Overcoming Self-Criticism and Building Self-Awareness: A Guide to Practicing Self-Compassion and Living from the Inside-Out
Becoming Best Friends With Yourself
Everyday you wake up, you get ready to tackle the day; to take action on your goals, to uplift your well-being and to take charge of your life. You are pumped, after watching motivational videos and seeing inspiring posts on social media telling you that you can do anything that you want the night before. Then… just as you start your day with a can-do attitude, your inner-critic wakes up and it’s noisy! It makes you doubt yourself by telling you that you don’t have the perseverance or the abilities to live beyond your limits. It fills you up with fear by reminding you of the ill opinions and judgements of others towards you. And it constantly makes you question your ambitions. ‘Like who the heck do you think you are trying to live happy? It’s not possible, so just continue to live your mediocre life. At least you have everything that you need to survive.’
WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON?
Well, as you may know as you’ve grown up you’ve picked up certain limiting habits from your parents, teachers and other caretakers. Also, you’ve internalized the opinions, judgements of assumptions of other towards you. By the time you turned seven, your mind was programmed to respond with self-criticism instead of self-soothing behaviours For some, this causes psychological disorders such as: mood disorder, social anxiety, alcoholism, eating disorders and various other cognitive illnesses.
Symptoms of such disorders are:
Feelings of guilt and shame
Perfectionist tendencies
Feeling unworthy and inadequate
Self isolating behaviours
Rumination and worry based thinking
THE INSIDE-OUT
It’s likely that society has conditioned you to feel that you don’t have enough; that in order to feel adequate you must strive at building a ‘good’ outer image, to buy the newest gadgets and technologies and to go after a career that will make you a lot of money rather than to get a career that will fulfill you.
Therefore, you’ve grown up believing that happiness is a product of what you have rather than who you become.
