Self-Compassion.
It all matters.
It’s all connected.
You can’t decide to make a change in your life without acknowledging why your current behaviours and emotional responses exist. Your past matters. You can’t just ignore it and move forward, it matters. Before we can release an old pattern or behaviour we must first acknowledge it, understand it, and thank it for protecting us. (Almost always, the behaviours we want to change or release were adopted by our younger selves to protect us from something, real or imagined.) You can’t beat yourself into change. Compassion needs to exist for change to occur.
I have run up against this time and again in my own personal development and in my work with clients. When a client is stuck, struggling to create a change that they truly desire but unable to take the necessary steps to do so, it is almost always an indicator that we need to go deeper in our work together. This can be vulnerable and uncertain territory. In fact, I would argue that it is always vulnerable and uncertain territory. Many of us have not truly sat with ourselves, gazed deep into our own psyches, or sought to understand our habitual behaviours and thought patterns at the level that is required to create real and lasting change. Even those of us for whom this is a regular practice can feel scared or overwhelmed by it sometimes. If you are ready to “go there” that’s totally okay. You can still grow and change, it can just be a bit harder. Harder to make the changes stick, harder to shift out of the old patterns and stay out. Sometimes it can be enough simply to acknowledge that the behaviour likely served a valuable purpose at one point without actually delving into what that purpose was.
Humans are incredibly adaptable and resilient creatures. What may be a completely maladaptive behaviour today in your adult life, was likely a brilliant response to a situation in your childhood. If you can cultivate compassion for yourself and understand that you were just doing the best you could with the situations you found yourself in (I like to extend this understanding to everyone I interact with every day), you are far more likely to be able to create meaningful change in your life. It turns out that punishment is a terrible way to change a behaviour. Positively reinforcing desired behaviours is much more effective. Armed with this knowledge, rather than beating ourselves up for being too lazy, lacking discipline, or reacting poorly to life situations, we can find ways to reward ourselves when we do follow-through with a new habit, behaviour, or reaction. Instead of berating ourselves for our old habits, self-compassion allows us to be grateful that our younger selves were able to adapt to the situations we found ourselves in.
Can you find compassion for yourself? Can you extend gratitude to yourself for the beliefs and behaviours that have gotten you this far? Can you lovingly thank them and then release the ones that are no longer serving you?
The liberating and somewhat overwhelming reality that you will eventually come up against in this process is that you are the source of your own success. You have to put in the work. You have to want to grow/change/become in order for it to actually happen. There are, unfortunately, no quick fixes here. It is so tempting to look outside of ourselves for a miracle cure. We think if we can just buy the right course or find the right mentor or hire the right counsellor, that growth and success will simply happen. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we can buy our way to happiness, success, and fulfillment. However, it simply isn’t possible.
Are you making something outside of yourself more powerful or more responsible for your growth than you?
An awesome personal-development course, gifted healer, or amazing coach can certainly contribute to your journey. They can act as a support and a guide. They can help you to see new perspectives, to find solutions you may otherwise have overlooked, to feel safe enough to begin unpacking your shadows and begin to heal and grow.
But…
No coach, healer, mentor, counsellor, or anyone else is going to solve your problems for you, as much as you (and they!) might wish they could. You are, wonderfully and terrifyingly, responsible for your own life. Are you ready to take ownership of this and begin to create the reality you desire?
If the answer is yes, I would be honoured to walk this journey with you.
