Cultivating More Self-Compassion

All of my perfectionists and recovering perfectionists out there … raise your hands!

That was me. As most of you know. Coming in hot with the negative self-talk. Never believing in myself. Never enough. Always comparing my work, my body, heck my whole life to everyone else.

Perfection is actually a limiting belief.. because there is no destination.. no one can ever be perfect.. at anything. One of the most common ways perfectionism shows up is an all-or-nothing mindset!​​​​​​​​
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All-or-nothing thinking can keep you trapped in a cycle of unrealistic expectations, exhaustion, and failure. It completely disconnects you from how you feel, what you need, and the present moment. Meaning your actions will not align with what’s actually going to make you feel good. It can cause you to miss out on a lot of the goodness of everyday life. Trust me, as someone who spent years dieting and overworking, I can’t tell you how I look back now and see how much joy, connection, and pleasure I missed out on.

On top of all that, it creates this false belief that your worth is dependent on meeting external expectations.

So if you’ve ever had a moment where you feel like you’re falling short, or you’re not measuring up… when you’re in your head with thoughts like:
“I’ll only be successful when I get that job”
“I’m not smart enough, pretty enough, thin enough”
“He/she didn’t ask me out again… I’m never getting married”
“I don’t feel good today… my health will never change”

Then I want to share today three really powerful questions you can ask yourself in those moments to release yourself from feelings of failure.

These questions are going to help you shift out of that all-or-nothing mindset into a space for growth so that you can learn, change and honor yourself with compassion.

• First, what was the silver lining of this experience?

Maybe you tried something new, spoke up with YOUR opinion, or are working on something really
important to you and had a setback... See if there’s something positive you can take away and take a moment to acknowledge yourself!

• Next, what did I discover here?

I love the saying, “there’s no such thing as failure, only feedback.” What’s the feedback here? What did you learn?

• Finally, what do you want to do differently next time based on this experience?

With this question, you can create an empowered next step forward based on what you’ve learned… based on YOUR experience. How cool is that?! Make the next step possible for you here.

If you take some time to work through these questions, I’d love to hear how they shift your thoughts, perfective, and experience

Xo K