“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.” – Brené Brown
Some of you are probably already skeptical about a term like “self-compassion”, but this argument is backed by solid scientific research, not just feel-good pop psychology. So allow me to explain what I mean:
Self-esteem is a broad, global judgment of ourselves and our own worth. It’s not surprising that it is usually considered a good thing to have a high self-esteem. After all, valuing ourselves and being proud of our work is important, especially for a business owner.
However, self-esteem is also ego-driven, constantly striving to be different and better than others. When we encounter a setback or failure, our self-esteem takes a dive and we turn on ourselves harshly. We tell ourselves that there’s something wrong with us and we feel like a failure, or worse still, a fraud.
Self-compassion, on the other hand, is a willingness to embrace ourselves as we are, with all our imperfections and mistakes. We behave with gentleness and kindness towards ourselves, affirming to ourselves that “we are enough”, rather than treating ourselves as our worst enemies.
As a result, self-compassion leads to higher levels of motivation, optimism and personal well-being and to less anxiety and depression. And this has been proven by many research studies.
Self-compassion is particularly valuable when things don’t go our way – our ability to forgive ourselves, learn from our mistakes and then move on is so much more valuable than our ego. And let’s face it, we are going to make plenty of mistakes and encounter numerous setbacks in business and in life.
This means we need to intentionally introduce more self-compassion into our lives. As human beings, we are all inherently worthy of love and compassion, and we need to start by loving and being compassionate with ourselves.
So every time we fail, fall short, fall behind, or are just having a bad day – we give ourselves the gift of self-compassion. And when we fail to be self-compassionate, we are compassionate about our inability to be self-compassionate!
