Self-Kindness Matters

Self-kindness – it’s a very good idea. When we treat ourselves with thoughtfulness and appreciation, regard and acceptance we can create a much easier life for ourselves.

Self-kindness makes life easy because it means we don’t mentally beat ourselves up over every little-perceived mistake or drive ourselves into ill health through proving and overworking, or devalue ourselves by putting up with poor treatment from others.

Being unkind to ourselves gets in the way of a happy life: it blocks our confidence and creativity so we can’t see easy solutions to life’s problems and it keeps us from asking for help when we need it.

Yet from the very moment we even start to consider how we can be kinder to ourselves, we connect with an unwavering and genuine strength.

It’s all about the power of love

That genuine strength is the power of love. It's capable of creating worlds, of reorganising our entire universe in amazing ways for us—it’s so much more powerful than any strength we struggle to summon up all by ourselves and it will always make life good for us when we choose to turn to it.

When we let go of being hard on ourselves and start being nicer to ourselves, we make room for love to come into our lives so that it can show us creative solutions to problems; so it can help us have better relationships, support from other people and respect and regard. Then we feel happier, healthier and more confident to go ahead and achieve our dreams.

And all we need do is practice being a little kinder to ourselves each and every day.

However, it’s so often the case that when we think about kindness, we think in terms of how kind we are towards others. We forget that it's just as important to be kind to ourselves.

As a therapist helping hundreds of people, I've found that whenever I ask someone, "Are you kind?" They most often say, "Yes, of course!"

I've also found that when I follow that with,

And are you kind to yourself?..... most people have to pause for a moment to think about it.

Quite often, their response is that they're not so sure. What does self-kindness look like - they wonder? How would they do that - they ask me?

Why ​you may find it​ hard to be kind to ​yourself

The problem is that quite often we’ve picked up limiting beliefs, often many years before, in our childhood. Beliefs such as I have to prove myself mean we’ve formed deep, deep habits of being tough on ourselves. We think that we have to endure hardships and go out of our way to earn approval from others in order to be accepted and liked.

That makes it very hard to know how we can be kinder to ourselves because, well that’s just not what we've been used to.

However, with a little help and guidance, we can very quickly start a practice of self-kindness that will turn our life around and make it so much easier. We can start to get support from other people, to have happier relationships, better health, more productive and creative work and much more confidence.

Powerful Self-kindness practices for you

​There are lots of ways, big and small, that we can practice being kinder to ourselves. One way is to watch what we're absorbing from the media. We often don't realise what we're feeding into our subconscious because of its part of the background of our lives. If you constantly fill your head with media and entertainment that is violent, depressing and worrying your subconscious is going to operate from that perspective so you'll see the world like that.

Instead make a point of exposing your mind to media and entertainment items that feed your subconscious with messages of calm and positivity, happiness, and reassurance.

Doing that is being much kinder to you!