Blog Brief: 

The Importance of Self-Compassion

Owen Whitehouse 5 March-12 March 2023

There is a very important and perhaps suprising revelation at the heart of current self-compassion research and that is that self-compassion appears to be much more beneficial for people than self-esteem. This sounds like good news! How do we find self compassion?

Let’s put a bit more flesh on the bones of what self-compassion really means. According to Kirstin Neff, self-compassion consists of three key areas that we need to engage with to gain a little self-compassion:

• Self-kindness instead of Self-Judgement

• Common Humanity instead of Isolated Individual

• Mindfulness instead of Over-identification with issues.

Self-kindness is about showing kindness and understanding toward oneself when things start to go wrong or don’t turn out how we wanted. When we fall short of our own high expectations at work or in personal lives. To develop a sense of self-kindness, we need to stop being so self-critical, to hold back on being judgemental ourselves. It's almost a cognitive error. We need to think about giving ourselves a break when we get it wrong.

Common Humanity is about positioning ourselves – looking at what we do, how we live, and what befalls us from a wider perspective. We should not choose to tie our happiness to transient or even inherited external influences. Of course, like everyone else we reflect on things, things that go wrong and that trouble us.  What befalls us is common to all of us – the human condition. You heard your parents say – there is always someone worse off – maybe there is – more likely there are many more in the same position. There is no new disappointment or hurt under the sun. It also means recognising that we all mess up. 

We all have very human flaws, and that to think any one person is perfect, is folly. We might say this is a failing in many areas of society. When we have a leader on the global and national scene – why should they be perfect? Yet, the media tries to pull them down. Perfect, with unblemished lives and thoughts – no one is. To expect someone at the head of the firm or a country to have no flaws, to have made no mistakes, is to be led by someone who is a figment of some PR firm’s imagination. It’s true of everyone. We are not perfect, just as no action is perfect. We need to forgive ourselves our limitations – at least until we can or choose to do something about them – otherwise, get on with something more worthwhile than lamenting something that didn’t work out. We should embrace our own shortcomings and the gaps from our versions of perfection that we wonder about oft as we do, the things that we are good at – our strengths. Learn from bumps in the road, if you can, if it’s worth it, but move on. This is part of what Brené Brown notes when she talks of vulnerability and shame and why we so often laud the Theodore Roosevelt quotation recalled in her book. It is okay to be vulnerable. We should be – we all are on occasion – that should not stop us from becoming everything we want to be, in fact it should help us, throw ourselves back into the anrena of life.

Finally, Mindfulness means that rather than engaging with every thought and issue in our internal world and being drawn into every wave of complexity and strife that laps over us, we sit back and observe life as we experience it - with a sense of appreciation and detachment.  We need to examine our relationship with the world, our responses but rather than get caught up and live in them, we observe passively from the outside. An engaged observer in our own lives. This takes practice and study [you can ask me for advice]

In short, we need to learn to give ourselves a break. We are doing our best, each of us the fallible people in uncertain circumstance. We need to release ourselves, set ourselves free from personal self-judgements and be kind to ourselves, allowing each of us to accept the reality of the total human that we are. It also helps if we work wioth others and have great support networks, but that is a whole other blog brief.

Next Blog Brief:  The Cynefin Framework