Want to stop being so hard on yourself?
If you pause for a second and really get honest, is there an area of your life where you're being really hard on yourself? Is there more than one?
Given you ended up here, there's obviously a higher probability that dating is one but are you really hard on yourself about why you aren't already making six figures or why you said that awkward thing at your dinner last night? How your wardrobe does nothing to flatter your figure and you still haven't paid that bill from your last doctor's appointment?
Now before we spiral into all these types of thoughts, let me ask you this:
When you beat yourself up for not having yet done the thing or the way you performed last time,
does it make you want to keep going or try again?
I can't speak for you, but it certainly does NOT help me. When I start to chide myself for the pile of boxes that have been sitting by my door waiting to get broken down so I can recycle them, it does not make me want to get my butt off the couch to do it. That thought almost always begins a multiple minute thought binge of all the other things I know I should do but haven't done yet. I end up mentally glancing through a broad swath of my own imperfections against the perfect standard of who I could be. It's beating myself when I'm down.
When I realized this, I took a step back and asked, “What do we hope we're going to get out of being hard on ourselves?” I think for many of us, we've convinced ourselves that if we're not hard on ourselves that we'll dissolve into being absolute slobs, never motivated to accomplish more and letting laziness absolve us of all responsibilities. Like the being hard on ourselves is keeping the real us, a bad-kid-like, reckless, disrespectful menace lives inside us that if we don't keep on guard will be let out of an imaginary cave and ruin our lives.
But that's not real. If I stopped nudging myself to get things done, might my apartment get significantly messier over the course of a few weeks and might my yoga mat remain rolled up in the corner collecting dust? Sure. But at some point, I'd get sick of the mess and of my own volition decide that it'd actually feel good to clean up and maybe even have one of those aesthetic, light a candle, do some yoga, drink some tea Sundays. My world does not descend into madness when I stop reminding myself of what the perfect version of me would do, keeping myself in line. It eventually course corrects.
And often the beating myself up gets me so deep into thinking about the things I haven't done that I'm in a spiral of doing nothing because I'm so much a failure. (Not true, but you're living in my head right now so bear with me.) It's like a dark, twisted version of analysis paralysis - I have too many things I need to do in order to meet my own expectations and instead I'm going to stall out in the paralysis of the ways I'm not meeting my own expectations which encourages me to accomplish even less.
So clearly that's no good.
And I often see this in women thinking about their dating lives - a series of bad dates hurts their confidence and then when swiping on the dating apps they begin the diatribe of the flaws in their physical appearance that must be the reason that these men aren't swiping on them and the apps suck anyway, so what's really the point and they should just admit that the type of person they want isn't out there anyways and they'll eventually have to settle but facing that is super depressing so for now they should just take a break from dating…
What starts off as a little being hard on themselves, which they conveniently refer to as “being realistic,” spirals into them totally pulling themselves out of the process of dating altogether, thus creating the outcome of them not finding somebody, which is the thing that they're trying to avoid. Or when a woman is considering getting support and they start going down the rabbit hole of all the ways they've failed to follow through in the past and use it as a reason to not take a step forward now, keeping them exactly stuck in the reality they're trying to get out of. (If this sounds like you, check out my masterclass on Why We Struggle to Stick With Things.)
But what's the alternative?
Well, this is so simple, it sounds crazy. Your brain is going to read it and immediately kick in with all sorts of opinions. What if you just spoke more kindly to yourself?
Yup. I said it. What if when you catch yourself beating yourself up because you got the report into your boss a few hours later than you want, you tried to catch yourself and acknowledge how much else you have going on and while you're going to change some things to fix it for next time, it's not the end of the world that it wasn't in by noon?
Now, I'd bet that the thought coming up is - if I start being so nice to myself, I'll just completely let myself off the hook for doing anything I should do and get nothing done! I'll end up emotionally spending on a bunch of things that I want but don't need. I'll lose an accurate sense of what's real, putting myself in the path to so much disappointment. But remember the dirty apartment? Things have a way of course correcting and when they do, it comes from a place of “I want to do this," not “I'm shaming myself into doing it” or “I guess that's not in the cards for me but I'm glad I tried” rather than “I won't get it so it's not even worth trying.”
In my experience (since obviously I've been testing this on myself!) is that by being kinder to myself, I keep momentum so much more of the time. When I catch myself having scrolled on TikTok for 45 minutes rather than be productive, hard-on-myself would add on so much shame for the behavior that I'd feel like crap and end up clicking between softwares and back to TikTok staying in an unproductive headspace for at least another hour, overwhelmed with all the things I still had to do. On the other hand, when I catch the scroll and ask myself, “Hey, is the scrolling how we want to be spending our day? No? Okay, well there's no reason to dwell on the time already past, what would you like to do instead, self?” (And yes, I really do talk to myself in my head!) I end up jumping back into tasks faster and then build momentum of feeling good that I overcame the urge to scroll.
You don't have to believe everything works out or things never go wrong. You don't have to believe you're great at everything and have no flaws. You don't even have to be satisfied with life as it currently is. Just start with calling a timeout on the flagellating, borderline bullying self talk.
But you can also start shifting your self-talk right now. Just decide to try a different approach for this week and see what happens. And then, let me know how it goes!
