Episode 140 - Embracing Self-Acceptance and Compassion
Are you feeling frustrated by persistent old patterns despite your efforts to heal? You're not alone. Join us in this episode as we explore the detrimental effects of being hard on yourself and discover how shifting your mindset can lead to peace and growth. Learn practical strategies to break free from stagnation and cultivate self-compassion on your journey to personal development.
Topics
The flaw of high expectations in self-growth nerds.
Lack of self-acceptance hinders growth and healing.
Recognizing judgment and expectation in self-talk.
Frustration and self-judgment lead to negative behaviors.
Reframing Negative Self-Talk.
Adding self-awareness and self-compassion.
Embracing curiosity.
Links
▶️ Watch my new YouTube video series "26 Weeks of Journaling Prompts for Self-Growth Nerds"
Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the self-growth nerds podcast. I'm your host, Marie, a courage coach, creative soul, and adventure seeker since through hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions, and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello, Nerds. How are you? I am good. Today is going to be short and sweet. I want to offer a reframe that all of us self growth nerds need.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:53]:
People who care a lot about improving themselves have very high expectations, and that's a strength of ours. But every strength comes with its flaw. And the flaw here is a lack of self acceptance. The problem is that you cannot truly grow and heal without self acceptance. You cannot whip yourself into feeling better. And most of us, and I'm going to include myself, most of us don't even notice when we do this. The sentence that I want you to flag, that I want you to notice is when you tell yourself, why do I struggle with that? Or why do I still struggle with that? If it's something that you have been working on and that keeps coming back, why do I still struggle with that? Hear the tone of the sentence, there is judgment. There is expecting yourself to be different than you are expecting yourself to be further along on the timeline than you are.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:57]:
A timeline that is completely made up, by the way. And there is a big should hanging above your head. Like I should be over that by now. Says who? Says who? Now, I don't want to argue about whether that's true or not, whether you should be over that or not. Instead, I want you to consider how you show up, the actions that you take or don't take. When you believe this, chances are you feel frustrated. And when you feel frustrated, you ruminate. You beat yourself up.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:02:30]:
And the more you beat yourself up, the more you're going to feel the need to numb, to disconnect from the mental chatter with Binging series on Netflix, with eating food, drinking alcohol, doing more work that needs to be done just so that you can distract yourself from the negative inner monologue. And what's the result of that? You go to bed later, you wake up groggy, and you are in this cycle of self judgment, wishing you were further along on the journey. Just imagine being with a partner who is annoyed with you, who wishes you were different than you are, and always, every day, looking at you like shaking their head with a sigh. Is that going to make you want to become better? Probably not. You're probably going to want to stay in bed, avoid them and feel ashamed. That's what we call a toxic relationship. And yet that's what many of us do to ourselves. That's where I want to bring in the reframe.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:36]:
So if we go back to the sentence, I want you to notice in your mind it's, why do I still struggle with that? We're going to replace it with exactly the same words but a very different tone. Okay. Instead, you're going to say, I still struggle with that. I wonder why. I'm going to repeat the two sentences to make sure that you really hear the difference. The first one is, why do I still struggle with that? And the second one is, I still struggle with that. I wonder why. I'm sure you can hear there's a lot more kindness in the second one.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:11]:
You start with self awareness. Yeah, I see that. I still struggle with that. There's self compassion in the tone. And then you end with a question. You bring in curiosity instead of judgment, I wonder why. And then here you might start to normalize. Well, makes sense that I still struggle with that, because, I mean, I'm 34 years old, and that's a coping mechanism that I've developed when I was very young.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:38]:
So, you know, I have a lifetime to decondition. I have a lifetime of patterns to unlearn. So of course it's going to take time, and that's okay. You might also start thinking about what's going on in your life right now that make it more challenging for you. Oh, maybe you're going to notice that you haven't been sleeping well, that you haven't actually been taking care of yourself like you usually do. Maybe you haven't been eating well. Maybe you didn't take the time to. That's me.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:12]:
If I don't take the time to do some meal prep, to go grocery shopping and get some healthy food ready, I'm just going to eat snacks or I'm going to eat junk food, and then I'm going to feel like a toddler that's been spending the weekend with their grandparents, eating sugar and having no boundaries, going to sleep when they want to, watching as much TV as they want, eating all the candies that they want. Then they go back to their parents and they're a mess. They're irritable. They don't listen to them. It's the same with us. If we forget to take care of our needs, if we neglect our needs. It's just more challenging to stay afloat. It's just more challenging to uphold our healthy habits.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:06:04]:
It makes sense, and there's nothing to beat yourself up over. It's just being like, oh, yeah, I see that. I've done that. Now let's get back on track. Let's do what needs to be done for me to feel better, like you're working with yourself, like team players, instead of fighting with yourself, instead of being annoyed at the member in your team that didn't score a goal or that didn't make enough passes. I just finished watching the second season of Ted Lasso, and you basically have to bring in the inner Ted Lasso. I remember if you've seen the show, how Jamie Tart was at the beginning, he would just bring the whole team down because he would blame others, because he put himself on a pedestal and blamed everyone else for their flaws. That led the team to complete disarray.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:02]:
But then when Jamie came back and decided he was going to play with the others and be humble, be kind, everything changed. You have to do that with yourself. Drop the weapons. I'm willing to bet it's not been working for you. And I know unconditional self love doesn't feel natural at all. That's what I want to encourage you to practice more and more every day. It is very paradoxical because in order to get better, you need to accept yourself exactly as you are. Sure, you might push yourself to lose the weight you want to lose from a place of self loathing, but you're just going to end up skinnier and miserable.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:52]:
Same thing with money. You might achieve your financial goals, but if you do it from a place of annoyance with yourself, of thinking you should be better. You're going to get there and you might be rich, but you'll feel dead inside. Just like a kid can come home with perfect scores in their exams and still be filled with crippling anxiety. Is that what you want? Do you want to reach an image of success but feel disconnected from your core? Or do you want to feel aligned? Do you want to feel grounded in a sense of self worth and then from there, see what you're capable of without aiming for perfection, just seeing life as more of a game, exploring, playfully uncovering what you can achieve when you're having fun, when you have a harmonious relationship with yourself. I know I prefer this option. It's up to you if you want to keep doing what you've been doing or join me on the unconditional self love train. Wow, that sounds really cheesy.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:08]:
Another reframe I want to give you before we go is if you tell yourself like, oh, I should have done better, or I could have done better. Agree with your inner critic. All of us overachievers have a very loud inner critic and one way to have them lose their power over us is to disagree with them, both the inner critics and the outer critics. It's like, yeah, I could have done better. Yeah, we could have won the match. If I'm making another Ted Lasso reference, we could have won the match, but we did not. So now what? Let's learn from this and move on. Do that with yourself.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:46]:
When you're beating yourself up, when you're telling yourself, like, I was so unproductive today, I should have been better, can go like, yeah, that's true, I could have done better, but I didn't. So what can I learn from this and how can I move on? So we have a fixation on the past that's not serving us like, okay, no drama. Let's remove the drama. Let's just take the past experiences and squeeze it like a lemon to take the learning opportunity and use it as we move forward. In order to be able to do that, though, you need to be able to drop the part of your identity that is attached to the comforts of negative self talk. One of the reasons why you keep doing it, it's because it's familiar, because it's comfortable, because it's easy, and it feels more secure, and that's all unconscious, obviously. It feels more secure than choosing to drop it and instead pursue your big, beautiful dreams. It's a distraction, in a way, from doing something scary.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:10:52]:
If there's something you've been wanting to do that freaks you out, your ego is going to offer up a million reasons to beat yourself up, and you can choose to pick them up, spend a lot of time looking at them and agreeing about all the ways you could be better. Or you can be like, I see you, sneaky little ego. You're scared. Of course you're scared. But we're going to be okay. Let's channel our energy in a direction that lights us up. Let's do it. Let's go.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:25]:
Let's fucking go. That's it for this week. I hope it was helpful. Please, if you have a friend who nerds to beat themselves up a lot, send them the episode, and I will see you next week, okay? I'm sending you lots of love. Bye bye. Hey, if you love what you're hearing on the Self Growth Nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together on Selfgrownds or message me on Instagram at Self Growth nerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago. So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:17]:
Get in touch now. And I cannot wait to meet you.