self compassion

The last few weeks have not been the easiest.  I’ve got a condition in my inner ear, that when it flares up, I have an on again off again low-grade fever and get dizzy, where every day I’m on a boat that is rocking in the wind as I try to do my best to coach, facilitate, or do whatever it is I’m tasked with.  Not fun.  And then things pile up, I get stressed, I try to exercise self-care and ask for what I need, reschedule where I can, show myself some much-needed compassion and empathy.  But as you know, these things aren’t easy, especially when you run a business. All this to say that some things fell off in the shuffle last week, which included this blog.  And at that time, I practiced compassion and told myself it was okay, that in every life a little rain must fall, and took the opportunity to congratulate myself on my fine efforts up to this point.  Which is all well and good.  Yay me. And this week I’m still muddling through as the dizziness isn’t gone yet and heard a pesky little voice ringing in my ear, the voice of the workhorse, full of type A authority – “Pull your head out of your rear Shelley, and just get the blog done!” And guess what happened?  Absolutely nothing.  I started looking for ways to procrastinate.  My mind was filled with anything else I could do, and I really do mean anything else.  Taking out the trash, scrubbing the toilets, making a grocery list.  I was really scraping the bottom of the barrel to be sure.  Why?  Because it felt like a grind. A soul destroying, sucking daily grind.  And who can easily muster energy for the daily grind? We unknowingly create our own daily grind And then I remembered the fundamental lesson on why it’s important to approach life more focused on the journey than it is the destination.  Or in other words, the being is just as (or even more important) in life than the doing.  So often in life and leadership we’re focused on the latter.  I’ve just got to get this deliverable out the door.  Make another phone call, send another email.  Complete another performance review.  Give another presentation. And then I can relax.  I’ll have more time later to think about things and enjoy things. But the problem is we never do.  This is how we fool ourselves.  And then we wonder why we feel so empty, and life just feels like an endless daily grind of one thing after another. I’m not saying reframing this is easy by the way, we live in a world that rewards output and productivity.  We set ambitious targets for revenue, we set stretch goals, we live in a VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world where everything needed to be done yesterday.  And I’m also not saying that we shouldn’t get goals or visualize success.  As a coach […]

Developing a healthy sense of confidence, whether it’s in your leadership, or whether it pertains to your career direction, is important.  We often report feeling like we lack it.  But how to build confidence?  It’s intangible and fuzzy – it’s nice to say we need it, but what do we do about it?  There are three elements critical to building confidence in my experience as a coach.  As I describe these, think about for yourself which of the three you would rate as high, and which you would rate as low. How to Build Confidence – The Three C’s of Confidence Clarity – Direction is important, and to the extent we lack it, we can feel rudderless in our lives and in our leadership.  Do you have a vision for your career?  Do you know who you want to be as a leader and how you want others to experience you?  I remember when I was making my career change from accounting to leadership development back in 2012, I knew what I wanted, I had a direction.  I might have had no idea how I was going to get there, but the passion I felt for the vision I was cultivating kept me going.  Clarity is inspiring.  Once we have it, we can take steps to materialize our vision. I often have clients think about their values as a method of making a way out of the fog.  It can sometimes feel like an arbitrary exercise, but it’s not.  Our values guide the choices we make, and we all have values, whether we are conscious of them or not.  One of mine is autonomy.  It came into play recently when I was faced with a difficult business decision.  Tuning into my values helped to navigate this situation, knowing that I was tuning into my own True North.  Competency – Building skills builds confidence.  Every job has competencies associated with it.  Some are technical, and some are what folks often refer to as the softer skills.  Things like communication, presentation skills, time management.  Leadership does as well.  Good leadership is about two main things – building relationships while getting tasks accomplished.  We often sacrifice one for the other.  Maybe I over-focus on delivery and ignore important opportunities to coach and mentor my team.  Or maybe I focus too much on relationships at the expense of deliverables.  Good leadership requires balance between these two elements. How do you stack up on the competencies for the role you’re currently in?  Do you even know what they are?  What are you strong on?  What needs some work?  When we’re feeling less confident, we often try to hide our inadequacies.  We’re ashamed of them.  We may shy away from things that will challenge us because we’re afraid to fail.  The more willing we are to cultivate a growth mindset by leaning into our strengths and working to improve our weaknesses we better we will feel.  Movement in this direction generates energy and motivation.  Compassion – […]

I look around and see everyone is pursuing these amazing careers and they have great lives.  They all seem to know what they’re doing, and they have a purpose.  I don’t understand why I can’t get in gear.  What’s wrong and missing in me that I can’t figure it out? I hear this a lot as a career coach.  And I also recognize it’s hard not to compare yourself to others.  When we are caught up in the cult of comparison, we are often caught up in the trance of the inner critic.  It’s our brain’s flawed way of trying to motivate ourselves to move into action by using comparison as the carrot to dangle in front of our faces or more aptly the switch to use on our backs.  It works up to a point where it stops working as a motivator. We prove and we prove and we prove and then we get tired. And wonder what it was all for.  And that is when we find ourselves on the messy path to growth.  To wholeness.  To uncovering our true value. When I first started out as a coach, my confidence was lower.  I was trying something new; I was worried about whether I would be a success and I spent a lot of time and energy ruminating about what I was doing in relation to other coaches.  I’d see their fancy LinkedIn posts of workshops they were running, filled with pictures of smiling participants, complete with slick materials bearing perfectly polished logos and I’d feel woefully inadequate.  I’d use it as fodder to beat myself up with.  I’d start to spring into action to post something, to plan something, in a desperate desire to compete, to put my own words out there too.  And then I’d be riddled with thoughts about how my idea wasn’t as good.  It would never work.  And I’d abandon the idea to the graveyard we each have in our heads.  Following your true north isn’t easy The inner critic comparison attack still happens from time to time for me, and chances it does for you too.  But it looks a little different now.  Recently I’ve turned down a few opportunities that have come my way, because I’ve sensed they weren’t the right path for me and didn’t resonate with my values.  Perhaps they would have been right for a different coach, or if I had a different idea or vision for my business.  And it was extremely hard to do because I knew deep down my inner critic wasn’t going to like it.  I was afraid of the fire that I knew saying no would brew.  Now Gertie (my inner critic) is telling me I was crazy to walk away from the revenue.  Telling me I am woefully inadequate compared to the coaches that took that path and look how successful they are.  And it’s getting in the way of progressing a couple of initiatives I want to kick off, which was […]

Every once in a while, I ask a client a very interesting question – “What gives you your sense of self-worth?” I’m often met with a blank stare.   What usually prompts me to ask that question in the first place, is the coaching client is struggling with one of what I call the 3 reactive traps.  These are the places we go to when our sense of identity or worth is threatened, our amygdala gets hijacked, and we feel we are under attack.  The Three Reactive Traps Approval – I define my self-worth based on whether people like me and approve of me.  I aim to please and will turn myself into a chameleon.  Whatever I think the other person wants and needs I’ll be!  Boundaries, what are they?  It’s more important that I do whatever it takes to win someone over.  Recognition and appreciation – it’s more than a nice to have, it’s a must.  It’s my drug.  It’s only then that I’m safe.  Conflict is scary and I’ll do anything it takes to avoid it.  Conflict is for difficult people.  I’m a people person.  I’m flexible.  Other people do conflict.  I do what it takes to make it work.  Knowledge – I define my self-worth based on my smarts.  I’ve got the answer – so you’re better off listening to me.  If you don’t, I’ll tell you defensively or with an air of arrogance why you are wrong.  You’re criticizing my work?  No way!  How dare you!  It’s not my fault, someone else is to blame.  Or apathy is the name of the game when I’m feeling challenged or ignored —  I just can’t be bothered, you didn’t listen to my advice, so I’ll stay away and disengage.  The project is doomed anyway, and I don’t want any part of it.  The less I’m associated with this crappy piece of work, the better off I am.  You made a mistake?  I’ll be the first one to point it out and only highlight only the negatives.  If someone receives the feedback badly?  Who cares?  Most people just aren’t that good at their jobs and they can’t take criticism. Accomplishments – I define my self-worth based on my achievements.  I’m out to prove that perfectionism isn’t an illusion, and I will get there or die trying (and take the entire team down with me in the process).  If the proverbial ‘you know what’ hits the fan, no problem, I’ll just do all the work.  And if I think about it, it’s easier if I do, because then I know it will be done right.  You have an idea on what would work best?  Forget it – we don’t have the time and it’s better if you just do what I say.  Celebrating success – what’s that?  It’s on to the next thing!  There’s always something next to do and we can’t drop our pace.  It’s about getting ahead.  I need to get ahead and prove how successful I am.  The […]

There’s often a disconnect between what we want and where we find ourselves in this journey called life.  Maybe you come up with an idea of something to try or to learn, but you find yourself quickly dismissing it or finding reasons to rationalize why it would never work.  We often mistakenly perceive these things as a lack of motivation.  “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.  But when I find the right thing, I’ll know it because I’ll suddenly be motivated and filled with an intense passion!” Wrong.  Motivation doesn’t just fly out of the air when you find the right thing.  There is no right thing by the way.  Cultivating motivation and passion has a lot more to do with what voices you’re letting speak inside that crazy thing called your head, rather than the specific thing that you’re focused on. In my experience as a coach, folks typically are stuck for one of two reasons.  The answer lies in the source of the stuckness, and whether it has to do with an outer block or an inner block.  What is an outer block? An outer block is an external constraint or barrier that gets in the way of a person achieving their goal.  It’s something that needs to be planned for, managed, and actively worked.  Let’s say I’m thinking of making a career transition, and I want to move into finance.  Education will obviously be a barrier to me achieving this goal if I know nothing about numbers.  So identifying a course or a program to enroll in, using time management skills to plan for this course, budgeting for this course will be key.  Outer blocks are relatively straightforward and easy to coach.  The problem is that most of us suffer from inner blocks when there is a disconnect from where we currently are to where we want to be, when we feel stuck or are lacking motivation. The sinister world of the inner block and the inner critic In my time as a coach, I’ve never met a client (including myself) who didn’t suffer from inner blocks and the curse of the inner critic.  An inner block is a deep-seated belief that who we are and what we are just isn’t good enough and will never be enough.  We all have an inner critic.  Mine’s name is Gertie.  Here she is: Gertie loves to fly around my head at warp speed and bump into things.  She squeals with glee as she yells, “You don’t work hard enough Shelley!”  Deep down Gertie knows that I’m lazy and I’ll never do what it takes to finish that new initiative or project.  That online leadership academy I’ve been thinking about building and piloting – What a silly pipe dream!  And then I start thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.  Maybe I just didn’t want it that bad.” Or maybe I do, and I just allowed myself to get derailed because the inner critic […]

Over the years I’ve heard the phrase, “You’ve got to feel your feelings,” so many times I could choke.  It’s a popular phrase now, way extended beyond mere psychology and coaching circles.  It’s almost as common as “living your best authentic life,” which also elicits an eye roll from me.  How we hide from our feelings Feeling your feelings sounds simple, but most of us have no real understanding of how to do it.  And the guidance out there on this front is hazy at best.  A lot of this has to do with the fact that we don’t often have good role models on this front.  I’m reminded of that 70’s musical classic, “Don’t cry out loud.”  Words, unfortunately, that many of us have decided to live by.  Furthermore, most of us think we are feeling the difficult emotions when they come up, but we’re really not.  We’re fooling ourselves. This is because when difficult emotions do arise, the fight or fight mechanism gets triggered, our amygdala gets hijacked and rather than do the hard work of leaning into the actual feeling, we lean unconsciously instead into a coping mechanism, which could look something like one of the following options: So, what to do instead?  The answer to how to feel your feelings lies is understanding what your default tendencies are and making a conscious choice to do something different.  2. Say yes to the emotion – Pat Rodegast (representing the teachings of Emmanuel) writes, “So walk with your heaviness, saying yes. Yes to the sadness, yes to the whispered longing. Yes to the fear.  Love means setting aside walls, fences, and unlocking doors, and saying yes … one can be in paradise by simply saying yes to this moment.”  The instant we agree to feel fear or vulnerability, greed or agitation, we are holding our life with an unconditionally friendly heart.  We are accepting the present moment as it is. 3. Connect with the feeling in your body – Is it nervousness in the pit of your stomach?  Is it anger and frustration in your forehead or shoulders?  Is it sadness and grief that hangs heavy in your heart?  Connect with the feeling in your body, lean into the experience of it and breathe deeply as you allow yourself to experience it.  I find that once I’ve connected at this level the experience of the emotion typically passes rather quickly and it feels almost as if it’s moving through my body. 4. Show yourself loving compassion – I find it’s sometimes helpful to whisper out loud, “I’m feeling scared right now and it’s okay.  I’m feeling resentful right now and it’s okay.”  The trick here is to acknowledge what’s happening with loving compassion towards yourself, not to make the emotion go away.  The only way it will go away is once you’ve accepted it fully and embrace the sensation. Coaching questions for thought: Shelley Pernot is a leadership coach who is passionate about helping her clients discover their […]