Mind What You Say
When a friend makes a mistake, most of us know what to do. We offer reassurance, pour a glass of wine, help them get perspective. If it’s a small thing, we might even laugh about it together once the sting has passed. What we don’t do is heap insults on them, undermine their confidence, and treat them with scorn. Yet that’s exactly what so many of us reserve for ourselves. If we spoke to friends the way we often speak to ourselves, we’d soon find ourselves very lonely indeed.
Psychologist Kristin Neff, in her book Self-Compassion, reminds us that this isn’t about self-indulgence or giving ourselves a free pass. Self-compassion means holding ourselves to account, but fairly. It’s the difference between saying “I made a mistake” and “I am a mistake.” When we approach ourselves with the same humanity we’d extend to a friend, we not only take responsibility more clearly, we’re also more able to learn and move forward.
Paul Gilbert, in The Compassionate Mind, puts it plainly: if you shout at yourself, you’ve created two problems – the mistake itself, and now how awful you feel. And to make matters worse, when we attack ourselves, we reduce our capacity to think clearly. The “thinking brain” tends to shut down under attack, just at the moment when we most need it.
So why not try something else? After all, if yelling at yourself really worked, you’d be perfect by now. Instead, pause. Take a slow breath in and out. Be honest about the mistake, but also honest about the fact that you are human. Then ask: what can I do to put this right? Can I fix it, or make amends? That shift – from castigating ourselves to constructive action – doesn’t erase the mistake, but it does mean we’re far more likely to learn from it.
One way to strengthen this shift is by noticing the very first words you say to yourself each morning. Make them friendly: “Good morning, let’s go,” or whatever phrase feels natural to you. The point isn’t the exact words, but the habit. If the first thing you hear from yourself is encouragement rather than criticism, you set the tone for how you’ll handle everything that follows. Over time, that daily greeting becomes a quiet reminder that you deserve the same respect and compassion you’d offer to anyone else.
And if you have children, it matters even more. They learn less from what we tell them and more from what they see. Modelling this kind of kindness in the way you treat yourself teaches them, quietly but powerfully, how to treat themselves when they make mistakes too.
Research underscores just how powerful this is. A study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans (Hiraoka et al., 2015)* found that self-compassion was a stronger predictor of whether they developed PTSD than the amount of combat they had experienced. In other words, how they related to themselves really mattered.
So perhaps it’s time to rethink self-compassion. Far from being soft, it is – as the evidence shows – a super-strength. And it’s one you can begin to build today.
To learn more about how compassion and positive psychology can make a difference, visit the website.
* Hiraoka, R., Meyer, E. C., Kimbrel, N. A., DeBeer, B. B., Gulliver, S. B., & Morissette, S. B. (2015). Self-compassion as a prospective predictor of PTSD symptom severity among trauma-exposed U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 28(2), 127–133.
