Lean Out Podcast

Solocast: How to Practice Compassion This Season

• Dawn Baker • Season 3 • Episode 44

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Do you beat yourself up every time you make a mistake? How you would treat a friend or loved one who did the same thing? In this solocast episode appropriate for the holiday season, Dawn Baker talks all about self-compassion. She gives examples and talks about the components of self-compassion that we can learn to practice every day.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

** Lean Out Confidence Course Black Friday Sale! Get the course here for $47, the lowest price ever offered. Use the code blackfriday Nov 20th through Dec 4th to get the deal. **

** The 1:1 coaching special is still on through the end of this year! Go to practicebalance.com/coaching to learn more, or sign up for a free consultation here. **

Relevant/Mentioned Links:

Get in touch with Dawn:

Welcome to the lean out podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Don baker. Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance? You've come to the right. Place. For inspiration. information. and a community. community. of like-minded. Professionals. Let's get to the show. Hello. Hello. Thanks for being here. It's one week until Thanksgiving and this weekend we are having the infamous chicken themed birthday party. One of my daughter's friend's dad told me that his kid wanted to get mine an actual chicken for her birthday present, but he told her that probably wasn't a good idea. And to that I said thank you very much. I have an exciting announcement. I am going to run a Black Friday sale on my Lean Out Confidence course. I'm going to have the sale start today. Go until the Thursday after Thanksgiving. So for exactly two weeks, you can get four modules of inspiring content, relevant and practical exercises and useful resources, all about the elements of lasting true confidence. And you can complete this at your own. There's also an option to purchase CME and an option to purchase coaching sessions along with the course. So go check it out@practicebalance.com slash courses, and if you use the code Black Friday, just all one word. You can get the course for a screaming deal at$47. This is the lowest price I have ever offered it, and this price is good from today, November 20th until Thursday, December 4th, 2025. Okay. Onto today's show. If you're a subscriber to my newsletter, you may have noticed that the three most recent newsletters had the exact same subject line. And by the way, if you are not subscribed, why not? It takes two seconds to go to practice balance.com and put your email into the purple popup box. In exchange for giving your email, you will get my tried and true core values exercise that I use with almost all of my coaching clients, and you'll receive a couple emails a month from me with inspiring stories goings on and resources I've particularly been enjoying lately. So the subject line thing was obviously a mistake. In fact, anytime I make a typo or a mistake in my newsletter, blog or podcasts, I feel a twinge of embarrassment. I've pride in myself for many, many years on how well I can write. It was something that set me apart from other men and women in STEM fields at an early stage in my adult career. Hell, I even written a book and maybe there are some small errors in there too that I haven't found yet. If you've read it and you've found any errors, please let me know by sending me a message so that I can identify them. The program that I used to craft and send all my business emails recently changed its interface and things aren't where they used to be. And I thought after I created the newsletter and edited and added the pictures and such, I would have a chance to change the subject. But no, I only see the same subject over and over again in my inbox on a Thursday. And yes, I do receive my own emails. I listen to all my own podcasts, and thus I do notice my own mistakes. I could tell myself in this case that I'm an idiot. I could berate myself and be upset by these little mistakes. Maybe I can get discouraged to the point where I don't do a newsletter or a podcast anymore because it's not perfect or. I can practice self-compassion. Self-compassion is exactly what it sounds like. It's extending compassion to yourself. But this is both abstract and easier said than done. So we're gonna break it down a little more. the best resource I know of for information on self-compassion is Dr. Kristen Neff, who has a website called self-compassion dot org, and I will link it in the show notes. Kristen is a professor in the educational psychology department at UT Austin, and she has become known as an expert on self-compassion. She's written several books on the subject. She's been interviewed many times on different podcasts. She runs frequent workshops, operates in online community, and provides a lot of free resources on her website. I'm constantly referring coaching clients to her site to find self-compassion exercises and guided meditations. Dr. Neff defines self-compassion as being in the presence of one's own suffering with a desire to help. So this is no different than the definition of compassion, being able to feel someone else's suffering, with that desire to help. You're applying it to yourself, and it's different from empathy in that there is this addition of wanting to help as opposed to just feeling the feelings of the other person. I really like Kristin Neff's Venn diagram that explains compassion. She breaks it down into three elements, kindness, the recognition of common humanity, and mindfulness of presence. And so you can apply these as well to the self, whereas the kindness instead of towards someone else, it's toward yourself. But when a friend or a loved one is struggling, you're mindful in the moment, recognizing their suffering, and you typically reach out with warmth and understanding. Compassion and empathy are both deep rooted emotions that are uniquely part of our human experience. Earlier this year I did a solo cast about what sets us apart from the fish I was observing in my stream when I took a walk on our property and it was about freedom of thought. I will link that episode in the show notes in case you missed it. But these types of of emotions as well are also things that set us apart. From animals. There's an evolutionary purpose there. If compassion and empathy are part of our humanity, why is self-compassion so hard? Well, there are myths about self-compassion that Kristen Neff also mentions on her website. Self-compassion is often associated with complacency or laziness. Like if you're too kind to yourself, you're not gonna make progress or make changes. People think it's selfish or self-centered. If they aren't cracking the whip on themselves and that they'll lose motivation and this will negatively impact their chances of success in the future. But in her research, she points out that self-compassion is actually a vehicle for good, healthy habits, enhanced relationships, self-confidence, and more compassion for the people in your life. On top of it all, and this is particularly true for high achievers. We are our own worst critics. We have very high expectations for ourselves. And this leads to a setup for so-called failures. What if how we approach these failures, and I'm putting the word failures in air quotes right now, was different. How motivating and contributing to progression would it be if we could look at them as merely a part of our human experience and be kinder to ourselves? I just recently hosted a perfectionism expert, both by research and by personal experience on the podcast. Her name is Dr. Am Shair, and I will link her episode in show notes in case you miss that one as well. And she talked about how one of the big tenets of perfectionism recovery is adopting self-compassion. I talk about self-compassion as one of the components you can practice to learn authentic, real confidence in my confidence course as well. And I have my own personal transformation that I'd like to share with you from self-hatred and negative self-talk to self love and self-compassion. I spent my childhood comparing myself to others. I was fixated on it. I don't really know why. It was always at the forefront of everything for me, but I, like most of you, was a high achiever. So I was very competitive in school and I also by far, was the tallest kid in all of my classes. Having a physical difference, I think made comparisons just so much more easy. I realized that being tall is not like having a disability, but it's a very visible difference that affected a lot of my interactions with both kids and adults growing up. The awkwardness of being tall manifested in me, wishing for years that I looked different, I wished I could cut off part of my legs just to be a little bit shorter. I was just sitting in the physician lounge at a hospital when I was working and I was talking to a colleague and he mentioned to me that there's this orthopedic surgeon in the city that does limb lengthening procedures, electively on people who want to be taller, and all I could do was laugh at the irony. Anyway, looking back now that I'm more than halfway through my life, I realize I really didn't like my body very much. I didn't appreciate all that it did for me, and while I wasn't destructive in any way, I wasn't particularly kind to myself, and I definitely wasn't mindful. Fast forward to early adulthood and being tall wasn't so bad anymore. It was actually something that set me apart and I could see the positives, but I had other ways that I was unkind to myself. I told myself stories about my lack of athleticism despite an expectation to be athletic because I was so tall. And when I got into rock climbing with my husband, and given the fact that I had all these stories I believed about myself, it became a whole new way for me to compare. I compared to him, I compared to other women who were climbing. And it was always like, well, how long have they been climbing? And what levels are they climbing at now? Because I felt like my progression was a lot slower than other people as I advanced through the different levels of climbing. And of course another way to compare was medical school and residency. When I was sick during residency and I didn't know it, I was particularly unkind in my self-talk. I would say, why can't you cut it? Why is this so hard for you? And it's so easy for everyone else in the residency, I struggle for a couple years to keep up falling into a deep period of fatigue, and it led to me taking a leave of absence before I knew what was wrong with me. But man, I sure hated myself. It affected my marriage as well because I didn't feel very lovable when I got the diagnosis of brain tumor. All this changed in an instant. All of a sudden, I could say to myself, no wonder it all makes sense. You poor girl, you have cancer. My self hatred comparison and all the why mes turned into self-compassion and after I got through my surgery and on my initial rough period of recovery, I made it my mission to be kind to myself and to love myself, my mind, and my body for all they do for me. So what are some practical steps that you can take to learn self-compassion? Well, the first is to design a regular mindfulness practice that works for you. Something that you can be consistent with. I've talked about this many times on the show and I will point you to a couple articles I've written about easy ways that you can work mindfulness into your days. They'll be linked in the show notes. It doesn't have to look like a perfect 30 minute guided meditation on a meditation pillow. You can do even just a few minutes of practice each day by drinking your coffee in silence, taking a walk without your phone, and noticing what you see or hear, or maybe just closing your eyes and putting your hands to your heart for just a few minutes at the end of your lunch break. The other thing you can do is journal. Yeah, writing things down, getting them out of the jumble that's in your head, and putting them into some sort of logical framework, even though it doesn't have to be perfect prose, it can be so powerful for making anything stick. Try journaling so you can identify any negative things that you're saying about yourself. Journaling has a similar effect to mindfulness and meditation in that you can become through consistent practice, an observer of your own thoughts. If you're not the type to write things down, you could try dictating. I've had some coaching clients that really hate writing in a journal, but because they're physicians, they know how to dictate and it can work the same way. When you observe that negative self-talk, come up with a different statement to replace it. Make some statement in your journal that you would say to a friend or loved one who came to you with the same problem you're judging yourself about. How would you respond to them? If this is hard to swallow, write it down, look at it, and let it sink in. Like I said before, we are our own worst critics and it can be really difficult to conceptualize this, and that's why journaling is very powerful. The goal is to get to the point where you can automatically ask yourself in the moment when having negative self-talk, what would I say to a friend or loved one who's coming to me with this situation? And the last thing is to recognize that this is all a continuous practice. Just like everything we talk about on this show, you're not going to see quick changes. You have to be consistent in your practice. Even in my health crisis, my transformation from self-hatred to self-compassion was not like a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt was my diagnosis that jolted me into motivating for change. But after that, I took a deep dive into mindfulness practices, personal development, and self care. I learned all the things I share with you here and talk about in my articles, my talks, my book, and my course. It's a journey, but it's well worth it for peace, And peace is really what I wish for you this holiday season. When you go to self-compassion dot org, if you click on practices on the menu bar, you'll find guided meditations about particular topics as well as guided journal entries and exercises that I'm often recommending to my coaching clients. Tell me, do you find it hard to be compassionate with yourself? Share your thoughts about it by sending me a text through your podcast listening app, leaving a comment on the blog post associated with this episode@practicebalance.com, or sending me a DM on Instagram. I'm practice balance. Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast. If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services. You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker. Have a great day and we'll see you next time