Self-Compassion is not the same thing as making excuses

And how that definition is limiting your cognitive functionality.

I want to talk about an extremely sticky topic: self-compassion.

I think of self-compassion as a “sticky” topic, because when I bring it up in coaching, it often brings up a physical response akin to trying to eat a massive spoonful of peanut butter while dehydrated. It gets stuck to the roof of your mouth, and it’s tough to swallow.

Why is this? Because we’ve been taught that self-compassion is the same thing as “making excuses”. As a result, most of us are significantly more willing to double down on self-blame and shame than we are to give self-compassion a chance.

This is a problem. A BIG problem, because self-compassion ≠ making excuses. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the practice.

Instead, self-compassion is what allows us to get enough perspective to accurately identify the problem. This matters because correctly identifying a problem is the only real chance you have of solving that problem.

I cannot tell you how many times clients have come to me after months, years, even decades of struggling - and failing - to solve the wrong problem.

I can tell how you immensely rewarding it is to witness both the immediate relief and the immediate progress that comes when clients learn to shift their relationship with self-compassion, and how to leverage it as more one badass tool on their neurocoaching toolbelt.

Case Study: A Brief Example of Practical Compassion in Action

The session I just wrapped offers an excellent example of what this looks like, and why self-compassion is so critical to our ability to make meaningful progress in any area of our lives.

The Client:

A woman in her early 60s who works for a major global tech corporation.

The “problem” that she asked for support addressing:

Yesterday, she started work at 7:30am and didn’t finish until 11:30pm. This doesn’t happen every day, but it’s something that she’s struggled with her whole life.

She said, “Everything takes me longer than everyone else, and I end up using my entire day to accomplish what everyone else seems to take a normal workday to finish. Can you help me figure out how to get my work done faster?”

How I addressed this “problem” with her:

Years of neurocoaching has taught me that our first step should always be to fully and accurately define the problem. This includes questioning assumptions and cognitive biases, investigating whether we’re assessing the situation from a fixed or growth mindset, and asking ourselves - with practical compassion - whether we’re looking at all the evidence, or just that which supports a negative/fixed mindset belief.

In this case, I started by asking her to walk me through several examples of projects or tasks that took her longer than others to accomplish. As she did, I began to get a clearer picture of the issue - and it wasn’t what she thought it was.

I wanted her to see what I was seeing for herself. So, to facilitate her thinking, I asked some questions, based on both my experience of working with and getting to know her over the past several months and on how she described the projects that consistently took her “too long”:

1. Does your inner dialogue saying anything else, when you’re thinking about how long it takes you to get work done?
   
   Yes, it says, “you’re just slow and stupid, or you’d be able to get this done during work like everyone else.” (We’ve just identified and named a fixed mindset belief - a huge source of her self-blame and shame.)

2. Would you say its true that you genuinely care about others, and about meeting their needs?
   
   Yes, absolutely. That’s how I make most of my decisions. (Now we’re beginning to engage self-compassion - a practical process of questioning assumptions and beliefs in order to get a clearer perspective and more accurate read on a situation.)

3. Would you say that you have your own “pride of work” - in other words, that you put in a level of work that matches your expectation of how a thing should be done, regardless of anyone else’s opinion or instruction?
   
   Yes, definitely. I feel like there is a right way to do thing, and that’s always what I try to accomplish. That’s how I define “success” or “completion” in a project. (Doubling down on self-compassion by giving her the chance - and the permission - to notice a loving fact about herself that I suspected could be at the root of her “time management” issues.)

4. Do you find it hard to deviate from what your brain tells you is the ‘right’ - most ethical, thorough, or considerate - way of doing things?
   
   Yes, it feels nearly impossible. I’m just not wired that way. My boss has even told me, “you don’t have to work this hard - to do things this well.” But doing any less makes me physically uncomfortable. (Delicious! Now we’re validating this fact from an outside source.)

5. In your experience, do your colleagues generally have the same understanding of “the right way to do things”, and do you see the same attention to detail, consideration, and thoroughness in their own work products?
   
   No, almost never. It drives me crazy. (At this point, I can see the dots connecting…there’s an ‘ah-hah’ on the horizon.)

6. Ok, with that in mind, do you think your colleagues generally follow the same task plan as you do to arrive at their final deliverable?
   
   I’m not sure. I guess probably not, since whatever plan they’re following doesn’t take them as a long, and doesn’t result in the project being done “the right way” - at least not as my brain defines that. (We’re getting closer and closer to accurately defining the problem…)

7. At this point, what do you feel like is a better description of the situation:

   1. “You are slow and stupid and so you take longer than everyone else to deliver the same level of product,” or

   2. “You take doing a thorough job that meets customer needs so seriously that you’re doing significantly more work over a slightly longer time frame, in order to deliver a much higher quality product?”

      Oh. **Laughs** The second one.

The Insight:

For decades, my client has been desperately trying to solve the “I’m slow and stupid” problem, with no meaningful progress. It didn’t work for two main reasons:

1. Defining the problem as a fundamental, immoveable defect in herself (a fixed mindset belief) made her feel shame, which triggered a threat response, limiting her access to the part of her brain capable of solving problems - the Prefrontal Cortex, or PFC, and

2. That was never the actual problem. We were firmly in “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” territory.

Practical Compassion is the key that unlocked this insight:

Most of us believe that we’re somehow less than the people around us. (In fact that feeling is pretty central to the survival of our current power structures and economic system, but that’s another conversation.

These feelings are at the root of shame, imposter syndrome, guilt, and a pile of other feelings we instinctively want to avoid.

In giving my client a chance to question her assumptions, and consider the issue from a more self-compassionate perspective, she realized that taking others into consideration is SO IMPORTANT TO HER, that she has essentially chosen a lifetime of shame over doing work in a way that she feels is intrinsically unethical or harms others.

I mean, what a statement! What a choice! What a woman!

Now she can relieve herself - slowly, through intentional practice, experimentation, reflection, and experience - of the inaccurate belief that her “time management” issues come from an internal defect.

That relief paves the way for a more reasoned, logical, discrete understanding of her actual growth area.

The Actual “Problem”:

The problem was never that my client is fundamentally defective. It’s that there’s a mismatch between her expectations of herself - which come from a really good, ethical, considerate, values-based place - and what her job actually needs her to accomplish.

Ok, now THAT is a problem we can actually get tactical about solving! In fact, that’s less a problem, and more a growth area - a skillset that is practical and teachable.

She is going to bring a real project that she’s about to start to our next session, and I’m going to support her to develop a new approach to projects that works for her, doesn’t require her to subvert her values (we know how important this is to her now!), and gets the job done in the appropriate time frame.

We’re going to start by getting clarity, from the front end of the project, on the difference between these two things:

1. What her internal work ethic-ometer tells her is “the right way to do the thing”, and

2. What “minimum viable right way” will genuinely meet the customers’ needs (an alternate, equally ethical - and therefore viable - definition that gives her something to work towards without subverting a core value).

How you can experiment with practical compassion:

You may have noticed the term “practical compassion” showing up throughout this article. This is the term I use to remind both myself and my clients that self-compassion is not equivalent to making excuses, and is instead the key that unlocks our ability to more accurately assess and address our growth areas - fueling our evolution into “favorite self”.

If you are ready to experiment with practical compassion, here are a few things you can try:

1. The next time you notice yourself feeling shame, embarrassment, or guilt - pause. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Remind yourself of who you are by writing down 1-3 kind things you absolutely know to be true about yourself.
   
   Example: I know that respect is important to me, and that I always do my best to ensure that respect shows up in my words and actions. I know how hard it is to be a person, and that I really try to remind myself to be kind, because we never know what someone else is going through.
   

2. If you are trying to challenge a negative or fixed belief about yourself, like “I’m just not smart enough to reach my dreams”, ask yourself: Am I considering all the evidence, or just that which supports my negative belief?
   
   Example: The client referenced in the case study above, for example, was using the fact that she worked with one person three years ago who was (in her estimation) more brilliant, faster, and more articulate, to “prove” to herself that she was “slow and stupid”. Meanwhile, she had also shared that every week she has at least 10 interactions with people whose quality of effort or work product was less effective than her own. Don’t focus on the one brilliant exception and ignore the 1,560 not-so-brilliant interactions you’ve had in the same three year time frame. This is a deeply illogical argument on which to base one’s sense of self.
   

3. Take your context into consideration, and allow space for factors that explain mistakes or f-ups without excusing them. Then brainstorm - and begin implementing (!) - a plan of action that would allow you to thrive through a similar context in the future.
   
   QUESTION 1: Was anything happening with my body, in my relationships, in my immediate environment, or in the world at large that may have impacted my ability to show up the way that I wanted to?
   
   Example: Were you on your period, have you been struggling with sleep lately, did a relative recently pass away, has your kid been going through something at school, are you experiencing a lot of post-pandemic social anxiety, is your community recovering from a recent major storm? How do those things affect how brains and bodies in general? How might they have limited your ability to show up at your typical level, or how you may have wanted to?
   
   QUESTION 2: What can you learn about how you responded or reacted to those contextual factors (or about anything else about how the situation you’re responding to went down) that negatively contributed to your ability to show up as your favorite self?
   
   Example: Maybe you learned that if something is going on in your personal life that is mentally or emotionally depleting you, it’s harder than usual for your brain to engage at work, which has resulted in you falling behind.
   
   QUESTION 3: What can you do to turn those new insights into action, so that you can thrive through a similar situation in the future? Another way to ask this is, “How can I better honor my body and mind’s needs next time something like this happens, so that I am better able to show up in a way I’m proud of, even when times are tough?”
   
   Example: Maybe you’ve realized that next time something similar comes up, you need to take stock (notice) earlier, and (a) take more intentional care of your body (through better fuel, going to bed earlier, etc), and (b) give yourself more time for projects at work.
   
   To help yourself turn these insights into action, you might (a) begin a nightly practice of mood-in-context tracking, to help yourself notice earlier when you’re beginning to trend downwards, and (b) write down a care-of-self-under-emotional-strain plan in your notes app, so that you can just reference it next time you start feeling this way - rather than expecting your brain to do that thinking when you’re already depleted.

In short, practical compassion is not just about being kind to yourself when kindness is deserved (this is a tricky qualifier that generally doesn’t serve you when you’re already in a bad headspace). It’s about taking the realities of being a complex body, mind, and identity in a rapidly-changing world into account, and recognizing that explaining the facts to yourself is not the same as making excuses for yourself.

You don’t blame a car for not being able to drive when it’s out of gas. Don’t blame yourself for getting reactive when you’re depleted. Recognize why it happened, and come up with a practical plan to visit a gas station earlier in the process the next time this comes up.

This is the heart of practical compassion: being able to recognize that tearing yourself down actually leads to more problems than solutions, and allowing yourself to be kind as a path to reason and growth.

I can’t wait to see what beautiful self-truths - and functional solutions - you and my client discover next!!