It’s April and for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the signs of Spring are finally all around us – the cherry blossom on my walk this morning was breathtaking. It’s also Stress Awareness Month and the theme for 2025 is Lead With Love which aims to encourage everyone ‘to approach ourselves and others with kindness, compassion, and acceptance, no matter the challenges we face’.
How does this land for you? It makes sense doesn’t it that to be a good human being we should be kind and compassionate? But what does this really mean?
Feel it to Heal it
I sat down to write this blog, I was aware that I was feeling tired, heavy and stuck. I simply couldn’t write. My mind took me down all sorts of rabbit holes – the wellness world is abounding with noise at the moment, who needs to hear from me? What’s the point? I sat fingers poised at the keyboard and still nothing. I fought the impulse to return to bed and pull the duvet over my head. Who would know anyway?
The struggle continued for another 20 mins. Writing words, sentences. Deleting them. Noticing that as I pushed harder, my breathing became more constricted and I felt almost sick.
Finally, I got up and just sat on the decking with Mira (my rescue dog from Cyprus). She looked up at me with her trusting brown eyes and as I ruffled her coat I felt myself soften, and tears began to flow. My breathing opened up just a little and then a little bit more and I felt the icicle in my chest start to melt.
It was my birthday on Monday and it’s the first time my mother has forgotten my birthday. She’s 88 years old and lives in Guyana, South America. She has Alzheimer’s. Lately she’s been falling a lot and now the forgetting is getting worse. She is fading. And I’m not with her.
It has taken me three days to feel the grief. In the meantime, I’ve numbed out with birthday celebrations, food, exercise, work and the third season of The White Lotus. So many distractions. So much to think about. No time to feel. And now it has caught up with me and here I am writing a blog for Stress Awareness Month and the theme feels so apt – kindness, compassion and acceptance.
As I sit stroking my faithful companion, I find a way forward through the heavy stuckness. I remember to find self-compassion. I say ‘remember’ because recently I have embarked on a self-compassion journey after listening to an interview with Dr Kristin Neff. In the interview she mentioned her Self Compassion Inventory and so, of course, I immediately clicked the link and 5 minutes later I was staring at a number that told me there was work to be done.
It’s early days in my journey, but it is already proving to be profound. The weirdest thing is my sleep has gotten even better, my Oura ring data shows my nervous system is more regulated and restored, and my Resilience score has hit the ‘Exceptional’ category. I know it’s not all about the data but I can’t help being a bit blown away…
What is Self Compassion?
Many of us haven’t been taught how to be self-compassionate. Our parents might have done their best, but it wasn’t on the agenda back then.
So, we go through life being tough on ourselves – most of us do it much, much more than we realise. We judge ourselves for not being good enough parents, partners, siblings, friends…and then we judge others. We try to be perfect at our jobs in an attempt to meet the deficit of not being good enough in other areas of our life.
How do we find compassion for ourselves when we are subsumed by overwhelm and to do lists, worry about world events, or guilt/ worry/ shame when we are caring for loved ones (in person or from a distance, as in my case)? Isn’t it self-indulgent to be thinking about ourselves when there’s so much suffering around us?
Is self-compassion an indulgence? What exactly is it?
According to Neff, has three key components:
- Treating yourself with kindness, understanding and acceptance, much like you would a good friend.
- Recognising our shared humanity and that we are all imperfect, and
- Acknowledging and accepting that suffering is a part of life. In other words, it has to start with oneself.
For example, in the situation I describe above, being kind to myself, enabled me to step away from the keyboard for a few minutes, acknowledge that I was feeling stuck, find a way to soothe myself (thank you Mira), and then meet the emotions of grief and sadness. It has taken me over three hours to write this blog as I’ve had to step away from my garden office and rinse and repeat the above over and over again, each time melting layer after layer of hardness around my heart and feeling a new type of strength emerging. Actually, I had planned to go to the gym but it seems a different type of training is needed today.
An Evolutionary Advantage
We urban hunter gatherers are still walking the planet because of self-compassion.
The research shows overwhelmingly that self-compassion affects not just our psychology but also our physiology. Our immune system is more robust, blood pressure drops, stress hormone levels fall, we produce more of the love and trust hormones oxytocin and serotonin and we’re more likely to sleep better (as I’ve found).
In business, self-compassion has been shown to make you a better leader and last month I spoke at a conference for senior business coaches in which I talked about how to lead with ‘extraordinary energy’. In my almost thirty years of doing this work, I have found that leaders who run on the energy of extreme perfectionism, control, fear and lack of trust tend to create teams who are more prone to burnout and running on survival energy. Whereas those who are emotionally intelligent with a high degree of self-compassion are more likely to create teams and businesses that thrive.
Simple Daily Practice
I want to offer you a simple practice to get you started on your journey or to help you improve your level of self-compassion. The first thing I’d recommend is to check out Dr Kristin Neff’s TED talk:
Secondly, be courageous and do the questionnaire, particularly if you feel you have that inner voice that is harsh, judgemental, controlling. That voice that tells you it’s never good enough. You can’t stop until it’s perfect (which of course, is impossible).
And then start building small practices into your day, every day.
First thing in the morning – Meet yourself wherever you are. Before you reach for your phone and especially before you listen to the news, before you even open your eyes, simply become aware of whatever is going on in your mind and body. How are you talking to yourself? Is your mind racing with must do’s, should do’s, have to do’s?
Place your hands over your heart or one on your belly and the other over your heart and simply feel the weight of your hands guiding you out of your head and into your body.
Follow 3-5 breaths – innnn and outtttt. Keep repeating.
You can even try a gently self-soothing massage such as rubbing your hands up and down your arms, legs or belly. Just for a minute or so. It doesn’t have to be long.
Simply meet yourself wherever you are, right now, right here.
To take it to the next level, you might even ask yourself ‘what do I need right now?’ and then listen. You might end up having breakfast instead of skipping it and going for coffee. You might even decide to delay looking at your phone for 20 minutes before starting your day (by the way, that’s probably less than 3% of your waking hours in one day).
And then see what happens when you go out into your day and hit the traffic jam. Or when you have that conversation with your tricky teenager, or child-like parent. Or when you get together with your team.
Our world can feel like a mad and chaotic place at the moment but let’s each make a difference during this month of Stress Awareness and beyond…and that starts with yourself. Soften, allow, feel… Lead with Love and let’s become the change we want to see in the world.
With love
Nerina x
