Self-Compassion and Self-Love

How do you treat yourself? Is it like you would treat a loved friend or is it like you would treat someone you dislike? Self-compassion is being kind to yourself especially when you do something you dislike or are not successful in achieving a goal. It is accepting that you are human and therefore, not perfect. With self-compassion, you accept that you have shortcomings, make mistakes, do things you do not always like and then treat yourself with kindness.

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When we often do when we are faced with our inadequacies is – berate ourselves, feel awful, vow to never do that again, hold ourselves back and feel miserable. I will share a personal example here; I have always been hard on myself for my writing. Most often, I would berate myself for wasting time and putting off work while I was free. This procrastination was largely to do with my belief that I would do a bad job and be humiliated.

Writing is such a deep passion for me and has been linked so strongly with who I am that a bad job of writing would be a bad job of being me. If I wrote something and there was the smallest error – a typo or a missing article, I’d be mortified. I would say to myself, “you’re so stupid, how could you miss that, everyone knows you’re a bad writer.” After this, I’d vow to triple check everything, be hyper-vigilant or stop writing completely.

Eventually, I learned to disassociate myself from writing. I still love it and it is one of my favorite emotional and creative outputs, but it is no longer an indication of who I am or how good I am. In fact, nothing is. When I made a mistake, I correct it and accept that I am human and will make mistakes. I identified that a big error I made was spending so much of my energy on berating myself and trying to be perfect that I had no focus left for checking my work.

Self-compassion is important to self-acceptance. Once we realize that we are human and will make mistakes, we can be kind and accept our humanity rather than be horrible to ourselves. This additionally gives us a safe space to learn from our mistakes and that is such a beautiful aspect of mistakes – we get to learn from them.

Think about how you talk to yourself after you’ve made a mistake – do you say awful things to yourself or are you kind and loving? Several years ago, I would ensure I did not take anything to soothe my headache if I had a hangover believing that I should be punished for drinking too much. This self-flagellating was me punishing myself for doing something all my friends did in college – drink too much and have a good time. Some of this weird justice was because I knew my parents would not be happy that I was drinking, and I decided to punish myself since they would probably not know.

Self-compassion and self-acceptance are important aspects of self-love, perhaps the most important. It is with self-compassion that we learn to understand, accept and love all of ourselves including the things we might not like. It is also key to realizing that we belong. Usually, when we deny ourselves compassion it is because we expect to be different and better than everyone else. But this is isolating. As humans, we need to belong and when we isolate ourselves, we deprive ourselves of that need.

Self-compassion allows us to first accept that we belong within ourselves. We learn that we are worthy, that we are enough. We accept ourselves and realize we are lovable and deserving of happiness, compassion and in turn become more accepting of others. We realize that everyone has their own struggles, that everyone is on a journey and at times that journey is awful beyond belief.

Self-compassion is reclaiming our humanity. It is accepting that we are flawed. It is celebrating sameness, being average or even failing at things. It is learning to love ourselves, to be kind to ourselves and learning to love ourselves.

Begin your self-love journey by signing up for my free 11-day Self-Love Challenge.

You can also book a one-on-one coaching session with me.