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Have Kindness for Yourself
Treating yourself harshly is never as effective as kindness.
Not only do we tend to be our own harshest critics, but we also tend to be less-than-kind to ourselves overall.
I have, for years, struggled with how my self-talk goes. One of those struggles has involved working with a lot of unkind and harsh things I think and say to myself.
Having kindness for myself has often been challenging. It gets overridden by less pleasant notions of self, which I need to not allow to dominate what I choose for how to live my life. But a lot of that tends to get connected to things that are outdated beliefs and values about myself.
Where do these come from? A lot of them are based on a combination of past experiences, as well as notions I absorbed from friends, family, teachers, and other people in my youth. If I am not mindful of that, my subconscious mind ends up taking the wheel. When that happens — and I do not take control of it — I can feel as though I am not doing as I should, and subsequently get annoyed with myself.
That, in turn, can lead me to anger and harsh thoughts and feelings towards myself. I am increasingly unkind to myself, and that harshness makes it harder to choose actions that grow my life and make it better.
