The Season of Self Compassion

The seasons are changing and I think it’s time to change the way we see ourselves as well. It’s time for a season of self-compassion.

I talk a lot on the podcast about self-development, but none of us can truly grow and develop and reach our potential without having a high degree of love and compassion for ourselves. Without it, our quest for self-actualization can easily become an exercise in self-contempt.

Self-compassion sometimes gets a bad rap because we mistake it for self-indulgence or self-satisfaction. But self-compassion never requires you to settle for a life you don’t want. Instead, choosing self-compassion simply means making a commitment to treat yourself with kindness, patience, and love as you as you experience your life and do the work of creating your future.  You can grow and develop in any way you want but you never have to bully yourself into it.  

Join me on the podcast today where I encourage you to embrace a new season of self-compassion and show you how to trade your contempt and frustration for understanding and love.

Transcript

Welcome to the 100% Awesome Podcast with April Price. You might not know it, but every result in your life is 100% because of the thought you think. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

Hello Podcast Universe! Welcome to episode 231 of the 100% Awesome Podcast and welcome to October! Are you glad to be here at this point of the year? Here where I am in the Northern hemisphere, things are just starting to change and get a little bit cooler and I for one am loving it. I am fully leaning in to the enjoyment of fall and the change in the season, the shorter days, the cooler temperatures. It feels like exactly where I want to be right now. And this past weekend I even got out the candles and the candlesticks for the table. Like one of my, like, very favorite pleasures is to light candles for dinner. Like, I love the light, I love the feel and the energy of that candlelight. And as the days get shorter, it is one of my favorite rituals to light those candles at dusk and let them burn all evening. And just in general, like I've been walking around my house and and putting out the coziest pillows and finding like, the big chunky throws and like, I love putting out all the soft things and I love, like, turning off the lights and lighting the candles, softening the light and pulling out all the books that I've been meaning to read.

And David and I went out last weekend and bought new puzzles and a new game and like, I'm just, like, settling in, like, I really, really love it. So, I hope that you are enjoying it where you are as well and noticing all of these changes in the seasons and just the change in my feelings and my energy and my priorities has really prompted this episode today. And, so I want to start today with a question and also a suggestion. So the question is, are you frustrated with yourself? Are you mad at yourself more than you're not? You know, do you find yourself wishing that you were different, maybe, maybe happier, maybe having a different experience than you are right now, maybe farther along. Maybe you wish you were more capable or more successful or more patient or more motivated or less hard to live with, right? Maybe you're just, like, dissatisfied with yourself. Well, today, what I want to suggest is that what you might need is not more ways to change and more things to change, but more self-compassion.

So, if you have been trying to change for a while and just feeling like really stuck or incapable or even like hopeless about it, this element of self-compassion might be the thing that you are missing. And I say this from personal experience for years and years. For decades even, I tried to get the most out of myself and my life and my potential through self-judgment and self criticism. And like my husband's eternal question to me all the time was, Why are you so hard on yourself? He was just like, April, Why? Why are you so hard on yourself no matter what? Like, you're going to be tough on yourself. And it was because I was trying to achieve, you know, self actualization and reach my full potential through self-flagellation, like just beating myself up and being critical and impatient with myself and my efforts and just noticing how it was never good enough, you know, it was just never going to measure up. And I was just always bullying myself to try harder and to be better. But it just never worked right. And it actually I think that it it didn't work because it can't work.

And I think that self development and self actualization doesn't come through self contempt and self-reproach and self-criticism, right? Because it is a rejection and a denial of ourselves. It's like I want to be the best me, but I hate me, right? I want to be all that I can be. And yet I hate everything about me. It's like we're working on like towards two different objectives there. And so, I think it's just important to realize that your self actualization and reaching your potential will come through self discovery and really truly knowing and understanding yourself and self compassion and really truly loving yourself and encouraging yourself through that process.

And that is simply because reaching your potential is always going to be a result of love and not hate. It's going to be a result of connecting with yourself, not disconnecting. We just find ourselves at odds when we're like trying so hard to be something different rather than being more of who we are. Like as children always says, like it isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. And letting yourself change and grow and develop is just an outgrowth of that friendship. And a lot of times we think that if we pair our self discovery with self compassion, that we're just going to get smug and self-satisfied, like we're just going to be like, just like, okay, like, this is who I am and this is how I'm always going to be, right? And that makes us scared to be kind and compassionate and loving with ourselves. But we've got it wrong because self discovery paired with self compassion is the only way to like become whole and to become self-actualized, like to become our highest, truest, best selves is like not a different self, but an expansion of our actual selves.

For every one of us, the highest ideal is love. And we're never going to become everything that we were created to be through anything but love. We can't get there by hating ourselves and distancing ourselves and disconnecting from from ourselves. And so I talk a lot on the podcast in general, like about self discovery and really understanding why you do what you do, why your brain works the way that it does, why you have the thoughts and feelings and make the choices that you make, and really understanding that and discovering that.

And we spent a lot of time here talking about that. But today I just want to give special attention to the critical companion of your self discovery, which is self compassion. It is not enough just to discover and understand ourselves. We have to pair that with love for ourselves as well. And so, as I said right, the seasons are changing. And so, I think this is a really good time to invite you into a brand new season of self-compassion. And I just love the thought of that, right? The season of self-compassion. And I'm just inviting you to pull out all the soft things and to create a soft place to land mentally and emotionally and to soften that harsh light of self-criticism and light the candles of self appreciation and encouragement and slow down and just sort of rest from that constant, unrelenting job of having to prove that you are okay and prove your own worth yourself, all right.

So, if you feel any sort of relief hearing this invitation, then welcome. It is time. I want you to give yourself permission to enter the season of self-compassion. And if you're a little bit annoyed at me and you're feeling some resistance, a little pushback inside, you know, just with the suggestion of this idea of giving yourself any compassion, then I just invite you to wonder why, right? Why does giving yourself some compassion feel so uncomfortable and so distasteful and just curiously see if it's coming from a place inside that is just already fed up and frustrated with yourself? Because if it is, then the season of self-compassion might be even more what you need, right? Not what you want and not what your instinct is probably, but perhaps exactly what you need.

All right, so I'm just inviting you to try me, you know, give me a season of self-compassion and see how you feel, see what your life looks like. Then I think you have nothing to lose but your own contempt for yourself. So, I think we just need a whole lot less contempt and a whole lot more self-compassion. Okay, so what does the season of self-compassion look like? Like what? What are the characteristics of this season? Well, the first important thing that I want you to notice is that self-compassion is a feeling like I think when we hear self-compassion. Our brain wants to go straight to like, you know, our action line. What does that look like? And and maybe like ideas popped in your head like, like sleeping in or letting your to do list go or having a bath instead of doing the dishes like these kind of like, you know, traditional self-care items. And hey, like, all of those might be choices that you want to make. But when I say self-compassion, what I'm talking about is the way we approach our life, right? We're talking about a feeling. And I want to point out that as we increase our self-compassion, we're going to do that the same way we increase any feeling that we want to have in our life, which is not through our actions, but through our thoughts.

Self compassion is a feeling, which means it is created and nurtured by the way that you think about yourself. It isn't the things we do. It's the way we do them. And no matter what your goals are, right? Like maybe you're building a business, maybe you're you're trying to get healthy. Maybe you're trying to improve your marriage. Maybe you're trying to, you know, let yourself rest like whatever it is that you are trying to do in your life. Whatever goals and desires that you have in your life, you can do all of those things and none of them have to change. But you can do them with the feeling of self compassion. And that's going to change your experience of all of them. And we achieve that feeling through our thoughts. We get to self compassion when we ask ourselves to think kind, loving, compassionate thoughts about ourselves. So you don't have to change your schedule or ignore all your obligations or like you don't have to spend any more money or time or overhaul your whole schedule. Self-compassion isn't about like escaping all the burdens of your life. It's like how I think about myself inside my life, inside my challenges, inside my my goals and dreams, inside the life that I am living and entering.

The season of self compassion is like an intentional decision to change how I think about myself this season. Okay, so I'm going to give you a kind of simple three step framework for what this can look like. And really it's like a lot of the physical preparations we make when we prepare our house or our garden or our yard for a new season. And so, I want to think about this framework as three things clean, sort and beautify. All right. Just like we prepare any any space when we change seasons, right? Like I was telling you about the little changes that I made in my house last weekend.

And like, we also did all a whole bunch of work outside, right? Like during the summer in Phoenix, we get these huge monsoon storms and these huge dust clouds actually that just kind of like engulfed the city they called herbs. And after a summer of all these hubs and monsoons, there's like this thick layer of dust on everything. And this last weekend, like, we went out and we sprayed everything up and we pulled up all the plants that didn't make it through this summer and cleaned up the patio and sorted through all the sun, damaged stuff and beautified the patio so that we can enjoy it all fall. And that's what we're going to do inside of our minds as we enter this season of self-compassion. We're going to clean and we're going to sort and we're going to beautify. Okay, so the first one that I want you to think about is cleaning out your interior space. Cleaning out the thoughts that are not producing self compassion, right?

So, what is the opposite of compassion? It's indifference. It's callousness. Maybe heartlessness and cruelty. Insensitivity. Hatred, right? Like it's like a feeling of hard heartedness towards us. So what are the thoughts I have about myself that are making me hard hearted towards myself instead of compassionate? And recently, my husband and I have been like working on our family budget, like we got through the wedding and then we're like, okay, we got to regroup. We got to figure out where the money's going and like, pay attention to it. So my husband downloaded this app that like, shows him like where all your money is going and like there's all of these subscriptions that over time you subscribe to, right? Like, like we had a subscription to a gym in California that we'd signed up for a couple of years ago when we went over there for vacation and there was like, you know, there's a whole bunch of like, ones for like your Apple apps that you're no longer using or there's like all of these streaming services that I'm like, I don't even know if anybody's watching that, right? Like, it was just shocking to see like all of this unintentional money going out to these subscriptions that we aren't really using.

Right. And I was just thinking about like, it's just so good to, like, every once in a while go like, wait a minute, where is my money going? And do I still approve of all of these places it's going? And it's the same thing. In your mind, Where am I spending my time and energy and thoughts? Like what am I subscribing to? What beliefs about myself that that might create judgment and cruelty and insensitivity towards myself and my subscribing to and thinking unintentionally. And what if I could get a printout right from the app in my brain that said, Oh yeah, last month you spent, you know, 20% of your time being mean to yourself or being unkind or impatient, right? And it's just really good to think about cleaning some of that out. Now, negative thoughts are just like a natural part of your brain's like operating system. And I'm not saying we have to clean them all out, but I really want you to just notice what are 1 or 2 thoughts that I have on a pretty regular basis that are cruel or insensitive or dismissive of me and the things that I'm going through.

They're sort of like judgmental of the ways that I am trying and the and the ways that I am like, yeah, maybe not doing it perfectly, but really making an effort. And what are 1 or 2 thoughts that I am going to stop thinking this season and I kind of flag them just like we did on the app were like, okay, for sure, I don't need this one. And for sure I don't need this one, right? And like, go in there and clean it up every time that old thought comes up this season, like just know we're going to redirect. We're going to like draw a line in the sand or say like, no, I'm not going to talk to myself that way. Like, I want to be really clear here. The problem is not that you have unkind, mean thoughts. Like in many ways, our brains have habits, right? They're already programmed to look for problems and then some of our thoughts become habitual. And that in and of itself is not a problem. But you just have to recognize, like. Having the thought is not a problem. But do I allow it to stay? Do I allow those thoughts to accumulate? Do I allow the dust on the patio furniture to just stay there? Or do I go out there and clean it up and just know that like cleaning up those negative thoughts, that requires kind of like constant attention.

You can't just do it once. You just got to notice. All right. Like this is one of those thoughts that I don't want to think this season. And every time it comes up, you know, I'm going to I'm going to draw a line in the sand and say, no.

Okay, second sorting, so in this case, I think one thing that can really increase our self-compassion is to sort the difference between us and the experience we are having. In other words, we can be very judgmental of ourselves when we identify with our experience, when we identify with our feelings, when we identify with our actions or our choices. And instead of like thinking about ourself as a like a person having an experience or a person making a choice, we think of ourselves as the person like we are that choice. Like maybe you'll hear yourself saying like, I'm just not a disciplined person or I'm critical or I'm depressed, I'm impatient. Instead of recognizing that you can't be any of those things, you can be a person having the experience of depression. You can be a person having the experience of choosing a negative thought, but you aren't negative yourself.

And I think this is just important to distinguish. Like we don't want to have compassion for ourselves a lot of times because we're judging ourselves, we're judging our experience, we're judging our actions, we're judging our feelings, and we're seeing ourselves as that thing. Rather than a person having that particular experience, making that particular choice, feeling that particular feeling. So every year at this time of year, for whatever reasons, the way that my body cycles through its neurotransmitters or its hormones or like whatever else is happening physiologically for me, like I always feel down, you know, in these early fall months, August, September, October, they're always challenging for me physiologically, and that affects me mentally.

And I wish that that was different, but it is not. And I remember last year talking to my coach about this and just like identifying so much as this experience and just being like, you know, I'm depressed and I wish I wasn't this way, it happens to me every year and I hate it. I wish I wasn't this way. I wish that I was different. And my coach really pointed out, like, you aren't that way. You are just a person in a body having this experience. You aren't this thing right And like that just helped me so much to be able to stop identifying as the problem and recognizing I'm just a person in a body who's having this particular experience and like, what if that doesn't mean anything negative about me? And it gave me so much more compassion for myself navigating the world while I was having that experience.

So, people will often say that like self compassion is just like a form of self indulgence, right? And you just kind of give in and say, Well, this is just who I am and you just accept it and then you don't try anymore. But Self-compassion asks us to look deeper and to recognize that I am not the things I do. I am not the things I feel. I'm not the experiences I'm having in my body. I am not even my choices. I make choices. But I am not those choices. I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. And self compassion says, okay, this is where I am. In some cases, this is what I'm choosing. But no matter what, I am still worth loving and I'm still worth. Having compassion for myself in that experience and in that choice. Like, it's just interesting to me that in our moments of suffering, we are the least compassionate with ourselves. And Self-compassion asks us to notice. Like in our moments of suffering. Yes, suffering is a part of life and sometimes we create our own suffering.

But I am having the experience of suffering. But I am not my suffering. And may I now be kind to myself in this moment of suffering? May I give myself the compassion that I need? And so this is an important component of self-compassion to sort between yourself and your experience and have compassion for yourself in your current experience, whether it's your choice or whether it's not. Like sometimes what we're saying is like, I am the creator of my suffering and therefore I can't have compassion for it. And I think like, of course, we are the creators of our suffering and we deserve to have compassion for it. In fact, I think it's even more reason to have compassion for ourselves.

Okay, number three, beautify and I just mean in this season of self-compassion, make a soft place to land inside yourself. Be a friend to yourself, and what this looks like is saying like who I am, where I am. The experience I'm having right now, the way that I'm feeling right now, it is all allowed. It is welcome. Even it belongs. It's like I'm going to stop rejecting who I am and where I am and the experience and the feeling that I'm having right now. And I'm going to tell myself that it all belongs. Like self-compassion means I'm done rejecting and judging any part of me or my experience. And just going back to that experience I had last year with my coach as I was kind of like in this low period and I was just like, I wish I could be different.

You know, my coach offered me this question. She said, What if you wanted to be the same? And I think of that so often. Is that. It's not that I stay the same, but if I stopped wanting to be different and if I just wanted to be the same, then I am at peace with myself. I stop fighting myself. I start having compassion for where I am. So the question that I want you to ask yourself is really like, what is preventing me from liking myself and being a friend to myself exactly as I am? And that's always our thoughts, their thoughts about what we think we should be, who we who we think we shouldn't be.

Thoughts about how we're supposed to be different than we are. And that, like, whoever we're supposed to be is better than who we are now. And so right now we are inferior. And then we're just like, I can't be friends with me until I change, until I'm different, until I'm not this inferior creature. I'm just like, we're just, like, waiting for ourselves to be a better version of ourselves before we're friends with ourselves, before we like ourselves, before we have compassion for ourselves. But I want you to remember that you can't be inferior to another person, and you can't be inferior to a different version of you.
And like, just in general, like, at least this is how it was for me. Like, we're just scared to make a soft place to land because we think that that's where we'll stay. But it's never true because remember that self-actualization comes after self-compassion. They are not opposites of each other, right? It's not one or the other either. We're going to like reach our potential or we're going to have compassion for ourselves. No, like self-actualization is the result and the byproduct of our self-compassion, not the opposite.

And so just to like have you think about how do I make a soft place to land here, just a few things that that I think are really important. First of all, stop shooting yourself. And by this, I mean like every day, How many times do you say, I should have done this, I shouldn't have done this, I should be this, I shouldn't be feeling this. I should be somewhere else. This should be different. How many times do I tell myself that a different experience or different me or a different reality would be better? Every time I do that, like the soft place to land disappears and it's just nothing like it's just a very subtle and sometimes not so subtle criticism of where we are.

It is not a soft place to land. So, like, stop telling yourself you should be different than you are. Another thing you can do is really start to use gentle, loving language with yourself. The words you say to yourself have power. And like, I love listening to Byron Katie when she coaches other people, like she uses those words of Endearment and she talks to herself like that as like honey and sweetheart and dear. Like, what if you use those words of encouragement to yourself? What if you just started speaking to yourself with those loving endearments? And how would things change if you just started every sentence with yourself with the word sweetheart, right? Or darling, Like every sentence would change if you started with that word.

So think about introducing that into your life. Another thing that you can do to make a safe place to land is to recognize that you are always more than one thing. And it's okay. Like you're not going to be all good. You're not going to be all kind, you're not going to be all gentle. You're not going to be all. Anything, Right. But that doesn't mean that we need to withhold love and compassion for ourselves. Like we are good and bad. We are gentle and unkind.

We are brave and we are scared. We are all the things. And I think just like allowing yourself to be. More than just the positive thing is like a really helpful way to make a soft place to land. Like allow yourself to be whole. This is a really good place to practice unconditional love. Like that's the idea. We're all trying to learn how to how to be more loving and to love without condition. Start with yourself and like that.

You decide to love yourself and be compassionate with yourself no matter what. It's a really good place to start that practice. Another thing that you can do to make yourself a place to land is to forgive yourself. Give yourself fast, forgive yourself immediately. There's just no reason to hold on to these grudges for yourself. It's not changing your choices. It's not changing your experience. It's just making it, like, really uncomfortable to be with yourself. And then the last thing that I would say about creating this soft place to land is just to recognize that you don't have to deserve or earn that soft place.

You don't have to deserve or earn your own self-compassion. You know, I've been thinking about this scripture that King Benjamin gave, you know, and he was giving his address and he was talking to the people about compassion and about empathy and about like, giving to other people and giving to the poor and taking care of people, right? And there's this scripture that says, you know, perhaps thou shalt say the man has brought upon himself his misery. Therefore, I will stay my hand and I will not give him my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer for his punishments are just like King Benjamin's like, maybe the reason you're not giving to others is because you're just like, well, they brought it on themselves.

And, you know, whatever's happening to them, they deserve. And it's not up to me to alleviate that. And I think, like in so many ways, this is what we do to ourselves. We're just like, I'm not going to give myself self-compassion because like, I brought this on myself and like, these are just the consequences of my choices and the way I've lived my life. I'm just not going to be nice to myself. Right? Like, you don't deserve my love and listen, like, I really want you to think about that. That what if I stopped saying that I have to deserve my own compassion? And like, I followed the counsel of King Benjamin Recognize, like, my job is not to judge whether or not they deserve it.

My job is to give, to give freely and to apply that to yourself. Like, my job is not to judge if I deserve any compassion or if I brought this on myself, but to just give compassion freely. Like ask yourself what you need and provide it freely with an open heart. There's that old saying that says Never suppress a generous thought. And I just want you to apply that to yourself. Never suppress a generous thought for you either. All right, my friends. That's what I have for you.

Clean up your judgment and your self contempt. Sought out what is you and your intrinsic inherent unlimited value and sort that out from the things that you are experiencing or choosing and make a soft place to land. Welcome all of you to the season of self-compassion. I hope you love it here. I think it's time for it. I think it might be the best season of the year. And that, my friends, is 100% awesome. I love you for listening and I'll see you next week.

Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. If you're serious about changing your life, you first have to change your mind. And the best way to do that is through coaching. I work with my clients one on one to help them change their thoughts and their feelings about themselves, their lives and their challenges so that they can live a life they love. If you'd like to work with me one on one, you can learn more and schedule a free call to try coaching for yourself at April Price Coaching.