Hello, lovely Soul Drop! How are you feeling? In my case, I have been feeling like a living storm. My emotions as strong as they are plus my bad habit of trying to be perfect (when in all honesty, it's simply impossible!) makes it hard to be stable.
I start to critic myself excessively, overthink everything, and all of the sudden I have no self compassion at all. Which is obviously an issue, a very bad one. However, I have learned throughout the years how to increase my self-compassion!
Follow me in this step by step love pill!
Let's start with why you should increase your self-compassion to achieve all those dreams you have.
I encourage big dreams! To achieve those, you need to have the strength to keep moving forward despite of the obstacles of life. You know how many and how often those appear! Having self-compassion you'll be able to work with yourself instead of against yourself. Maybe you feel like you don't want to dream big because you feel either that you can't accomplish it or that you don't deserve it. In that case, think of your loved ones. Whether it is your best friend, your brother or your teacher, they love you and your happiness makes them happy! Remember that hurting yourself is also hurting others, even random strangers. While if you love yourself, you give love to the rest of the world.
Convinced yet? Great! (if not, read again. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. It takes time)
Now, let's see those baby steps we need to begin our self-compassion journey!
Step 1: Breathe! Slow down. You can't dance all the steps at once! You can't climb the whole staircase without going up step by step. Instead of trying to do everything at once, take 5 mins per day to slow down and remind yourself you are getting there.
Step 2: Would you beat up your friend like that? In case you do beat up your friends each time they mess up...you probably need more help than just this post. In case you don't (which I hope is your case) then why are you treating yourself like that? Whenever you're about to attack yourself think of what would you tell a friend who made the same mistake.
Step 3: Find the words that make you feel the best about yourself and repeat them! It's no secret that NLP or Neuro Linguistic Programming is extremely powerful! We all know that words have power so beware of them. Use them in your favor!
Step 4: Allow yourself to feel bad. I'm NOT here to tell you to feel happy go lucky 24/7 because that would be nonsense! If you feel sad, angry, frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, etc. Then that's OK! Emotions don't last forever but they also need to be felt and drained so they don't bring you trouble later.
Step 5: Start dating yourself! Have you ever dated someone? If you haven't then, what would you do to get to know them? Imagine that phase in which you are getting to know each other, you're doing little things for each other, that romantic phase at the start of a relationship. Perfect! Now do all of those things with YOU. It will definitely make it easier to feel self-compassion towards yourself if you start focusing on yourself like that. Your quirks, what things you enjoy, what makes you feel one way or the other, so you treat yourself better!
Self-compassion means to understand you are also human, you fall, you break, and that's alright! It doesn't mean to slack off or to feel pity about yourself. It just means to accept that you are not perfect and that doesn't make you less worthy!
I hope this helped somehow!
With much love,
Bel.