Ep. 6: Self-Compassion (Happiness)

Learn to notice and reduce the influence of the inner voices that are diminishing your happiness. Then learn how to introduce positive and fair voices.

Chapters

• 0:00 You have to get used to the idea of self compassion
• 7:01 You have lots of inner voices
• 15:47 Straightforward version and advanced version
• 21:36 Step one: notice
• 28:07 Step two: label
• 33:50 Step three: introduce positive voices
• 39:49 You'll never entirely get rid of the negative voices
• 44:33 Self compassion is also for big setbacks
• 48:54 The mantra

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hi, my name is David Murphy, and welcome to How to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast for and from the Mildly Incompetent. Hi, welcome to Self-Compassion, the second episode giving advice about being happy. So years ago, actually decades ago now, I took calls on the San Francisco Suicide Prevention Crisis Line. Did that for two or three years. And it was quite an experience. I'll give some shout outs to people who are surely not listening. To Edwin and Percival, who was my shift mates, were three of us taking calls at the same time. And then Sally Sorretta, who ran the training sort of off the phones, and this woman named Lynn, who was my trainer, actually taking calls when I was brand new. Anyways, it was quite a time. You know, it's actually very rare you get calls of someone who's about to end their lives. You do get those calls, but they're the unusual ones. Most people call, they're not happy, they have no one else to talk to, so they want to talk to you. Anyways, the training for becoming a call taker was, you know, excellent and so meaningful. And I remember one of the people who came to sort of teach our group, it was learning at the same time, was a woman who came to talk about addiction. And she talked about 12-step programs and life with addiction. And she was a psychologist who had grown up with her parents as alcoholics, as functional alcoholics as they're called. But if you are familiar with this personally at all, you know that a functional alcoholic is actually very dysfunctional in many ways. So she had grown up like that and she'd become a psychologist, and she had over the years started to teach people about these things and do these sort of public talks, like in these little groups like ours and larger groups. And she just became totally used to talking about it. And she said that one day her father came to hear a talk she was giving. And she was just so used to talking about the alcoholism of her parents when she's growing up that it meant nothing too strong a term, but it didn't at all make her feel uncomfortable. And she forgot that her dad was not like that. He was very uncomfortable because he is not used to talking about it at all or hearing her speak about it so openly. You know, but you know, time for her had changed her perspective on it. It became an easy open topic for her. I bring this up because the term self-compassion might just immediately turn you away or turn away a lot of people. You know, this this phrase that just sounds awful to anybody with a with a cynical uh point of view or just a just sort of repugnance, uh, what you might call new age, you know, soft, sort of hippie-ish, you know, uh vibe. You know, Dan Harris, who runs a 10% happier uh podcast, who wrote the book 10% happier, you know, he talks sort of that idea a lot that when he was started off sort of entering this world of meditation and and working on your happiness, just all the stuff sounded so awful to him as this you know hard-bitten you know war correspondent. And um, you know, especially you know, the this meditation called loving kindness meditation, that he you know fully engages in in and advocates for it now. He said that just the I that name, loving kindness meditation, just it was sounded terrible to him, and you know, it turns his stomach. But he had to get used to it, and he did get used to it and found how valuable it was. All right, self-compassion. If you're of the mindset where this sounds like something you you can't even say out loud, let alone try to take on yourselves, you're gonna have to work past that. You're just gonna have to for a while block it out and learn to say these things a little more to yourself sometimes and eventually get comfortable with it. Sometimes in these situations, the technique would be to like, well, just call it something else. I don't want you to call it something else. Get used to the phrase self-compassion because it's very important. Just compassion itself, unattached to any other modifier, is an extremely important quality to develop and enhance. I personally consider it the most important quality. If you can teach your kids just one character strength, I would vote for it to be compassion. You want people to feel for other people, to care about their suffering, and want to do something to help that suffering. And this might be the real turnoff for some people, you have to learn to direct that compassion towards yourself as well. You deserve it just like everybody else. You deserve criticism, you know, critiques of your actions if you're not behaving well, just like everybody else, and you deserve kindness and compassion, just like everybody else, and you deserve it from yourself. Now, this is not a political show, of course, but there's this phrase you might have heard of uh American exceptionalism, this idea that America is special and unique as a country. And people will use that idea sometimes to make excuses for America that they don't make for other countries, though frankly all countries do that, or all nationalists uh do that. But also it could be a reason people, you know, Americans can criticize America more. People who believe in the American mission, the world can say, look, this thing we're doing, that's not good enough for America. Okay. I bring it up because people tend to have this idea of sort of personal exceptionalism. They they believe that they somehow are different to the rest of humanity, meaning they sometimes give themselves excuses they don't give other people, and they also give themselves criticism they know other people wouldn't deserve. And what we want to do with this lesson we're learning here and now about self-compassion is look at ourselves honestly and fairly, but also with the kindness we think it's good to treat other people with. And you know, I promise you, as I go through this, I'm not gonna be someone who's trying to get you to say nothing but sweet things to yourself that might make you nauseous. But you have to get used to this idea and be open about what it is. It's self-compassion. All right. So that's out of the way, let's move forward. Okay, the first thing to know here is that you have lots of inner voices. You know, people sometimes talk about though their inner voices, they hear but this idea and you're aware that there's a voice in your head. But even the phrase a voice in your head is incorrect because you have lots of voices in your head telling you different things in different tones at different times. They are almost always talking to you. You might not realize that. You don't might not pay enough attention to your thoughts, or have done any kind of training in that to notice just how often you've got an inner voice going off, telling you something. Almost always throughout your day, your voices are talking to you. You know, it's not in some like crazy way telling you to do terrible things. You probably noticed that. But they're just rattling on all the time about things that are going on or things that happened 20 years ago. They'll just go off. Now, it's important to understand how many of these voices are really under the surface. We don't notice them. We all talk to ourselves like out loud sometimes. People catch us, it's embarrassing. Or we talk to ourselves in our head, so we're actually having this sort of verbal conversation. But when I talk about voices, I mean a lot of them are really under the surface of your attention. You're going on doing your tasks. You little things in your head are talking to you, but it's so sort of low level that it's not creating a conversation in your brain. What it's doing is affecting sort of your mood, your perspective on things. It's like music in a movie that you're not paying attention to the music because you're engaged in the scene, but that music is affecting almost entirely how you view what's going on. That's happening in your brain as you go through your life. Yeah, I mentioned Dan Harris a minute ago. He wrote in his book, 10% Happier, that the original title he wanted for that book was The Voice in My Head Is an A-hole. He didn't say a-hole, he said the full word. Anyway, it's funny, as I mentioned in a different episode, my parents were from Ireland, uh, swearing to me, it's like uh breathing and walking around. Uh, and I don't expect any children to be listening to this podcast, other than my own children, when I force them to. But for some reason, I don't want to hit the explicit button. So, anyways, I won't say the full word. But, so that was the original title he had planned. And he writes in the introduction to the book most of us are so entranced by the nonstop conversation that we're having with ourselves that we aren't even aware we have a voice in our heads. And now that might sound sort of nonsensical, contradictory to people who haven't spent time watching their thoughts much, but the idea that we're so driven by, we're so entranced by, as he says, these voices that we don't even notice are there. It's just the truth. We are pushed around by the voices in our heads all the time, and we don't even know that they are telling us not only what to do, but even more importantly, how to feel, how to feel about ourselves, how to feel about this coworker that just we just interacted with, how to feel about our performance this morning. You know, these voices are going on and on, they're entrancing us, as he says, and we don't even know what's happening. Some of the most persistent ones, ones that grab the mic a lot of the times, are ones that have nothing good to say about you. All they had to say is really lousy things. They will bring up something you said stupid earlier today or yesterday or a decade ago. They will, you know, look in the mirror and they will point out whatever feature on your face you don't you like the least, they'll say, oh, look at that again. And they'll they'll bring up embarrassing photos from 30 years ago and pop it into your head. They'll point out some mistake you made and say that you you know you blow things now and you blew things, you know, when you were a kid. Uh, they will often tell you that uh you're a failure, you're always going to be a failure. And that kind of voice, by the way, comes into people, even who are very successful. They will get these voices to tell them, you know, you're never gonna really be a success. Now, if you say to if your reaction to my going on about that is to say, I never get any voices like that, well then either you're a very unusual person, which is fine with me, especially if you're unusual in that sense, or you again are unaware of just how much your voices are talking to you in negative ways. That would be fine if therefore those voices had no effect upon you, but unfortunately, they do. Even the ones that we are not noting, they affect us a lot. In fact, I recently heard it said on a podcast that when we are aware of a thought, when we look in, you know, some thought pops into our head, and we can look at it and say, Oh, that is a thought I just had. That thought has relatively little power over us. But if we just aren't objective about it, if we don't realize that some opinion that pops into our head, you know, some view or perspective of something is just a thought that pops up. If we just, if we don't note it sort of from the distance a little bit, it becomes very, very powerful. It just seems like reality to us. This is true of these voices that tell us how much we suck, that are very hard on us. We assume, we believe that this perspective is the true perspective. It's an objective view of us, of our reality, not our opinion. Not only our opinion, but the opinion of one of the crazy voices in our head. You know, you may have seen the movie Inside Out by Pixar, where this kid is controlled by these five emotions that have, you know, disputes uh among themselves. Uh, I haven't seen the sequel. I think there's more emotions than that one. But, you know, I would express it more that your mind has many more than five voices. And just like in that movie, the kid is not aware of the disputes among the emotions. She can't hear them. She just sort of feels a result of these things, uh, of this sort of bickering and going back and forth and people sort of seizing control of her. Uh in your mind, you can think of it. Imagine more like there's a town hall meeting going on, sort of all the time, beneath your consciousness. And this town hall meeting is a whole bunch of people come along. And there are some people, as often is the case in real sort of, you know, uh town hall meetings or city council meetings, there are some people who take the mic a lot and never have anything good to say. They go right up there and they say negative stuff all the time, and usually they have a favorite topic or two. They go on and on about that thing. And they would like never to have to hand the mic over to anyone else. That's going on in your head. There are a whole bunch of different voices that are there, but some of them are very good at seizing the mic and going on and on. And again, very often the ones that are good at grabbing the mic are the ones that are very critical of you. And to make, I guess it's an obvious point, this having this collection of voices so heavily imbalanced towards the negative is not making you happy. On the contrary, it is significantly reducing your happiness. Again, even if they're not noticeable to you, where you're not literally hearing voices telling you, oh God, you suck, which sometimes we do, right? And sometimes, you know, we hear the voices of people in our past, our parents or teachers or other kids from school or something. You know, we can hear the voices telling us you're terrible, life's just screw up, whatever. But even if you don't have that going on, it's not that noticeable. Again, the voices collect and make this background music for your life. So you're going through your life, and you're maybe doing your job or you're hanging out with your family, or you know, you're dinner with friends, even something seems positive. But instead of there being nice music playing, instead of just like horror music playing, it's like the background music from The Shining. You don't realize it, and so you can't even work against it. But it's affecting how you view yourself and how you view what's going on, and it's taking away your happiness. And so it's our job here to help your happiness by helping get the voices a little more in line, help reduce the control on our perspective. Now, again, I'm not doing this episode to tell you that you never deserve criticism. You would truly be an unusual person then. You know, it's a sure thing that you make mistakes sometimes, and you, you know, you do the wrong thing, and sometimes you actually act sort of badly. There are times when you surely are more selfish than you should be, when you, you know, snap at someone in anger who doesn't deserve it, uh, or if they do deserve it, you go too far with it. That's always a fun one. Like you know you're in the right, so you really take things out on somebody else. Uh there it's a sure thing that you at times act in ways that deserve some criticism. So I'm not arguing that you your voices to yourself should always be entirely positive and supportive. There's sort of two versions of self-compassion that I want to talk about here. There is the um, what I mean call it, a simple version and a sort of higher level. And the simple version is just that the voices that you tell yourself, the voices in your head that are talking to you, should be fair and kind. That's all. Fair meaning criticism is warranted if it's warranted. And kind meaning like everybody deserves some kind of kindness there. It does it's not effective, frankly, to make someone better at things by always putting them down. It's just, you know, even if it were effective, which it's not, it would be a very unpleasant way to live. You know, your voices should be like the voices that you think other people should get. Other you don't think other people should be just constantly berated for things that they've done now and things they did, you know, 20 years ago. Uh you think they should get treated fairly and with some kindness, right? That's what you should get. But if you don't actually do some work on the voices in your head, that's not what you're gonna get. You probably already know that. And if you're not aware of it, uh you gotta start paying more attention. Unchecked and uncontrolled is the wrong word, because we don't actually get sort of real control over these voices in our head. We're always gonna have, you know, crazy Bob grabbing the microphone at the town meeting. But if you don't get some influence over our voices, it's just gonna be a crazy and unproductive time down there. So again, the simple version of self-compassion, just fairness and kindness. Those are the goals. You know, that's a good goal for when you're communicating with anybody, and it goes for you too. So then the more advanced version of self-compassion, it's not really the right phrase, the higher level of self-compassion. So first is the idea of just working there of compassion itself, this quality where you can look at another person and see their pain or the suffering and want to help them with that, maybe just by listening somehow. And to look at other people and see their value and see their potential and wish for them that they can you know achieve that potential and see their own value, and maybe you can help them with that. It's good for everybody in the world to work on compassion. I've already said I believe that's the most important quality people can have. So whoever you are, it's likely you should keep working on compassion, heightening that ability to connect ourselves to other people, not exclude other people, but to connect with them and care about what they're feeling. And then when you worked on the sense of compassion, you point it at yourself just like at everybody else. There are a lot of very caring people in the world who don't do that, who feel, as I said earlier, that they are some kind of special case that doesn't deserve to have that compassion given to them. You know, people who think that to to point compassionate yourself to spend time on that is a is a selfish action, selfish action. Uh, who think that, well, you know, they're just so full of faults, maybe faults that other people don't know about, that they don't deserve uh to have that. And this is just false. You know, I don't know how uh great a person you are. I don't know how many mistakes you've made and how many times you have acted badly towards other people, but you're not some special case who does not deserve compassion. It's frankly a sign of maturity to realize you're like the rest of us, which means that you deserve the criticism again that other people might deserve if you have done something that's wrong. But you also deserve compassion. So by working on compassion overall, you're increasing your ability to see the value of other people by working on this higher level of self-compassion. You're sort of working on the first point of the mantra that uh I use on this podcast. The mantra is that you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. Well, that idea of that you matter, that you have value, that's what I'm talking about here with this version of self-compassion. You actually are looking at yourself and saying, you know, you're not just looking at yourself in the moment being nice to yourself, that's great. But you're also saying, oh, this is a valuable person I'm looking at when I look at myself. And that person deserves help when they feel bad and deserves to get to their potential in life and achieve what they want to achieve. And again, if this all seems way too far down the self-affirmation road, you know, the self-reflective, let's all sit around in a circle, be nice to ourselves, kind of a thing. It's too much for you, it's okay. Skip what I'm calling the higher level for now and stick with the basic stuff, which is just like, you know, be fair to yourself and learn to say some nice things to yourself. Let's talk about how we actually practice self-compassion. And the the first step is actually just taking in the message, getting into your head what I've already talked about, that you deserve self-compassion. It's a good thing in your life, it's not something you should just push off. It doesn't make you weak, it doesn't make you bad at things. You know, I'm gonna have an episode called Blame the Process over on the success side, which is essentially self-compassion that helps success. It just means, you know, something doesn't go right in your life. You know, you fail a test, you don't get hired for a job, you know, you you you blow something that's important to you. You don't sit around and call yourself stupid and a failure and all that stuff, which is what the voices in your head want to do. You look at, okay, what is it that went wrong? It's not that I suck. I did something wrong or something along the way went badly. Look at the process that led you up to that point and identify it and fix it so you could get it right next time. You know, this is all a way to see, show how being, you know, treating yourself well actually helps you in success. So, anyways, step one of actually working in self-compassion is getting that message into your head, oh, beating myself up, it doesn't make sense. It definitely doesn't make me happier. Okay, but let's do let's do further work on working on these voices. I said you got to kind of get a get a handle on the voices that are running this town hall meeting. It's the level of your consciousness here. So, step one, it's simple but not easy, because you got to start paying attention to your thoughts. And I talk about this more as well in the next episode on happiness called Be Here Now, but living in this moment instead of dwelling on the past or the future too much. And part of that is about paying attention to what's going on in your head. So we've got to work on it here in self-compassion as well. And it's very tricky. If you've never done anything like that, if you have not worked on any kind of mindfulness practice, uh, it is actually just foreign probably to you, the idea of looking at your thoughts. Um, maybe you've done some kind of journal writing, but you have to start to do that. You have to, you know, you're going through your day and you're busy and you're getting stuff done. You kind of check in and say, especially in these moments where you feel crappy about yourself, say, okay, what am I telling myself right now? And look, it's you're probably not even going to do that. Just I'm telling you now, I do that. Okay, check, I'm gonna start doing that. Every time I feel bad, I'm gonna start questioning what's going on, what are the thoughts in my head? You won't remember to do it based on listening to this episode one time because our thoughts, they just carry us away. We're used to getting tranced by our thoughts, just so involved in our thoughts that we run along with them. We don't observe them from a more objective perspective. Maybe, I don't know, maybe once a night you'll say, Oh, I'm supposed to be looking in at my thoughts. Well, what am I thinking about right now? Well, I think I'm thinking okay, thoughts right now. It's not the best level of self-analysis, but hey, once a night is a start. It's better than uh never. But listen, the more you can try to remind yourself, what am I thinking about right now? Just to ask up that question. And especially again, if it's a stressful moment, if it's a moment you're feeling bad about yourself, step back a second and say, What's going on in my head? Uh what you will start to notice is some of the actual, you'll start to actually hear more distinctly the words of some of those voices, of you know, Crazy Bob's voice, you know. Uh and so just start to see it and go like, oh, yeah, that that's me. For some reason, I keep going on about this this thing I did. Yes, this thing I did today was kind of dumb. Or it wasn't that dumb, but whatever. It was kind of dumb. But I've brought it up to myself now probably about 14 times. What is the point in me bringing it up to myself 14 times? And oh, yes, I just, you know, for 10 minutes, you know, replayed that story of something I did 10 years ago that made me feel just humiliated. Why am I going on about the story again? I I've played it a thousand times in my head over the last 10 years, and I surely will play it more. But why am I doing that today? Oh, it's it's crazy Susan. She's so she decided to remind me of that event. As she does, it's her favorite story. You just notice, like, oh, these things, they're not functional, they're not useful, but somewhere in my brain, there's some voice saying, you should be thinking about this right now. So notice, notice these things. Notice how often things that are not useful to think about. Yes, sometimes it is useful to address things you've done wrong, but we usually go on and on about these things without it presenting a solution. We just we just want to dwell upon the fact that we suck. So notice, notice, and that is really, it really is a challenge. If you could get a little bit better at it every month, so that after six months, you are somewhat good at, you know, saying, Oh, you know, after let's say after a few minutes you think about something, you could say, like, oh, wait, wait a minute. I I'm just perseverating on this idea. Well, that would actually be a big step forward. You'll be much more sort of self-aware than most people in the world, and then you have been your whole life. And that might seem like, oh God, it's gonna take six months on this skill. No, no, it's gonna take you years to get really good at this skill, and that's if you work on it consistently. Now, if you think, well, I'm not gonna take on some project, it's gonna take years and years to get better at. I got things to do. But here's the thing: you're gonna live another 10 years, 25 years, 60 years, I don't know. I hope it's a long time. You're gonna be alive all that time. You could spend that time not noticing what's going on in your head and letting those thoughts just spin around, or we can spend that time getting better, noticing what's going on inside your brain and making yourself happier. It's really up to you. You're gonna spend that time living. I say spend that time being happier. That's the point of this podcast. So, notice, start to pay attention. A meditation practice does help with that. But even that, like, that takes time to do it. I encourage you to do a meditation practice. But just so you know, it's not like, oh, I started meditating last month and now I'm just a whiz at noticing everything I think about and paying attention and labeling things. That's not the case at all. Uh, but it will help you see what's happening in that town hall meeting. Okay, the second skill of uh the practice of self-compassion, uh, just first off, you're not waiting to master skill one before this idea of noticing what's going on in your head before you start working on this skill two, which I'll talk about in a moment. Uh you're doing them in conjunction. I just told you you're gonna get it's gonna take you a while, a pretty serious effort, to get any skill at the noticing stuff. So you don't want to wait that long before you start working on uh the second part. And you might say, you know, you might look at it something like learning, if you learn classical piano, you're gonna learn how to do some scales the first day or very early, at least in your training, but you don't need to wait to master scales before you learn any how to play any kind of piece at all. That's not how uh the training works. Well, same thing here. Basically, right away with the noticing, you get into the second step, which is labeling. You know, it it could they go hand in hand, but you you know, you start paying attention to the fact that, well, I feel crappy about myself right now, and oh, there's these voices telling me I'm probably the stupidest person who's ever lived. It's okay to put a label on there and say, like, oh, well, that's just excessive. I mean, it's kind of bragging. You know, I might make the 12th stupidest person who ever lived, but the number one, that's just not realistic. You can make a joke about it or not make a joke about it, but put a label there and say, that voice, it's not telling the full truth. And you can concede that you did something stupid. You can step back and look at your action and say, that was a stupid thing to do. And I'll tell you right now, listeners, I do dumb things myself. I think of myself as a smart person, as part of my self image, and then I do stupid things, and it makes me question that self image. But if you get a voice in your head that's telling you like you're just the dumbest person alive, you can label it and say, like, that's really over the top. And it might sound like, oh, you know, I was just being funny, but no, we tell ourselves stuff like that, like for real. And we mean it when we say it to ourselves, like you're just such a screw up, like you do nothing but screw up in this in this life. That's just going too far. And it might sound like I'm being simplistic or obvious when I say these things, but here's the thing: if you don't notice that you are saying these things to yourself, if you don't get any kind of objective perspective, you will say these things to yourself and you'll just believe them. There'll be no questioning of that voice that you may or may not even hear out loud in your head. There'll be no questioning of this judgment that you're the stupidest person in the world. It'll just be believed. So you have to do the noticing before we can do the labeling.

unknown: 31:00

Right?

SPEAKER_00: 31:00

You don't have to be a master notice, you don't have to be you know, just perfectly aware of what's happening in your mind. But you have to start hearing at least some of those voices before you can start labeling them. And the point of both of those skills is that you are creating some distance and you're no longer convincing yourself that what you hear or sort of hear is just the objective truth. You're no longer being entirely carried along on the river of your thoughts. You can admit you made a mistake and maybe you're stupid or you acted stupid in that moment, but you you can get some objectivity. So you're not being dominated by that thought. And if we go back to what is happiness, that that episode where I talk about how to become happier, the key is we stop letting negative feelings run the show. We make more room for positive feelings. Now, these thoughts that criticize us, as I said, they're not always clear verbal comments that we say out loud to ourselves. But we have to notice, like, oh, I'm just like, I'm just really being down on myself. I'm just really, you know, running through the playlist of all the embarrassments of my life, all the rejections I've had in my life. And there's, you know, first of all, I'm it's not fair because I'll never bring up any of the times that I've done things right, or when people have, you know, liked to go out with me or spend time with me, or when people did hire me, or took me as part of their team for something. You know, so step one and step two, you're noticing thoughts and you're starting to label these thoughts. And then you know, it's step two, because it requires, it does require step one, and also it takes a little bit of effort on your part, almost a little courage, where you go, like, you know, it's okay to be nice enough to myself to say that's going too far. If it helps you at all, just imagine you're somebody else in the world. You're at work and you see a manager talking to maybe a new employee, and they're just going on and on about some mistake they made. You maybe you'd get involved. And then if you wouldn't, you might think to yourself, that's just ridiculous. There's no point in going on and on. There's literally no point. You're not going to get better work out of someone doing that. But also, it's not fair. That guy doesn't screw up all the time. And if that is true of somebody else, if you would think to yourself, there's no point in a manager talking to someone else on and on about their faults, or a parent talking to a kid on and on about their faults, you know, a spouse talking to their spouse on and on about their faults. Well, there's no point in you talking to yourself on and on about them. So learn to see it happening and then learn to label it. And finally, step three of the practice has to do with you introducing statements into your own head that are kinder and more fair. And again, if you are on the page of, oh my god, this whole self-compassion idea makes me nauseous, you might be saying, Here, oh, I knew it. I knew there would be positive self-talk. Yes, that's how it is. We we have to start saying things to ourselves that are more supportive. And, you know, again, I'm not trying to say that every hour on the hour, you must tell yourself that you are a powerful tiger. You know, you you are uh amazing and you're the best person in the world. You know, look, I mean, there are some self-help people out there who do encourage you to use that kind of language with yourself. They will tell you to get a mantra going where you say these very, very ultra positive things to yourself, you know, six times a day, every morning when you get up before you go into a meeting as you're driving your car. And look, I'm not even trying to, I'm not criticizing those versions of personal development. But that's not what I'm working on right now. That's not what I'm advocating for here. I'm advocating for reasonable, sane, fair, and kind things to be introduced into your head. And there's no one else who can do it except for you. If you don't believe in those kind of voices, if you don't believe that you deserve to be the recipient of those kind of statements, then even when other people tell them to you, you'll just discredit them. And if you are aware at all of what's going on in your head, you probably know that's true. That someone might compliment you, but if you don't think you deserve that compliment, you just write it off and go, like, oh, they're just being nice, or oh, they don't really know what a jerk I am or what a loser I am, or how much I screw up, or how I had to work, how hard I had to work just to do that right. I had a teacher point out years ago that I could not receive a compliment without immediately and out loud contradicting it or discrediting it. And it's about 25 years later, and I still have that urge, I still have that habit, though I've reduced it a good deal. You have to learn to introduce these ideas to your own head. So step one, you're noticing. Step two, you're labeling. Oh, there's crazy bub on repeat mode again. And then you say to yourself, something that sounds reasonable. It could be like, you know, you don't always screw up. You know, most of the time, you do things right. Or somebody broke up with you, and you could think, like, I'm just such an idiot, loser, no one wants to date me. More honest voices would be like, well, that person did like you for a long time. You know, there's gonna be some reason, must have some good qualities about you that made that person want to go out with you. And maybe they broke up with you, it's not really about you. And if it is, okay, what are these faults I have that I could probably get a little better at? You might already know what those faults are. If this is the case, that someone broke up with you for faults that you have, you're probably aware of what those are. But you don't need to make them into these mountains that just define you as a person. Again, that person went out with you for a while because of your good qualities. So just as you would with somebody else. You say, what's what's good about the situation? And if it again, it doesn't mean you don't ever deserve to be criticized. If you acted badly, let's say, you know, I'm a parent, it's very easy to treat your kids unfairly, get too angry at them, you know, or or just in some way be unreasonable in how you treat them. And you feel bad about yourself after you do it. Doesn't mean you won't do it again later, but you're actually less likely to do it again later if you can look at yourself and go like, okay, you didn't do that well. You you kind of just screwed that up. You didn't act nicely there. But you you're a good parent, you care about this kid, and you try to do well for them, so you don't have to hate yourself. And now what can you do to do better? And I'm again, I'm sort of sliding into the blame the process idea, but they're they're so well connected. You know, this idea of being self-compassionate and then using that self-compassion to help you get better at things. So you need to start introducing these more useful voices. What you're kind of doing is at the town hall meeting, you're handing the mic over to people who have more constructive comments. Again, your brain is this like city that's just, you know, as uh city council is trying to run. It's a big public meeting. Yes, are the people who's just constantly grabbing the mic and just nothing but complaining and yelling about things. What you're trying to do is just have the mic go over more often to people who've actually got something useful to say. Yeah, this place isn't perfect, but you know, here's how we can make it better. So, step one, notice all the crappy things you're saying to yourself and just how crazy they are. Label them as being crazy, not always wrong, but often being wrong or just going too far or use you know going on and on too much. Uh, and three, introducing something more positive. You're actually pretty good at this. Yeah, you you you you messed up that time, but nine out of ten times you get that right. And certainly you can work on it and and get it right next time. I once read that Steph Curry, the great NBA player, said that sometimes you have to be your own biggest fan. This was after they had lost the NBA finals before going on to win more uh NBA championships. I guess the phrase I would use here is that sometimes you have to be your own positive mentor. You gotta do that for yourself because other people can't always do it for you. Okay, now listen, this work is a long-term project. Uh just about every skill that I teach on this site in this podcast, uh, it's a long-term project. Uh sorry? For some of them, maybe all of them, you can start to see, you know, results pretty early on, and that could be things like uh gratitude, like talked about last time, or treating people well, or exercise, which are both upcoming episodes. Pretty early on you start to see some you know returns on your investment of effort, you might say. Uh self-compassion, you know, it'd be nice to think that you know early on you could start to feel better about yourself, and you might, but this this takes a lot of work and time to get good at it. And that might be because it's a challenging process, like I said, especially if you've never done any kind of meditation work or work where you look at your thoughts much. Um, and also I think because the this idea of self-compassion for so many of us goes against years, decades of habits uh of of you know resisting self-compassion. But the rewards can be tremendous. They will give you the this work can give you a real feeling of self-worth that can be hard to get otherwise. And of course, that tremendously uh impacts your happiness in life. And to speak for a moment specifically to parents, it's very hard to teach something that you don't know and you don't practice. Now, I know that you want your kids to have healthy voices in their heads and a healthy relationship with the voices in their heads. You know, you want them to be able to see their own faults and correct them, but you definitely don't want them just carried away with loads of negative feelings, right? So often you hear parents try to tell their kids don't be so hard on yourself. Yeah, parents yell at their kids, but they also tell them, say, stop beating up on yourself. Come on, give yourself a break here. Well, if that's what you want for your kids, you spend time doing that with yourself. You will be much better at helping your child have good voices, or you hand the mic over to good voices if you can learn to do that yourself. And yes, it'll take a long time for you to do that, but you'll be happier and make your kids happier. But I will tell you as well that stupid voices, the crazy voices, they're never gonna go away entirely. You just don't think that you're trying to do is destroy the crazy Bob voice. You know, it's possible you will have maybe some particularly malevolent things or just very ignorant voices in your head that tell you, you know, whatever, something that doesn't make any sense at all, like you're to blame for some abuse that you suffered in your past. Maybe you can actually make those voices go away and not come back. But most of the voices that criticize us, they're gonna be there for the rest of our lives. But what you could do is really reduce how much time uh they get the microphone, right? They're not running the show anymore. Even when they do pop up and talk to us, we can say, Yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. So they're always gonna be there somewhere. And some days they're really gonna run the show. That's just the truth. Like that is gonna be especially the case early on, you know, when before you've done a lot of this work, you know, they already run the show a lot right now, even if you don't know that. And uh that's gonna continue to be the case. But even I'm telling you, you start to work in self-compassion, you get much better at it. Five years from now, you're gonna have days where really you're just beating up on yourself a lot. And you just have to keep going. You have to realize those are days you don't get to go lie down in a bed with the lights off. I mean, maybe you do, but if you do that, you're just gonna still go on and on about how much you suck. And so we do have to learn to keep going, even when these voices are telling us how awful we are at things. And again, for some people, that's the whole solution right there. You know, forget the self-compassion thing. Learn to carry on, even you're calling yourself a loser. In fact, that that voice telling you you're a loser is helping you. It's not. And what it's definitely not doing is making you happier. And we are here to learn how to be happier. So while some days we have to keep going, regardless of what those voices are telling us or yelling at us, but we keep doing this work to reduce how strong the grip is upon us. When you do this work for years, the days when you are kinder to yourself will become more and more common. The number of hours in each day when you are kinder to yourself will be greater. Okay, I've been talking about this work of self-compassion being about getting through your day-to-day life. You know, and all the times as you go through your life, those voices come at you and tell you how dumb you are and ugly you are and blah blah blah. But of course, we do have very big setbacks in our lives sometimes. And these setbacks are tremendous opportunities for self-criticism and self-diminishment. They're very good at putting our self-esteem down on the floor. Now, look, sometimes things are our faults, they come from mistakes that we have made. We need to be honest with ourselves if that's the case. Lying to ourselves does not help. But it's also not helpful to believe that our mistakes, even our big ones, permanently stamp us with these labels of idiots, loser, failure. That now we are marked forever with those labels. And in fact, what often happens is something big like that happens, we we blow something somehow, or we have some kind of setback, our fault or not. We give ourselves a label of some kind, some kind of negative definition of ourselves. And we don't believe, oh, there's some new label that attaches to us, but rather it's the truth that's always been there. And finally, it's been revealed to everybody else. We've spent our whole lives trying to hide the fact that we are big losers and now everybody can see it. This is the kind of useful voices that go on in our head to just make the most of these big setbacks. Now, there are several things to keep in mind in these situations. Number one, you have value. That's just a baseline. I've been talking about that since I introduced the mantra in the very first episode. We take it as a baseline that we have value. And so you've got to remember that these moments when you feel like you don't have value. Number two, not everything that does happen to us, not every big setback is our fault. It's funny, though not in a funny way, but it's funny how easy it is for us to be embarrassed about, to feel bad about things that aren't our fault. But we find it very easy to feel ashamed for the problems and situations that we didn't cause. We just do. Three, if something is our fault, it's because of our behaviors or our patterns of behaviors. And that might sound obvious to you, but you see, it's about what we have done. It's not because of some stamp that's on us of being a loser, idiot, whatever. Okay, it's not about just who we are in our core, it's about ways that we behaved. And because we can change our behaviors, that means we can learn not to make those same mistakes again. We can improve where we are, because we can do things again better than we did before. And again, to sort of jump into the blame the process side of things, we're more likely to do that. We're more likely, much more likely, to make positive changes in our behaviors, in our long-term patterns of behaviors, if we don't believe that we are stamped with a permanent loser sign, failure sign, whatever it is. And four, if we have a gratitude practice, you know, I talked about gratitude at length in the last episode on the happiness side of the site, and if we are using a gratitude practice to open our eyes to the very good things that do occur in our lives, that occur in each of our days, then these big blows, these big setbacks, they won't make us believe as easily that our lives are ruined, that our futures uh are ruined for years. We can see in this moment, whatever's going on, that we have things to be grateful for. And that is a uh a big help in making us happier. Okay, so there's self-compassion for you. You know, get the message, get it into your head that people deserve compassion, and you're not some special case who doesn't deserve it or who functions better when they don't get self-compassion, uh, because you're not that special case. It's just not how it is. All right, let's talk about the mantra as we always do, then we can get out of here. So, the mantra, you know how it goes, it says, uh, you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. So, again, you matter, you have value right now. Just accept that enough makes you feel queasy, too bad. Say it to yourself until you get used to it. This work matters. You being kind to yourself matters. It matters to you and your happiness. Your happiness matters, of course. Uh, it matters because you will treat other people well because you feel bad about yourself. But I'm mostly talking to you about you right now, so you have value. This work of self-compassion, it matters. And finally, you can do this work, you can get better at self-compassion. It's not easy, as I said, and it takes a while, but you can definitely do it. And when I say you can do it, part of what that means is that you can develop the maturity to see that you're a human like everybody else. And that being particularly hard on yourself, you know, saying mean things yourself to quote unquote motivate yourself is not a winning strategy. Okay, thanks for being here. Until next time. All right, this has been the How to Be Happy and Successful Podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this uh podcast episode, you can go to the website. Website is www.happy-successful.com. So it's happyandsuccessful.com, there's types in between the words. You can read articles there, you can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying, hey, there's new content. Go listen or go read. I also offered coaching. So if you'd like some help being happy or being successful, or both, you think my ideas are good, reach out to me through the website. If you like the episode, please go add a nice review about it wherever you listen to it. And if you didn't like it, or you just keep that to yourself. And if you really like the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and uh send me an email. I will do my best to respond. So actually I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it. Until next time.