Developing Rigorous Self-Acceptance And Compassion

All right, welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're going to talk about Mental Health Month and I'm going to dive into the topic of developing rigorous self approval and compassion. Again, it's Mental Health Month and that's really important to me. It's kind of a big deal. Basically what I do is run a mental health company for men. Essentially we sort of do more than that, but at its core, at its root, what we are focused in on is developing more self led men. And how we do that is by nurturing the proverbial garden within us, the, the sanctuary, the training grounds, the practice gym, the octagon within, so that we can go five rounds with ourselves and sort of win the battle rather than getting our ass kicked by the part of us that would like to drag us down into the depths of despair, into the depths of.

Failure, into the depths of depression and anxiety. This is a really important topic for me personally. I'm going to be sharing over the course of the month of May the four things that really shifted and transformed my own mental health in my own personal journey, which was a very long one and is still ongoing, right? This is still a part of my life. Every single day this week we're going to be talking about how to develop rigorous self approval and compassion. And there's a reason why that's so important for me. One of the biggest challenges that I faced at the very beginning of this journey and one of the biggest challenges that I faced in my own life when it came to my capacity and ability to be successful in my work and successful in my relationships and connected to the people that were around me and understanding my purpose and my direction and my mission in life. One of the biggest blockades and obstacles that I faced was that internal internally, even though nobody knew it, the dialogue that I had with myself was catastrophic. It was abusive at best. It was really detrimental. I mean, the level of self deprecation that I experienced on a day to day basis was horrendous. And so whenever I started to work on a new project or get into a new relationship, there was this background noise of self hatred, of really disliking who I was, what I was doing, the choices that I was making, constantly undermining myself, constantly questioning myself, consistently being in the action of.

Really downplaying the successes that I was having and the growth that I was experiencing. And so it was a bit of this dual experience, a bit of this dichotomy in the sense that on one hand My mind had been designed to sort of look for everything that was going wrong, everything that I was doing wrong. So there was no self acceptance. From the outside, I probably looked like a pretty confident guy. You know, I was sort of this rebellious dude that was sort of all over the place, you know, going to yoga on my motorcycle with the spikes. I had these like 2 inch metal spikes on my helmet, really loud. Motorcycle, street racing, stunting, you know, doing all kinds of illegal crap and at the same time sort of exploring, exploring the more nuanced side of what I wanted to do with my life. But during all that, I was out of control. I really disliked myself. At some point I started to realize that it was having, if I would just put it in very sort of pragmatic terms, it was having a net negative impact on my life in a massive way. My perception of who I was was so damaged, was so detrimental that it was having a net negative impact on my relationships, on my communication ability, on my ability to be honest with other people, on my ability to feel close and connected with other people, on my ability to maintain course in my daily habits and routines. Of course, the beautiful thing was to this part of my mind, my inner critic, this part of me that loved to take me down a peg and talk shit to me and, and self deprecate was that every single time that I failed, it gave, gave it more ammunition. So anytime that I messed up, there was just a tremendous amount of ammunition there. And so let's just talk briefly about mental health, just to sort of pivot here before I get into the tactical actionables of how I actually developed rigorous self acceptance and compassion. Mental health to me is really about our ability to maintain a sense of overall wellness within our mental constructs. And really the biggest component of that is our relationship to ourselves. How we view ourselves, how we perceive ourselves, the stories and narratives that we hold about ourselves, all of those things are going to dictate the sort of soil that we are planted in, that we are rooted in, that we are extracting nutrients from. And so if the soil that we are operating from cognitively is, is toxic and is sort of marred by and, and ingrained with the ideology and the narrative and the perspective that we're a piece of garbage or, you know, we're stupid, or that we're a piece of crap that will never amount to anything, like these were some of the narratives that I held. Every single action that I would take coincided with that main narrative. So our mental health is, our, is really in some ways predicated on, dependent on our relationship to, to ourselves. And that can seem sort of paradoxical in nature to begin with, but it's one of the main areas that we need to start. And if we look out in the world, pretty much everything that we'll do is going to be relational. So relationships with our partner, relationship with friends, relationships with bosses and colleagues, and you know, the person that works at the gas station on the corner. Everything is going to be a reflection of how we do relationships. And our mental health, how we interact with other people externally is often predicated with how we interact with ourselves internally. So it's incredibly important to develop a rigorous sense of self acceptance because otherwise we are going out in the world, we're operating out in the world from a place of I don't approve of myself and I need to get that approval from someone else. I actually need it because without it, I have to feel this void. I have to feel this deep shame, deep dislike, deep distrust, this deep disrespect. And that was one of the things that I really started to realize about myself. I actually did disrespected myself deeply. I didn't trust myself at all. And so I was constantly interacting with other people, with women, with friends, with colleagues, in a way that attempted to get that, that respect from them, to get that trust from them, rather than generating that within. And this created all kind of chaos in my life because it created a dependency, a neediness within me that I needed those things from other people. And when I started to develop this rigorous sense of self approval and self compassion, what it did for me was it actually cut the sort of needy ties to these other people. Sure, they could validate me. They, you know, they could give me respect, they could give me validation and acceptance, all those things. And those things were nice and they're, you know, they're still nice to some degree. It's still, it's still, it's okay to have other people see your worth and validate that worth within you. But the, the main piece is that I actually generate that myself now. I'm able to appro of myself and my actions and I'm able to lead myself more effectively, more efficiently because I'm actually able to validate and appreciate and have compassion. When I mess up. I'm actually able to delegate myself in that capacity and I have a much more cohesive, congruent, almost virtuous, sort of respectful relationship with myself. So in some ways I see mental health as almost like a, like an ego curating endeavor, you know, that you are trying to sculpt and architect your ego in a way that is beneficial for you, for the people around you, that you don't pretend like you are egoless because, you know, very few people maybe in this world are truly egoless, right? Maybe the Dalai Lama. I'm not sure. I met him once and he seemed like a great individual, but I didn't really sort of have like the ascension and enlightenment to know whether or not he was completely egoless. But the aim here is that we start to cultivate a relationship with ourselves, with our identity in a way where we respect that identity, we admire that identity. We are able to be in relationship with ourselves in a way that isn't blocking us and diminishing our capacities and our potentials out in the world. So let's talk about a few of the things that I actually did, and I'm going to give you some tacticals that you can start to implement, because these are the things that really shifted the game for me. The first thing that I want to encourage you to do is to spend a week catching yourself seeking approval from other people. I actually spent a few weeks, maybe even a month at first, and I kept a journal. I started to write down all the ways that I was seeking approval from women, from the men in my life, from colleagues, from co workers, from clients. I mean, it was just endless. And I started to see patterns of what I was trying to get validation about from within myself. And so in this way, I started to see what I actually needed to approve myself for. And sometimes that's really important because sometimes we have. We don't really have a context for the approval that we actually need to be giving ourselves. And that is true in many ways. If you listen to interviews with Navy SEALs like Jocko Willinks or David Goggins, or you listen to famous artists and musicians, extremely successful entrepreneurs, you'll hear that they have developed the capacity to. To approve of themselves and that that approval isn't coming from external sources. It might still happen, but it's not a necessity. The main source of that approval is actually being generated from within. And I would guarantee almost that at some point in that person's life, they have consciously or unconsciously started to understand the approval that they were seeking from others. And they started to develop a process of. Of giving that approval to themselves. So spend a week, maybe two, dialing in. Keep a list of every single time that you are seeking approval from somebody in a conversation. Maybe it's your partner, maybe it's family, maybe it's colleagues just start to track that, keep a list and then see how would I give that to myself, how would I dish out that approval to myself? As the saying goes, gratitude is a way of being. But at first it's a practice. And so if we're going to be grateful for ourselves, we need to practice that at first it's not going to come naturally. The, the second thing that I want you to start to practice and this is the thing that really was challenging for me was to forgive the fuck ups. I say that this is challenging because the way that my inner dialogue was structured there was sort of like this loyal soldier that was looking out on the periphery of my actions and looking at every single decision and every single behavior and was criticizing everything that I did wrong in a really harsh manner. It was detrimental and debilitating in a way because I able to make any progress. I mean, every single time I took one step forward, that inner dialogue, that loyal soldier would pop up and he would just tear me down like no one's business. I would take like 20 steps back, right? It wasn't like one step forward, two steps back. It was like one step forward and then a complete decimation for like a week long. And so you're going to drop the ball. No, you're going to drop the ball. When you are trying to create shifts, when you're trying to redevelop your mental capacities, it's going to happen. And so the shame, the sort of like shit, talking of yourself is probably not going to help. It probably hasn't helped this entire time. And so as the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result. And so we have to start to shift. So accept some of these failures, accept some of these fuck ups, know that they're going to happen and practice real time forgiveness. This is something that far too few men are actually capable of doing and they are carrying around a all of their failures because they haven't actually learned the virtue and the value of being able to forgive themselves. So again, spend another week or two cultivating a sense of self forgiveness, real time in the moment. It's like, oh, I missed that, I forgot about that. Okay, I can let that go. And again, this isn't about letting yourself off the hook, right? It's not like you've made a commitment to yourself to not watch porn or to, you know, put money aside for savings and you don't follow through on that. This isn't about letting yourself off the hook. It's about realizing that you're going to have some failures through the process. And the important part is that you can practice that quality of forgiveness so that you can learn how to forgive yourself, because nobody else is going to do it for you. The last part that I think is really important is shifting the energy, shifting the force that you are putting into self hatred, into self defamation, rerouting that stream, right? You can think about it as a flow of energy. You know, Bruce Lee said, be like water. You can think about this as a form of a flow within your mental architecture. And we need to move some of that energy from self hate and self defamation into self approval and self appreciation. And this is a very challenging process, but it requires us to literally start to look for the small wins. So where we would normally self deprecate and self hate, we catch ourselves in the moment and we say, okay, I see what's happening here. I'm actually just going to share a little bit of appreciation because I know that a year ago I wouldn't have done it in this way or I would have made an even bigger failure. I would have done something even worse in this, in this case, or self destructed in an even grander fashion than I did this time. And so I'm going to actually appreciate the fact that I can see, even if it's just an ounce, even it's just a millimeter of shifting and moving in the right direction. So start to reroute some of that energy into the direction of self approval and self appreciation. That might mean that you actually keep track of, you know, you have a note on your phone, you have a journal that you carry around with you. I've seen guys that have these like little tiny journals and they just pop it out and it's like, boom. You know, I appreciate that I did this. I appreciate that I did that. I'm grateful that I caught myself in this moment. I had that hard conversation with my partner, with my boss that I would normally avoid. I set that boundary that I would normally collapse on. Give yourself appreciation for celebrating yourself. If that is out of character for you, thank you so much for tuning in to week number one. I hope you tune into the other three weeks as I'm going to share three more tactical things that I've actually implemented in my life. By the way, each of these I actually did. I spent time with each of these weeks at a time, sometimes months, just practicing these things, catching myself in the moment when I had failed, and practice forgiving myself, having a different conversation with myself. I'd actually have to pause and maybe I would journal or maybe I would have a voice memo and I would sort of walk myself through the process of giving myself permission to forgive or allowing myself to be grateful for the progress that I had caught myself in the act of. So don't forget to comment below what questions you have, or let me know what you would like me to add in to this dialogue. Maybe you have some more questions, maybe you have some feedback. Maybe there's things that you would like to see me me discuss. So please, wherever you're watching this, feel free to comment on that and let me know. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.