Jessica Abel - "Self-compassion is your most powerful tool."

One of the biggest things that I've discovered is that the most powerful tool that when people take it on that it really has an enormous effect is self-compassion. So when the inner critic pops up, compassion is your most powerful, uh, tool to dealing with that. Thinking, wow, you know, this inner voice is really afraid, I can take care of it. And having compassion for this part of you that's really afraid and really struggling, even though it sounds so like commanding and in charge, right? Or, you know, getting back to the thing of being totally overcommitted and, you know, I'm so late on this, I'm so late on that, you know, especially self-set deadlines, you know, they just slide. Constant, constant self-forgiveness about that because that time is gone. Like, that's gone, you know. There's no— like, one of the things I do, um, I teach everybody to do in my groups— I don't know if they actually do it or not— but if you have to-do lists or whatever and things go red, you know, things go like past due, whatever, go take all those things and take them off past due and put them on either never, like don't assign them to yourselves, that's number one. But number 2, set the deadlines in the future sometime when you have some chance of being able to do it. Past due doesn't tell you anything except that you suck. So don't, you know, like don't let yourself tell yourself that every single time you look at your project management software, it's irrelevant and it does not help. All it does is sets you up for in a shame spiral where whenever you look at that thing, all you wanna do is run, run away, run away screaming, that doesn't help you do the thing. If you want to do the thing, get it out of a shame relationship by deep and continuous self-forgiveness about whatever you thought was going to happen and didn't happen, because life is life and you're a human being.

I love it. Yeah, shame is an invitation you do not have to accept, for sure.