Self-compassion or “Holding Yourself Accountable”
I recently finished a couple amazing books by Dr. Kelly McGonigal called “The Willpower Instinct” and “The Upside of Stress” both of which are potentially life-changing (and even life-saving according to the research). You can watch a couple of her seminars here and here to get the gist of what both books are about. I can confidently say the early returns on the lessons from her books have been outstanding. Without even really trying to lose weight, I have lost over 10 pounds in just a few weeks, which I’ve been battling to keep down for years, the number of which correlates very well to the age of my daughter. But I digress.
The one part of this that really hit me was the idea of being self-compassionate. I’ve certainly always been in the camp that you have to hold yourself accountable when you mess up or you’ll just become lazy and give yourself a free ride. However, Dr. McGonigal explains quite well that the research shows that beating yourself up is counter-productive because it actually triggers the threat response, which activates the lower brain. Of course, the lower brain is usually the cause of the problem in the first place. So in my usual situations as a Korean language learning, parent, or worker, I might let myself down by not taking advantage of an opportunity to practice my Korean speaking, being overly reactive with my daughter, or not giving a great presentation to a customer. In the past, I would start mentally berating myself, sort of like being my own old school basketball coach.
“You’re such a wimp. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that opportunity? How are you ever going to learn?”
“You’re a terrible father. Your daughter is going to grow up and be a total mess.”
“That was terrible. Everyone is going to think you’re a terrible presenter.”
I think back to the times when I was in the middle of one of these situations, and after the first mistake, I started in with one of these ridiculous dialogues. Naturally, they started a downward spiral, where I became even more fearful of speaking Korean, became even more reactive with my daughter, or became even more nervous and gave a bad presentation.
Of course, the flip side is that being compassionate with yourself doesn’t mean that you just give yourself a free pass. Kristen Neff, who is sort of the self-compassion guru, gives a great explanation of this in this video. Essentially, by being kind to yourself, you create a trusting relationship where you can provide constructive criticism to yourself without all the judgment and negativity. Then, this keeps the higher brain functions engaged and allows you to keep progressing despite some setbacks.
For me recently, I have resolved to do yoga at least every other day, meditate 20 minutes a day, and spend at least 30 minutes a day studying Korean. Now when I don’t meet my resolution, I take a much more analytical, non-judgmental approach to why that happened and how I’ll correct it in the future. It has been proving to be a much better approach. Now, all these mistakes and mis-steps feels like temporary dips in an upward climb instead of a sign of a downward trend that I would have to fight and battle with to have any hope of reaching the summit.
Related Story: When I was in college, I was an intern at an automotive company I spent a few months an onsite engineer at an automotive assembly plant. Each morning, the plant manager would go around the plant and look at charts of the daily quality metrics. For anyone with any training in statistics or data analysis, they look very much like random scatter on flat lines, but the plant manager would look at a downward trend over a 2 or 3 day span and use it to berate the responsible line manager, sometimes to the point where they would start crying. I think I can confidently say this never had any positive effect on the plant’s quality, but it had a very negative effect on employee retention.