Self compassion will fuel your success

Quite often we push ourselves too hard. This increases the risks and reduces the joy. Possibly we can achieve better by showing ourselves more kindness. The self-compassionate approach is correlated with emotional stability and professional success. It enables us to deal with obsessions and cravings and focus on what really matters. More reading here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

What do I mean by self-compassion?

The key attributes of self-compassion are:

  1. Listen to your body. Does not really matter if you use body visualization, lucid dreaming or other meditative technique.
  2. Self-empathy. Some of us are tuned to “power through” no matter what. Instead, focus on what you really feel. Maybe your goal is misplaced and your focus should be elsewhere.
  3. Positive self-talk. Self-criticism can be destructive.
  4. Diffusion. When our ego fuses with our goals, we may experience various cognitive biases. We are unique, which is more than our career, bank account, or any other scoring system.
  5. Gratitude. Whatever achievements we happened to reach, this is a result of our hard work. We should feel pride in our efforts and what we put on the table.
  6. Characters strengths. You should understand what motivates you and what makes you stronger. Even if this puts you against the ruling paradigm. If you value justice in a corrupt country, it is still a strength – even if it may put you in risk.

There is no fixed list everyone agrees on… So you may want to add or remove attributes.

What does that do to success?

A number of studies have found that compassion not only helps to build your resilience and improve your physical health, but it’s also a consistent characteristic of successful and resilient people. As a result, when your organization has a compassionate culture you’re more likely to be engaged, be innovative, collaborate with others, and perform at your best.

This means that some workplaces will have a toxic culture. If you stay far away from toxic places and people, you are more likely to function effectively. And if you have compassion, you are more likely to perform in places with a positive culture.

Better resilience, innovation, and collaboration does not immediately create a successful career, but the chances are definitely better this way.

Compassion and neurotransmitters

Compassion triggers the release of the same types of chemicals that come with feelings of love – oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, that can help you feel optimistic, positive, and primed for achievement.

At least this is the theory. One can be compassionate to others, but people come and go. We cannot run from ourselves, so we must be compassionate to ourselves.

Notice, I am talking about compassion and not love. There is nothing narcissistic in self-compassion. It has everything to do with caring, and almost nothing to do with vanity or pride.

By the way, caring for other people also increases self-compassion and happiness.

Can self-compassion be trained?

I do not think that self-compassion acts like a muscle. It is more a set of habits. Increasing the training does not generate new neural connections, however… Various mindful habits can be interconnected. Acquiring one mindfulness habit facilitates acquiring others.

When we practice self-compassion it feels almost like teeth floss. Kind of useless with a potential of great benefits. Just like we tend to avoid flossing, we tend to avoid self-compassion. Even people that regularly meditate and practice mindfulness, usually find other subjects for focus.

So the issue is simply practicing day after day until we acquire a set of habits. Even though we do not see an immediate benefit, there is a positive outcome.

At least this is the theory…

Happiness/success = money, power, respect?

Our mental “formulas” are somewhat biased. The “western” materialistic culture focuses on superficial attributes. We evaluate each other and ourselves by the money/possessions, power/influence, and respect/fame we can master.

This should be a formula for both happiness and career success. Only it does not really work. We see suicidal superstars and pretty happy and generous slump dwellers. Someone like Van Gogh dies without selling a picture and then suddenly becomes a success story. Our formulas work only sometimes, and even then they do not tell the entire story.

Typically being authentic is more important than any career success. Burnout can be extremely destructive. To be more productive we need to sleep more…

Happiness/success = learning, work, making the world better?

The alternative, more ancient formulas, often work better than modern ones. Jewish religion claims that “The world stands on three things: Torah, the service of God and deeds of kindness.” The Buddhist nobble path involves eight practices “right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right transcendence”.

The interesting part of the traditional religion: focus on the way we do things, rather than on the final result. We cannot really control the final results of our efforts, but we definitely can control our conduct. If we live a virtuous life, we feel successful and happy in a way.

The elements of personal transcendence and making the world a better place usually work together. Being kinder to ourselves we learn to be kinder to others and vice-versa.

Do we have a secular religion?

“If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him,” wrote Voltaire. Our world is mostly secular, even when we define ourselves as Jews, Christians, and Buddhists. We trust our scientists, and we preserve religious holidays. The contradictions are settled via a context switch between the holy and mundane.  These spheres simply do not clash, because we learned to ignore the clashes.

Let me ask you this. Do you really understand modern science and its limitations, or do you trust it blindly? Do you understand why psychotherapy helps? Can you pinpoint what mindfulness actually does? I claim that most of us do not even understand why and how our mobile phones work. This is our secular religion. We know that it “works”, we just have no idea how.

Unfortunately, our secular religion did not provide a blueprint for psychological well-being until recently.

Being happy in spite of yourself

Our modern view focuses on measurable achievements. If we have six best friends, we are likely to be an average between them. As we get better at anything, we acquire new friends, and we are still likely to be average. I am not the smartest person in the office where I work. My memory is not better than the memory of my friends practicing memory techniques. Maybe I read faster than my friends, but it does not make me feel any better. Probably I sell worse than most of my friends, and this makes me somewhat miserable.

Comparing with yourself also does not bring happiness. Even if we see progress… If our expectations are set too low, our objective progress will be slow. When our expectations are too high we disappoint ourselves.

Instead, the idea is to stop counting points and focus on doing the right thing. This increased awareness increases the chances of success.

Meditation does not make you a better person

Multiple studies found that meditation did not reduce aggression or prejudice or improve a person’s social connectedness. Researchers found that people who meditated felt moderately more compassionate or empathic, compared to those who had not done a new, emotionally-engaging activity. However, this is usually a bias. We only feel this way.

The focus is on living a virtuous life. Treat yourself compassionately, and try to make the world a better place. This will probably make you function on the level you could function with years of meditation or religious training. At least in some tests.

If the secret is not meditation, what is it then?

Some of the elements proven to work are listening skills and gentle action. Unfortunately, these skills are hard to develop.

Listening skills involve actively trying to understand the needs and the ideas of yourself and of other people, often asking the right questions and rephrasing in our words the understanding.

Gentle action means non-invasive non-destructive activity, typically dealing with the root cause rather than with symptoms. It may require understanding the situation and the alternatives, taking an effective perspective, and applying just enough force.

Definitely, these skills are easier said than done. I teach them in some of my masterclasses. I cannot say I mastered them myself, but I definitely improved since I started to understand the ACT paradigm.

A remarkable source of confidence

Understanding that what you are doing is gentle and helpful cannot be overestimated. It leads to confidence. If we understand that our actions can be dangerous, we cannot really be confident: the stakes are too high. When we do not know that we help, we have an inner conflict. Once we listen to our body, and our emotions, we can understand the level of inner conflict.

Understanding the righteousness of our path leads to remarkable confidence, whether we are right or not. We are not afraid to take chances or look silly, we do not care about pride and prejudices. And the success rate of our activities improve!

This is actually a superpower of a sort…  Think about it…

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