Stop Self-Inflicted Suffering

This is episode 306 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome.

Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast.

I am here with you today to end your Suffer Festival Fest. That's right, suffering. I'm sure you've done it, I've done it. We've all done it. We've suffered in some form or another and we want to stop the suffering, stop the suffer Fest. So here is what we're going to do today. I'm going to give you three steps to stop suffering if you're in the suffering in the moment. And I'm going to give you some practical tips today as well to avoid the chronic suffering that some of us tend to go through. And this affects us all. This is, this is the human condition. We all end up suffering because we're emotional beings. And so there's something that we're offering off, often suffering over. It could be time, it could be stress, it could be a relationship, it could be things not going the way we want them to. But today I'm going to give you the areas that we tend to suffer around the most, the ways we can stop suffering, and the those tips that can help you prevent the suffering from rearing its ugly head again. So first of all, what am I talking about when I talk about suffering? Suffering itself is, is this, this pain? It's distress, it's hardship. This is the, the definition of suffering. Emotional and physical discomfort could be caused by various factors, including external events or internal perceptions. But that's what I'm pointing to the most, is the internal perceptions that come up in self inflicted suffering. We're really having more pain than we really need to have. We're going to experience pain in life, we're going to experience negative emotion. But the level of suffering many of us go through is so unnecessary simply because we've never been taught the tools to manage our internal environment. When external things come our way that we don't like or when we're feeling certain ways that we don't like or so I'm going to give you a really simple definition in a moment. But the self inflicted suffering, this refers to the pain or distress that we bring individuals we bring upon ourselves through thoughts, behaviors, attitudes. And this is often stemming from negative self talk, often unrealistic expectations or failure to align with our personal values. And I really want to emphasize this because we've spoken so much on this podcast about our personal values. Why? Because this is all about self mastery for our own leadership, the leadership of ourselves. And when we're doing that, it's really happening. We're really getting that empowered self mastery. When we're aligned with our own values, when there's a misalignment, when we are focusing on something really negatively, when we've got that negative self talk, we're bound to suffer. It's going to happen. So here's the simplest definition of suffering. And hearing this definition, I've never forgotten it because it changed my life when I understood suffering in this way. It's so simple. It was from a coach called Brooke Castillo. And the simple definition is it's your pain about your pain. Because having pain in life is inevitable. Having something negative happen in life is inevitable. It's the pain that we have about it, it's the resistance to it, it's the not liking it, it's the dwelling upon it, it's the being stuck in the negative around it. It's the pain about our pain that's the suffering that we're talking about. So let's clean it up, let's see what's going on. First of all, so that we can identify what's going on. Here are the top, most common areas that we tend to suffer in. And I'll point to some of these areas in my clients as well because I think that's the demographic that's most pertinent to you, this leadership mindset, the external factors that people in leadership are experiencing and where the suffering comes around it, then it's easier for you to identify it for yourself. That's what I've found for myself. So top areas of suffering are typically around self doubt and a negative self talk. That's one of the key ones. This could be an imposter syndrome type of thing or body image issues or perfectionism. Those are the common areas in this self doubt category. So that's number one. Number two would be health concerns. This could be chronic in illness. So I went through, and have been going through chronic illness of a Graves disease, an autoimmune immune illness that's passing through me, but that caused some suffering. So managing these ongoing health issues, feeling out of control, maybe lack of exercise can even contribute to your suffering. Poor diet, another big one, that's number two. Number three is social comparisons. This is such a, a new form of suffering in a, a platform called social media. We've always had social comparisons. We' we've used this as a Survival technique. However, social media has ramped it up so fast that our versions of suffering have been transformed. By studying social media. Being able to see so many more people with such great intensity and great frequency. And that's just not how our brains evolved. We were used to judging and comparing and looking at one or two people who. Or a small group of people in infrequent time frames. Not the inundation that we have with social media now. So that one, that social media is a big one, that social comparisons, the peer pressure, even if you are with people and it's not on, on social media. And number four is time management. So much suffering happened in my life around time management. Feeling like I never had enough time. I need more time. I need more what I used to say I need more hours in the day. So time management, because we all have the same amount of time, we know that that's the logical part of it. But we're feeling like there's not enough time. We're feeling like we can't get enough in. And that's a very big zone of suffering for many, many people, especially the high achievers that I work with, they never have enough hours in the day. Same thing that I would have said. So this comes in with over commitment. That's the real problem. The problem is not time. The problem is over commitment. The problem is expectations that are unrealistic. So there's also a problem in there that leads to the suffering. And it's called procrastination. So we might feel like we don't have enough time simply because we put that kind of time pressure upon ourselves by procrastinating on the thing that we wanted to do or not planning appropriately or giving ourselves the gift of enough time for each task. So that one time comparison is a really big one. Number five is a bigger picture thing. And I definitely hear this from my clients from a legacy standpoint. But what it is this number five is this purpose. Related concerns, sometimes an existential worry that's continually going on. What is my purpose? What do I do? The feeling of a lack of purpose can cause a lot of suffering in people who, when they don't feel like they have the direction that's really meant for them that can lead to a lot of suffering. And ultimately it shows up for many people in career dissatisfaction. When there's career dissatisfaction that can be this. There can be this byproduct of suffering around not having the purpose or not doing the purpose that you felt you were meant for. I've definitely experienced that one too. So these are the main five, but they also lead into a sixth one. These main five causes causes of suffering. But the sixth one can be pervasive over everything. And it's just overall stress, overall anxiety that someone may be experiencing on a day to day basis. And there can be contributors to that from work related stress, deadlines, high expectations, could be personal relationships leading into stress, arguments, maybe conflicts with friends or close relationships and then financial worries. So work relationships and finances tend to be and health are really the big ones that cause some of the ongoing stressors or ongoing anxiety that many people feel. But I put this in its own category because it's so pervasive that any one of the other five that I mentioned are leading to this kind of chronic stress scenario that we're, we're stepping into and that is suffering. If we have have chronic stress, if we have anxiety every single day, that's unnecessary suffering. We're going to have pain in our lives, we're going to have negative situations. But when it's chronic, we're having the pain about that pain we're suffering. We have self inflicted suffering that's ongoing. We haven't removed or dealt with or healed the thing that is continually causing the suffering. So it's really the pain about our pain that we're speaking of. Okay, so those are the top ones. Now one, you know, I have a geeky brain that goes into the sciency stuff. So I love the research here and here's some of the chunks of research that I think are really pertinent to this topic, but that might be of interest to you. And some of them I've said before, some of them I've quoted before. But it's really key for this topic so that you understand that you're not alone, that this is something that goes on for all of us in some form or another. And it's not new. And that's why the research I think can help us really see that this is not your own island that you are experiencing. This is something that is happening to so many people in so many different ways. So we know that a there's hope. Cognitive behavioral therapy has shown this over and over. There's one study that showed that it significantly reduces symptoms of depression anxiety by simply addressing cognitive distortions. So our own beliefs about something that happened, our own story about something that happened, when we address that, that alone can reduce anxiety and depression and maladaptive behaviors. Areas where we might be beating ourselves up, negative self talk, doing things that don't serve our Best selves. These ways of reconfiguring the stories that we've created can really help us with anxiety and and maladaptive behaviors. This is in clinical psychology. A review article in 2012 research shows that mindfulness and acceptance, mindful based interventions are very powerful because ultimately they lower stress, they lower anxiety, depressive symptoms by promoting a non judgmental attitude towards oneself or one's experiences. How powerful is that? That we can manage certain things, our internal environment by promoting a non judgmental attitude towards whatever we've been experiencing. That research has been in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and another stat. You've heard this one before for me, I love this one. It's all about negative self talk. According to the National Science foundation, the average person has between 12 and 60,000 thoughts per day. That's not words per day, that's thoughts. A string of words to create a complete sentence in your mind called a thought. We've got 12,000 to 60,000 of those per day. My husband thinks it's 80,000 in my mind, perhaps maybe it's 50 some days and 80 other days, I don't know. However, the point is, is that we've got so many. But the majority of them, as in 80%, that's a pretty big majority. 80% of them are negative. This negative selft talk contributes to self inflicted suffering. The negative self talk contributes to our pain about our pain. When we see that, when we understand it, that oh wait a second, this is simply what happens in our brains. This is just our brain doing what it's what it does. Why? Excuse me, it was supposed to. Our brain's always supposed to these things because what it does is it looks for danger. Those 50,000 thoughts of them for danger. What the heck? That's right. Part of 5 of looking for danger. So 40,000, if you had 50,000 thoughts in a day, 40,000 of them are negative. That's why the positive has to be really important, really conscious, really aware of those positive thoughts. So there's an impact as well. So research shows that when we have something that's an unrealistic expectation, that when we set those unrealistic expectations, expectations, what we do, it can lead to this level of chronic dissatisfaction in our life overall. This chronic feeling of oh, I don't like my experience of life, I don't like my own life, I don't like this, I don't like that. But this chronic dissatisfaction simply from setting unrealistic expectations. And this is in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. People with high Expectations tend to experience more stress and lower satisfaction when those expectations aren't met. This is the chronic overachievers scenario. What we're doing is we're setting high expectations all the time. Why? Because we want to go for something beyond, above and beyond what we've done before. And I encourage that with my clients. However, if we don't understand the downside, then we can't mitigate for it. And the downside is very much this where we can set ourselves up to be in a situation of chronic dissatisfaction. We don't want chronic dissatisfaction. So we bloody well better celebrate those wins and take a look at what's positive around us so that we're not setting ourselves up for unnecessary suffering. We're going to have some pain like I said, but we don't want to create this self inflicted chronic suffering or over suffering that's just simply unnecessary. There's a stat in the American Psychological Association. 77% of people regularly experience physical symptoms caused by stress. Chronic disease is rampant in the entire world. Not just North America, not just Europe, the entire world. Chronic disease. That chronic disease is fed and fed and fed by anxiety and chronic stress. It's not something that is necessary pain. We're literally fueling unnecessary chronic disease and unnecessary chronic suffering from our negative self talk. And so many of the other external factors that have come into our world that our brain just simply has not adapted to, it's not ready for. All the things that have come have come its way. This, our poor brains, our poor brains trying to evolve and adapt to the technological era that we weren't ready for. All right. And lastly, research shows in psychological science that that level that individuals with high levels of self doubt and negative self talk are more likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression. So now that you have some of these stats and some of them are not pretty, but you can hear some of the solutions in them. You can hear that, okay, there's a lot of negative going on there. There's a lot of negative selft talk there. There's a lot of negative chronic anxiety that's that's contributing to chronic disease. Let's undo that. And that's why I want to give you the three steps to stop your suffering and the tips that are practical day in and day out that can help prevent it from coming when you don't expect it. So for me, I like to put things in simple categories. And these simple categories for me in my life are where I feel that suffering has been present are states when there's a Chosen change. You might experience this too, where you've chosen to do something, you've chosen to move houses, you've chosen to start a business, you've chosen to sell a business, you've chosen to end a relationship, you've chosen to do things. And those chosen changes create suffering. What happens, though, is sometimes we make a decision about a change and we don't really prepare ourselves or fully accept the pain that's going to come with it. And I did this to myself when I sold my business. And what I did is I transitioned my business by selling portions of my clients and my business to another business, another entity, and then I physically sold the business, the building. So I basically sold my business. But it. I was so attached to my business that I was lying to myself and lying to other people unknowingly. When I was saying that I was transitioning my business, I wasn't using the words I sold my business. I sold my clientele, I sold the actual business, I sold the building. And I wasn't using those words because I think at the time, it was just so hard for me. So much of my identity, so much of my time, so much of my life was built around and tied into a business that I had been working in for 15 years. So much a part of my life. So I kept saying, I'm transitioning my business. So then when it came to new clients, they weren't fully clear because there was still this blurred transition of my old business, which was a physical training facility and physical coaching and mental coaching within a physical training facility, largely around people who wanted to train for something, high achievers who wanted to do a race or whatever. There's this physical entity. And I ended up doing a lot of mind coaching and life coaching in that environment. But I transitioned out of that physical space and out of that physical coaching to go into leadership and life coaching. And I didn't clearly describe that when I would talk to people because I was still so attached to the other things that I had done and other things that I had built. So I wouldn't even say the words I sold my business. I would say, I'm transitioning my business. I'm not closing my business, I'm not selling my business. But I did. I sold my business and then transitioned to a completely different focus. But I couldn't quite do that in my mind and what it did. And I'm giving you this example because I'm sure that you're doing something like that or have done something like that at some point. I'M not sure of that, but I suspect, and I want you to be able to see my example because I caused myself so much more suffering than I realized. I caused myself more pain about the pain by not being clear with myself and clear with other people what actually was happening. And I couldn't see it at the time, but by reflecting on it and looking back, it's like, oh, interesting. I was causing myself more suffering by clinging on and being attached to something and not letting go in order to start something different, more, more cleanly, more kindly to myself and to others. So that's a chosen change in what can cause suffering. Here's another example of unexpected change. So if you've gotten an illness happen to you or a family member gets ill, that's unexpected change that's going to cause some suffering. Where we make it more problematic, more self inflicted is when we have more pain about it. And usually that sounds something like this shouldn't have happened or I wish this wasn't happening. So really not wanting it, resisting it, or then avoiding it is going to cause more suffering, more pain about our pain. Because the thing that happened that was unexpected, the unexpected change, like an illness, like a breakup, any of those things that is painful enough as it is, it's when we resist it more or think it shouldn't have happened, or dwell on what happened and not actively heal or process the negative pain, then that's when we cause ourselves more suffering. If we have the painful thing happen and we allow grief, someone breaks up with us and we allow grief, we go through the painful process and release, let go, clean it up. That's dealing with and processing the pain from the unexpected thing. When we make this situation wrong, we complain about it. When we dwell on the emotions, when we don't bother healing what we're feeling, we don't allow the grief, but we resist it. We stuff it, we, we magnify it. Those are all forms of suffering. When we could be healing it, we could be processing it, we could be going through it and cleaning things up and not denying that the thing is happening. So that's unexpected change. And then the last one, ooh, this is such a good one. This is what Tony Robbins the favorite flavor of suffering. The favorite, favorite flavor of suffering. And this is one that I noticed in my life that especially when I'm working with so many other people and I'm hearing the problems in their life and I help them solve their problems and I help them process what's going on, I help them strategically think and plan in their businesses. So I see what's going on for them and what I'll see. With every single client, every single business, every single human human that I interact with, there's always going to be one area where there's more suffering than other areas in life. And typically that same thing will recur. So most of the people that I work with are in business, and that's what they bring to me are business problems. And when they bring bring business problems, it's because that's the main area of focus. And they may still have a relationship problem, they may still have a personal health problem, they may bring those things here and there, but the focus is often the business thing. Now, that is because that's where most of their time and energy and attention goes. And it's likely an indication of what their values are and what matters to them most in their lives. That's the problems that they're bringing, but it's also their favorite flavor of suffering. If they're going to create a suffer fest is a little nickname that I'll give it every once in a while. If I'm in a suffer fest, it's usually in a certain category. And for me, it's going to be. It's. It's not in a. Usually in a category of health. But Graves changed that. For me, it's usually in a category of potentially my close relationships or my business. Those two areas, those would be my favorite flavors of suffering. But in business, I stopped suffering. In business, I really cleaned that up and made the problems the things I love to solve and made the problems not something to suffer about, but just something to go interesting. And away we go. But my relationships, totally different thing. That's where I find way more suffering. Now this will be correlated for most of us to our past experiences in childhood and what our current values are in life. So if that is a clue to you to go, what's my favorite flavor of suffering? It's going to be where your pain points are most poignant. Say that fast five times. Pain points most poignant. Those are the areas that you're going to find. So if you can, if you find that you're feeling a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, a lot of challenge, a lot of negative thoughts then, and you're not sure where it's all coming from, then take a look at where was the chosen change in my life? Where was the unexpected change in my life? And where has this pattern happened before? Where do I usually tend to suffer? If you look in those three areas Chances are you're going to find an area that you can find the solutions. You can find the area that might need some pain processing. So let's go into some of the thoughts that I've heard and maybe these are, are familiar to you. Things like this person is living rent free in my mind. I've heard that from clients or I'm on holiday and I can't get my staff to stop working. No, it's you that has to stop working. No, that person doesn't live rent free in your mind. But when we find ourselves stuck on that thing, we're choosing to suffer because we haven't cleaned up and gone through the negative experience that we don't like. That's the thing to clean up. And now we're dwelling on something and having pain that it exists. We're having pain about our pain. We're resisting the fact of something that happened. Another one is I have a legacy to achieve which is very different than my past. I want them to have a different experience than I did. They might have a different experience than you did, but it's not up to you. We can't make other people feel something or experience something. Another one, this problem is affecting my home life and my family. In other words, someone's bringing some stressors from work, from, from work into their home or into their relationships unknowingly. And it's causing more suffering in other areas because they're not dealing with or they're not processing or they're not expressing themselves or feeling the emotion or going through the emotion or getting coached, whatever it is. And it's permeating other areas of their life because they haven't been able to deal with that pain point in their life. So remember, the suffering is coming from an undealt with pain point. That's what, that's how we inflict suffering upon ourselves. So here's our three steps to stop this suffering in the moment. And it's going to be an A, an M and an S. So ams, you can say ams, but it's a step one and two and three when I keep it very simple. The A is awareness. So we're recognizing that and I've given you lots of examples so you can see this clearly. You probably now have an example in your mind of your own life. You are feeling down, you might be feeling stuck, but it's recognizing that, that a significant portion of that suffering is self inflicted. It's not the neutral thing that happened. Maybe the chosen change or the unexpected change. It's probably a pattern that keeps happening or that you're stuck in. So it's self inflicted. And once you see it, once there's awareness, that's what empowers you. It empowers you to be able to change the thing. So you might have a thought like I'm feeling down, I'm feeling stuck. That right there, those two sentences are awareness. It's recognition that wait a second, I'm feeling down, I'm feeling stuck, I don't feel good right now. And this seems to be persisting. That is all awareness. So a is for awareness. That's number one. Number two is mindfulness. Now this kind of sounds like awareness, doesn't it? This is a little bit different. It's a practice. It's staying present to what's neutrally happening versus what we're making it mean. Staying present to this is neutral. This happened and I'm making it mean bad. Just this morning we got news that we're away from our home and there's a water leak in our home. We have somebody checking in on the house. We've done due diligence. We have somebody taking care of the house and lo and behold, they discover water and water has gone into another room, through drywall, onto floors, all these wonderful things. Now there's a time that if my husband and I spoke about that, we'd both be so annoyed that that happened. We'd both be creating more pain about the pain. Well, the pain is that there's a leak in the house and it's caused damage. That's the pain. And most people don't like that. We're aware that we don't like that. But creating, not liking it more, creating wrongness around it, making it harder than it is, having a argument about it, how we're going to deal with it, anything like that, that's all added suffering, that's unnecessary. It's completely unnecessary. So when we do the practice of mindfulness and staying present and seeing what's going on and that something's neutral and that we have the opportunity to make it mean something, it reduces the impact of the negative thoughts. Remember, the negative thoughts are going to come first and foremost. Why? Because that's how our brain works. 80% of our thoughts could be a little less, could be a little more. Those super optimistic people out there, they have the negative thoughts but they choose to turn it into a positive one. So the negative thoughts are going to be there. That's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a normal Functioning, working brain. When we see them and we practice seeing them, then we reduce the impact of those unrealistic expectations about letting those negative thoughts overrun us because they're not who we are, they're just thoughts. And then we can see. Interesting. I keep focusing on this. I'm making this a really bad thing or I tend to suffer in blank most frequently. Or is this the thing I'm suffering? Is this thing that I'm suffering about, is it in my control right now? I can't control that the water leak happened. I have no control over that at all. So that's number two is there's the awareness, the mindfulness and number three and the AMS is the S. And it's self compassion. Self compassion. This is so important. Cultivating self compassion has plenty of research behind it. There's so many positive benefits. Cultivating self compassion mitigates the effects of negative self talk. Now you know there's going to be negative self talk because 80% of your thoughts are likely negative, give or take a few thousand. So you know it's going to be there. If you know it's going to be there, you can have a plan to mitigate it. Oh, interesting. H, there it is. Research in the Journal of Research and Personality indicates that self compassion is associated with greater emotional resilience and well being. I want to give you a really practical way of thinking about this. I am having pain about my pain. H, the pain is the leaky. The pain in our lives is the leak in the house. The pain is the water damage on the drywall. Now me not liking it, me making it wrong, me getting upset. Somebody should have seen it earlier or how did this happen or everything was working fine, all of those types of things aren't helpful in any possible way. But when I see that I'm having those thoughts and then I can give myself the gift of self compassion. And this is how I use self compassion. I'll say something like in. In a way that someone who I really cared about when I was a child would say something to me like, okay, dear, all right, love. I don't normally say that to myself. And in order to start doing that, having that self talk, that self compassion that way, I had to borrow from someone else's who spoke to me that way. That's what was really important. Or even a nickname, if there's a special little nickname, a pet name that someone really that you really like, use it on yourself. Use it on yourself like dear or love or whatever that you know, snickerdoodle whatever pet name somebody called you, you really like it, use it on yourself. What's really going on here and, and what you might find if I give the example of the water. Oh, I didn't want another thing to deal with right now. I don't like that my house is not, is not in perfect condition right now. I don't want to have to deal with a repair. And then usually I'll offer something like if I really see that that's what's going on, then I'll offer something to myself again. Self compassion. What do you need right now? What do you need? What will be helpful so those three steps can help you in your immediate suffering? That awareness, that mindfulness and that self compassion, especially because you need to have some lines, some thoughts, some talk, some internal talk that's going to mitigate those thousands of negative thoughts. And that's the internal self talk. And if you let it run rampant, it will and it's going to create a level of suffering in your life. Now here are some little practical tips that you can use to address these things. Of course, stress management. My favorite is a breathing technique that I've been using so much lately. I absolutely love it. It's helping me massively and I will record a podcast on that breathing technique. So stress management. I'm suggesting a breathing technique. Could be meditation, could be exercise, could be a walk outdoors, could be looking at the sky, it could be reading a book. Anything for you. But I'm going to share with you one of my breathing techniques. Another practical tip we just talked about in self compassion is positive self talk. But prescribe this for yourself. Make some actual positive statements that you want to say every day. If I said that to myself every day, would that help me? Yes. Okay, what is it that I'm going to say to myself every day and then decide what that is like the what do you need? Love or. I used humor a lot with myself. Talking to myself with humor and might sound like I'm crazy, but I don't care because it helps. It's much better than the alternative crazy health improvement. That one. I move every single day. Every day I get outdoors and I move every single day, no matter what the weather, no matter where I am, no matter where, where I'm traveling, movement and outdoors are part of my being. If that is not there for me, I will suffer in some form or another. So I make sure I give myself that Limit social media use. Now I'm going to tell you my stance on social media. For me, it's simply a platform to make positive contribution. If you look at my social media, everything I'm putting in there is something that I hope can help somebody in some way or another by an experience that I'm sharing, an example that I'm setting, or a information that I am teaching. That's how I'm trying to positively influence. When it comes the other side of social media, I'll prioritize with that. But otherwise I want personal connection. By me looking at everybody else's thing doesn't give me that personal connection. So I'm not fulfilling my values of love and connection. If I'm just scrolling through other people's lives. I want a personal connection with some of those people. And so I'll use social media for them to connect with me and reach a message out, or for me to make a message to them. But I typically am not going through people's lives. That's. That's not a thing for me. Time management. I have a technique called a power hour. I will share more about that as the time is right, but it's an assimilation of many other proven techniques that other people have used. And I pulled together what works really well for me. That power hour is something that is critical for me. Having a week that doesn't lead to either overwhelm or overbooking myself, or creating or mismanaging certain amounts of my time where I've put too much time on one thing and not enough on another. Not prioritizing well enough. So this is a technique that I use. You should have a system, something to help you with your time. Don't be afraid to have a few rules around your time because it will create some freedom for your time. And then it also leads you into more freedom for the next one, which is finding your purpose. If you don't know your purpose in life right now, then and I know mine, I have a one liner for it. It may not mean much to you, but I know what it means and it's to show up as my best, leave a legacy of love and change lives. That's my purpose in life. However, I have deeper meaning. I know how I'm doing each of those main three things. If you don't have your purpose in life, the best thing you can do is trial and growth. Trial and growth. Trial and growth. Try things on and right now, most of my clients know what they want to be doing and they are actively doing those things. And there's so much growth that goes along the way because it's never the way you Think it's going to be my purpose in life. I know what my purpose is, but the picture of it is constantly changing because I'm learning and growing as I go along. So unnecessary suffering is found when you feel like you're lost in what you love to do or what you're meant to do. The only way you won't feel lost, the only way you can mitigate that suffering is by trial and growth. Okay, so those are some practical steps I want to remind you. Go back to those three steps. If you are stuck in suffering right now, do not forget the awareness of seeing that. Okay, I'm feeling down, I'm feeling stuck. It looks like I might be suffering. Number two, mindfulness. Make sure that you are practicing seeing what you're actually thinking. Interesting. I keep focusing on this, I keep saying this thought in my mind or out loud or I tend to suffer in this zone most frequently. So practice reducing the impact of those negative thoughts. And then lastly, I think this is the most important one and it's self compassion. Actually talk to yourself nicely with some love, with some humor, with some pet names, any of those things. Do that, that is critical to get yourself out of the domination of the negative self thoughts, which again, nothing wrong with it. It's a normal, healthy human brain. That's what our human brain does. And we have this normal, healthy adaptability to be able to choose which negative thought gets to stay if it does and which ones get to go and which ones do we want to speak to ourselves kindly with compassion. All right, that is all I got for you today about that thing called self inflicted suffering and pain, about your pain. And I hope, my hope in this is that it's given you some tools to empower yourself to know that yeah, I'm likely going to suffer. It's part of what humans tend to do. And it doesn't have to be a thing. That's a persistent, constant thing. It can be something that we're aware of and we can do something about. So I hope this gives you some tools to empower yourself. If it's useful for you. If you love this, if you know someone who's in a little bit of suffering, share this, share this to them. Help a person out. Be that person who gives a pat on the back to someone else, gives a gift. Have a wonderful rest of your day. I hope this has served you. And don't forget it's normal to have the negative thoughts. It's normal to suffer. And we have choices. We can empower our lives with tools tools like these. So go for it. Have a wonderful Monday. Have a fantastic rest of your week. Keep being Empowered.

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