Be Gentle
Today we’re going to talk about being gentle with and having compassion for yourself.
Understanding how to do this is going to make it so much easier for you to be successful as you go through your parenting journey, because you’re not going to get it right the first time. You are going to make mistakes, everyone does.
You might begin to understand the reasons why you aren’t showing up as the parent you want to be, but that doesn’t mean you will be able to implement those changes perfectly on the first try.
Learning the art of being gentle and being compassionate with yourself is going to move the ball forward, move the train in the right direction so much faster.
Nelson Mandela once said, “I never lose. I either win or learn“. And I absolutely love that idea. If you can encompass and embody that, then as you go through your parenting journey, as tricky situations come up, if you practice the art of being gentle with yourself, you will be able to learn from your mistakes and make lasting change in your life faster than ever before.
Victor Frankel said it a different way, he said. “Everything can be taken from a man. But one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. To choose one’s own way”.
I love this idea of challenging what failure even is. Because according to these amazing people who have lived incredible lives, one of the most important viewpoints to have in life is to not see the things that you have failed at as something that defines you. It is vital, according to these amazing men, to learn how to believe that you are doing your best ad to give yourself and other people the benefit of the doubt, believing that losing is not final.
It just simply represents the opportunity to try again with more knowledge than you had last time. I would propose that failure is not real in the way one might traditionally think, it is just a mental construct. What if you approached parenting like this? Failure isn’t even a possibility.
Every time something doesn’t work out the way you wanted, you haven’t failed, you just found a path that doesn’t work, and that doesn’t work with your kids.
Let’s say that you are trying to get towards a more cohesive evening routine. You’ve tried it five different ways and nothing has quite worked yet. Instead of proclaiming bedtime a permanent failure, you realize that the previous attempts haven’t been failures, each of them have brought you closer to creating a bedtime routine that works for you and your kids.
I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as failure, even if that’s what your brain wants to categorize it as. I’m going to use the word failure in this post because it’s easier for us to understand. As parents, you are going to go through many different iterations of trial and error with many different things pertaining to your children.
From this process of trial and error, you are going to find things that don’t work. The good news is that the things you learn when you fail trying to figure out bedtime, when you can’t get all the kids to listen to you or to get out the door, are the things that you will be able to transfer to other parts of your life.
One final quote. This is from a woman named Bell Hooks. She was a feminist and an activist. She had this quote that I thought was so powerful.
“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds need not scar us for life. Our life marks us every day. We get things that impact us and influence us. But what we allow the mark to become is in our own hands.”
Like the quote says, if you are gentle with yourself and have compassion and empathy for yourself when you mess up, you are able to transform anything that happens into something helpful to you.
What if you were able to believe that no matter what happened, things were working for you, not against you? That even the hardest challenges, the hardest children, the biggest mom failures that you’ve had were gifts and opportunities for you to grow? What if you started to embrace the hard, the uncomfortable, the frustrating, because you knew that was how you were going to become the person you were meant to be?
Don’t Beat Yourself Up Over Past Mistakes
This was really hard adjustment for me to make in my life. I didn’t actually realize how hard I was being on myself. I thought I was just being a normal human.What I didn’t realize is that it was impacting my ability to show up as the loving, kind, generous, compassionate parent I wanted to be.
It took me a long time to realize that I really was committed to believing that being hard and critical of myself was the way I was going to make progress in my parenting.
Beating yourself up about times that you have messed up in the past is not helpful either. It might seem helpful to beat yourself up about your past mistakes but in reality there is nothing that you can do to change what happened, you can however change how you react in the future. The past only exists in our thoughts right now, in the present. The past is only the past, it’s already over.
The thoughts you are having right now about the past are what affect you in the present.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t have any thoughts about your past, or that you should have only beautiful thoughts about your past. That’s not necessarily the case. I’m just saying its almost never helpful to beat yourself up about what happened in the past.
If you catch yourself thinking about a time when your kids weren’t doing what you wanted them to and you lost your cool or reacted in a way you didn’t want to, you are almost certainly judging yourself and are bringing those judgments into your present day life which is not something you want to do.
Instead of judging yourself for yelling at your kids, you want to get curious about why you reacted that way so that you can understand yourself better and use that knowledge to move forward and improve as a parent.
Your past is just existing in our mind. If I were to ask you about your past right now, you would have a big story to tell me about what happened and why it still affects you today. Everyone has a past and beliefs about the things that happened to them that often dictate how they live their lives.
Let’s image that you got amnesia somehow and you had no memory of your past. Even though you would still have a past, that past would have no influence on our current perspective or your current outlook. You would have no pre-existing beliefs about yourself or the people in your life.
Say you couldn’t remember anything about your children, you woke up and maybe you could only remember they were your children, but you couldn’t remember any of the things they had done or any of the things that we had done to them that we felt bad about. Wouldn’t that be really interesting?
You wouldn’t have any baggage from the past or any judgment from the past. You wouldn’t have any beliefs about your kids or their personalities. You could approach your kids with a clean slate and an opportunity to create new relationships with your kids that are free of any pre-existing baggage that you had before.
Your Beliefs Shape How You Interact With The World
Your past exists in your mind, in your own way, and everyone has their own story about past experiences. Each of these experiences lead you and others to form opinions of yourself and others and those opinions affect how you approach those people in the future. In this way, your past always affects the future.
In this state, when you aren’t aware that you are actively shaping your sense of self, it is easy to get stuck in a self fulfilling cycle. You keep becoming that person because you keep living as that person. You keep believing you’re that person. You keep believing things like: “I’m impatient. I have to have my house clean to be able to feel peace. I need my kids to listen to me for me to be able to have all these conditions, I’m a procrastinator”
Those kind of beliefs keep you stuck being a person you might not want to be anymore. Once you realize that you want to change your current situation you have to ask yourself the following: “how do you want to use the past? How do you want to use your failures and mess up so that you can actually change it into a way that serves you?”
When I’m saying past, this could mean one event in the past. Sometimes our brains want to solve the big problems of the past, and there is value to that. But sometimes those big problems that we feel are looming in our brains for a long period of time get solved when we narrow it down. So I would encourage you, for the purpose of today, to pick something in your past that just happened recently that maybe doesn’t feel like the definition of who you are, but that you want to change
You get to decide how you are going to let your past affect you. Every moment you get to decide. You get to decide what you’re going to make the past mean. Will you get curious about it or you just get critical about it? A lot of parents come to me who are stuck with these stories and these little moments from their past. We all have a story about our past, this isn’t a judgement on letting the past affect your lives.
Some people have a go-to emotion. Some of us feel frustrated. Some of us feel resentment. Some of us feel irritated. Some of us feel bitter. There’s typically a collection of our favorite emotions that bubble to the top when things don’t go the way we want them to go.
So I want you to just look at those, and take the time to find out which emotion you default to. The next time they bubble up, use it as your cue. Use it as a sign to get curious about that situation. Something about that situation triggered you, take the time to discover what it was.
If you can notice those emotions of frustration and irritation or whatever it is for you that day, you can teach your brain to pause as assess the situation. When you feel this emotion of frustration, that’s your cue to get curious, to get inquisitive, to become the scientist, trying to get more awareness about the situation.
As you get better at pausing when you feel that emotion, you can retrain your brain to react in a different way, or to recognize that emotion as a sign that something is going wrong instead of a sign that you are doing something wrong.
I really believe parenting is like getting a masters in patience and love and compassion and empathy and understanding and seeing people for who they are. Let’s use it. Let’s leverage this beautiful experience we’re a part of to help us learn and become the best version of ourselves so that we can help our children become the best version of them.
It doesn’t really matter where you start applying this compassion and empathy for yourself. Just start whenever you can, things will begin to shift.
One of the hacks I had was to literally write on a three-by-five card, things I wanted to think or say or do when certain things happen. Because my brain, if I started having the frustration or the irritation or the resentment bubble up, my thinking brain would go offline.
All I could really get myself to do was pull the card out. I could remember to pull the card out of my back pocket and read it. I was always experimenting to see what would happen, and I would try different things until I found something that was helpful.
That was one of my go to tips when my kids were little. Take some time and find what works for you. Ask yourself, “what would be most helpful for me? What resource would be powerful for me to be able to use when things start to escalate?”
That’s one of the things that you can really focus on as you’re really getting deliberate about making progress towards your parenting goals. It doesn’t matter where you start applying compassion and empathy for yourself, but you want to start applying it to yourself because it will start shifting everything for you.
I want you to have boots on the ground, and I want you to use what we’re talking about today in real life situations that happen with your kids today, because judgment’s going to keep you stuck in your story, judgment towards your kids and judgment towards yourself. If you’re judging your kids, you’re going to be judging yourself. They’re linked.
You’re not able to do one without the other. So you have to release the judgment for yourself and the judgment for your children so that you can be curious for yourself and learn and grow, and so we can be curious about our children so they can learn and grow.
That judgment keeps you stuck in the same stories. If it worked, you wouldn’t be reading this post. We’d all just be out there being critical and giving lots of consequences and punishments and taking things away, and things would be fixed.
That’s not the way it is, because that’s not how humans work.
Judgement Keeps You Stuck
Judgment keeps you stuck in your story. Like I said, completely optional. Is it always possible in the moment? No. So sometimes people will take this information, and they will think, “I could just stop judging myself. Now I get it. I heard what and she said, I get it cognitively. I get it up here in my brain,” and then you go into the real life moment, and you’re not able to do it.
Then you use this against yourself. You think things like: “I didn’t do it again. I messed up again. I’m a failure. How could I mess up again when I know better?” Do not do that. That will not help you.
It’s nice to know that you don’t have to judge yourself, but if your nervous system is activated, simply knowing better will not help you do better. You’ve been practicing these specific thoughts for maybe five years or ten years or our whole life, that isn’t something you unlearn in a single day. It’s one you’ve likely carried over from childhood.
Your subconscious brain, which is so much more powerful than your conscious brain, is driving the train. At some point in your life, acting the way that you do today wasn’t optional for you. In that moment, your brain took over and tried to protect you in the way it thought was best.
Right now, you have the option to stop beating yourself up for every single mistake that you make. You can stop beating yourself up and start getting curious about why you are reacting that way in the first place.
Once you can pause, that’s where you will be able to start seeing things differently and creating lasting change in your life. It starts by looking at your own behavior differently, and then you can start to change the story you tell yourself. At first, you might have to change the story in your head after the fact, and then you will get closer and closer and closer to changing your reactions in real time.
The first suggestion I have for you is to start noticing the beliefs that you currently have surrounding whatever issue you are trying to work through. Notice the underlying beliefs that you have and do your best to have compassion for the part of yourself that believes those things.
A suggestion I have as you go forward is to do your absolute best to not judge or beat yourself up for any of your past, current, or future mistakes.
I spent years and years struggling with beating myself up over every little thing that I did wrong, and it still creeps up, because this is a story I practiced for 40 years. I believed that beating myself up was the way to change. I believed it all the way. I was all in on the story. It’s taken me so much time to unpack it.
Creating Lasting Change
The first thing I had to do was that I had to believe that I was doing my best. If you notice that you’re having trouble forgiving yourself or being compassionate about something that you did that you feel like was a total screw up, the first thing I want you to ask yourself is, “how can I look at that differently?”
You might think you’re letting ourselves off the hook by trying to reframe the situation, you are most definitely not. Accepting that you’re doing the best you can is not the same as condoning your behavior and thinking that was what you should always do.
In that moment, your brain was in fight or flight mode. You weren’t thinking as the highest version of yourself, not that beautiful, compassionate, real part of yourself that you feel inside. You brain is hardwired to protect you, and often that happens by repeating old thoughts and stories that have been logged for years and years.
Don’t mistake me here, don’t think that by refraining from judging yourself means that you believe reacting in the way you did was the best thing you could have done. It’s more about having compassion for yourself that in that moment, that is the best your brain was able to do. It wasn’t great.
If you could have done better, you would have.
I love asking myself, “if I could have done better, would I have acted differently?” Of course. I wouldn’t have yelled. I wouldn’t have screamed. I would have understood that the mess was just a mess, and I would have handled it so much better. I would have had this beautiful perspective on life, for sure. It would have done better. If I could have done better, I would have done better, and I wasn’t able to in that moment.
You have to start neutralizing the behaviors that you had in that moment and try to see them through the lens of somebody who was really struggling or hurting or fearful or scared.
You want to believe in the possibility that if you could have, you would have done better. When you open your mind up to that, you’re able to go mining for that evidence that will help you do better in the future. If you can pause that inner critic and go into this place of curiosity, you get to mine for evidence that maybe you were just really struggling. You were just doing our best.
I’ll ask myself, “why was I struggling? What was I afraid of?” And then my brain will help me see the answers to that question. And then you can drop into compassion and empathy for yourself and for your kids.
You are empowered to be able to set the parameters and rules that you want in your house, but not from a place of control. You have to do this so your children don’t go crazy.
You don’t have to continue to believe things about yourself and your kids that you don’t want to keep. You get to sort them out. You get to think about them and decide which ones you want to keep and which ones you want to drop.
So if you find out what you’re thinking about, and you get brave vulnerable about it, you can start to release those unhelpful thoughts. You don’t have to continue to believe anything unless you choose to.You get to decide what you want to bring into your future. Here’s the best news: you get to leave behind anything you don’t want to bring with you, it’s over. It has no power over you.
Once you get conscious of it you can release it forever and move on. If you notice that anything is causing you pain or suffering, it’s because there’s a story that you’re telling yourself about it. You are in control. Once you realize this, your life will be forever changed.
To sum it up, you may not be able to change what happened yesterday. But you get to change what it means to you now. There is no work that has had a bigger influence on me than me than this. Changing the story of my past, changing what it means and how I want to focus on it moving forward. It has been life changing for me and I know it will be for you as well.
I highly encourage you to do this practice.
All right. We’ll talk to you next week. Bye, guys.
