the intro to this challenge and then fail on DAY 2! How unprofessional!

And I would have let it say those things to me and get me feeling so terrible and discouraged that I might give up on the whole project. I might admit to myself that in my enthusiasm I started with an unrealistic goal, because busy days are going to come up. But my inner critic would use that as further proof of my inadequacy: “how could you not realize the daily posting goal was unrealistic before you committed to it?!”

My inner critic is trying to help. It’s trying to protect me from external critics, from failure, from… something. But it’s REALLY bad at its job, because its methods just paralyze me with anxiety and end up making things worse.

My inner critic isn’t gone. It wasn’t hard to access all those terrible things it would have said before, and it did, in fact, say some of them. But these days it’s much quieter, even a little half-hearted in its criticisms, and they don’t often have the same power and effect as they once did. I’ve been working on weakening that nasty, judgmental voice, and a big part of that process has been cultivating a newer voice—the voice of self-compassion and self-acceptance.

A common reason that people give for being reluctant to embrace self-compassion is the idea that they need to be hard on themselves to get anything done. But I’ve found that the more I’ve embraced a self-accepting and self-compassionate mindset, the more I’ve been able to accomplish the things I want to accomplish, in addition to being generally more satisfied with myself and my life. There’s a great quote I come across again and again that really rings true to me:

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

- Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy

Now, instead of listening to that inner critic’s analysis of the fact that I did not write a blog post on day 2 of my daily post challenge, I take a kinder view of myself. I recognize that my enthusiasm for this idea plus challenges with time-blindness led me to making an unrealistic goal. But the enthusiasm was a good thing and it’s still there! Plus this is a commitment I made to myself to motivate myself and it doesn’t hurt anyone that I missed a day, so why beat myself up and get discouraged?

Instead, I’m looking at this as data, and the data suggests I might want to modify the commitment to make it more doable. One post per day might be a good stretch goal, but maybe 3 posts per week is a better minimum goal. I’ll try for every day but still consider it a win if I post 3 times this week. That’s probably more sustainable long-term anyway! (1 per day was always meant as a jump start, not a sustainable pace).

And since I’m not beating myself up about it, I’m not discouraged and avoiding writing this post on day 3. Further, I’m not trying to run away from or hide the fact that I didn’t manage to make it to day 2 of my challenge, because I’m not pretending I have achieved some level of personal perfection and productivity out of fear that anything less makes me look like I must be an incompetent coach. (Stay tuned for a post about masking vs. authenticity which will explore that fear soon, possibly tomorrow!)

I hope this little anecdote shows how self-compassion can be a lot more helpful than self-criticism when it comes to actually getting stuff done and making progress toward goals. Self-compassion is a bedrock of my coaching philosophy, so I will be writing A LOT more about it. But part of this blog challenge is to force myself to remember that I don’t have to hit every point on a topic in a single post, because I don’t have time to write a whole book every day! So stay tuned for more insights, most likely tomorrow. But I know better now than to make any guarantees…