by Nancy Jonker
No more! Decide to treat yourself as well as you would treat a friend. Talk to yourself as lovingly as you would a friend. Treat yourself with as much respect as you would a friend.
In her research on self-esteem and self-compassion, Kristin Neff has found that the quest for self-esteem can be as negative for us as the lack of it! Self-esteem often depends on rating ourselves as special or above average. It is based on a comparison model, and the resulting sense of self-worth is often contingent upon these comparisons.
Rather than pursuing self-esteem, we would do better to cultivate compassion. Precisely when self-esteem lets us down, like when we receive evidence that we’re not in fact above average, compassion can be the balm for our hurting soul. Compassion creates a loving, connected presence that allows us to withstand the hardships of life.
On Self-Compassion
Self-compassion has three parts. It begins with an attitude of kindness toward ourselves. Here we need to counter our inner critic and all that our critic wants for us but goes about getting in the wrong way. We can be kind, we can check in with ourselves and see whether we’re okay (rather than jump right into problem-solving mode). We can offer understanding about the disappointments we face.
The second part of self-compassion is common humanity or what I call taking our part in the circle of life. Life’s challenges can make us feel isolated. We are quick to use our experiences to cut ourselves off from others.
This second component of self-compassion is all about using a particular hardship as a vehicle to connect with others. For example, let’s say you’re having a difficult time getting your boss to listen to you. You make an effort, but he comes down hard on you. You feel embarrassed and on the edge of shame.
And then you recognize that this is a hard moment—you offer yourself a little kindness and then think about all the women like you who struggle to be heard in the workplace. You remind yourself that this is a common dilemma (as opposed to “OMG, I can’t believe that just happened! I just got called out in front of everyone! Why do these things always happen to ME?”).
This example brings up the third aspect of self-compassion, which is mindfulness. This relates directly to the cognitive functioning dimension of personal power. Being mindful about the challenges we face means neither minimizing nor catastrophizing. Oddly enough, we tend to do one or the other.
We may not pause long enough to let the difficult situation register and, thus, minimize the challenge we’re facing. Or, we tend to blow it out of proportion (because of our strong feelings about it and our own insecurities) and make it worse than it is in reality.
Mindfulness is a practice, not only as applied to self-compassion, but in its own right. To be mindful in the moment is one form of being both centered and grounded at the same time. We can access our feelings about what is happening, but we also stay connected to what is real, not letting our thinking slide out of control or negating the impact of what we’re facing.
One useful idea here is to visit the self-compassion.org website and take the “Self-Compassion Assessment.” The value of this assessment isn’t just to give you an idea of your overall capacity to be self-compassionate. The results of this assessment also break down your tendencies along the various components of self-compassion, helping you see where the weak points are that you can address.
For example, when I took the self-compassion assessment, I learned that though I was pretty good at accepting my mistakes and giving myself compassion at those times, my greatest challenge was recognizing when I was experiencing a hard time. Without registering the hard time, it’s hard to apply the self-compassion. We don’t even “know” that we need it.
Again, using the complimentary workbook or a journal to track some of this can be so helpful. There are numerous exercises available that foster the development of self-compassion, including writing a compassionate letter to yourself for seven days. The effects of these practices are very robust in developing and maintaining increased life satisfaction.
Research has also shown that writing your way through problems and feelings can be very effective. In fact, writing for 20 minutes a day for at least four days in a row prompted 40% fewer doctor’s visits, as reported by James Pennebaker in Expressive Writing: Words that Heal.
So in observing our attitudes, our inclination to judge ourselves, our inner conflicts and our hopes for freer living, we lay the groundwork for living with more personal power. Our thinking gets clearer, our emotions come into focus, and we begin to track and channel our personal energy.
We can observe how we manage our drawbridge, and with this awareness, develop more options for ourselves. When we observe our relationship patterns, and the things that trip us up, we lay the groundwork for developing new patterns and ways of being with those we love.
When we observe our behavior and attitudes around finances, we set the stage for powerful change in this aspect of our lives. We begin to become more informed and more invested, which can lead to more powerful living and more financial freedom.
And finally, when we observe our fears, our responses to mistakes, and our capacity to settle ourselves, we increase that all-important skill of resiliency. When we trust ourselves to bounce back from challenges, “failures,” and disappointments, we can allow ourselves to take more risks.
W—Wonder Woman
After observing our own process and what it is that drives us, we can wonder. We can foster that attitude of curiosity and non-judgment.
And we can call upon Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman’s famous stance is one terrific example of a high power pose that we can use to regulate our hormones, boosting our confidence and decreasing our stress.
When we can be expansive, when we can take up space in the room and move our energy all the way out to the edges of our body, we have already increased our empowerment. Whatever we do next will be a more confident, efficacious act because we will be calling forth and acting upon the impulses of our true selves.
Remember that these high power poses can be done in private for two minutes prior to a challenging event or can be unobtrusively engaged in while talking or presenting. Be like Wonder Woman and be expansive!
E—Expand into Your Body, into Your Life, and into Your Strengths
The first thing to do when expanding into our strengths is, ironically, to embrace our imperfections. The quest to be perfect and to ward off feelings of hurt, possible rejection, and loneliness puts us on a road to isolation and frustration.
It’s a hard lesson to learn that vulnerability is part and parcel of strength. We are powerful when we can be authentic and have nothing to hide. We can have open hearts and a strong backbone.
Part of embracing our imperfections is forgiving ourselves for not knowing the answers, for making mistakes, and for not being as far along as we wish we were. In accepting where we are, we open up to new possibilities. We can form new opinions of ourselves, steeped in compassion.
For many of us, this begins to sound too “soft.” “That’s not how we get strong,” you might say! You might even think that forgiving, accepting our imperfections, and surrounding ourselves with compassion isn’t the way to be strong!
And yet it is.
Quoting from Joan Halifax again: “Don’t ever think compassion is weak. Compassion is about strength.”
Let me reiterate here. When we can show compassion to ourselves, we can actually take more risks. We can take more risks because less is at stake. Our whole opinion of ourselves isn’t on the line. We can take more risks, be more open, and recover more easily from “failures.” Compassion enhances our personal power.
Our personal power is also enhanced by focusing on our strengths. Being trained as a clinical psychologist, I was taught to assess and diagnose people’s pathology. Basically, I was taught to figure out what was wrong with them. In my twenty-five years of working with people, I have come to realize that it is far more effective to work with people’s strengths.
Many o
f us don’t really know our strengths. We tell ourselves whatever story we believe about ourselves and often don’t open up to people’s feedback about our strengths—often it is what they love and appreciate about us. Because our talents tend to be what we do naturally, it’s easy to overlook or discount them. “Doesn’t everyone do that?”
It’s also easy to get preoccupied with our perceived weaknesses and what we want to improve in ourselves. Most of us believe this is the way to greatest success. But research has shown that when we focus on what’s working already and try to enhance those things, we are far more effective than when we focus on the problems. This can be a difficult shift to make!
The 25’s Top 3
In order to enhance our strengths, we need to know what they are. Not so long ago, I had the assignment of asking 25 people what they thought my three greatest strengths were. My first impulse was just to skip this assignment. Who wants to go around asking that?
But I knew there was value in this if I could find a way to do it. So I did. I emailed 25 people and asked them what they thought my top three strengths were. I was tempted to give them multiple choice or provide some kind of template to make the task easier. But I didn’t. I left it open-ended.
There was remarkable consistency in their responses. What an amazing experience! People were happy to participate in my assignment and seemed to have no trouble coming up with their answers. And it allowed me to see myself the way others see me. I actually had a spreadsheet with their responses and could categorize them and discern my top strengths as others saw me.
Your Turn with the 25’s Top 3
I would not have done this exercise if it had not been assigned. And I would have missed out on great information. So that’s why I’m including this assignment here and in the complimentary workbook. Find a way to ask 25 people what they see as your top three strengths. I recommend email because you can actually set it up as a survey and have their responses come back into a spreadsheet. But however you do it, take the risk and ask. Use this assignment to discover something amazing.
StrengthsFinder 2.0 Profile
Another way to discover your strengths is to take a strength-based assessment. The StrengthsFinder Profile was developed by Gallup to help people spend less time trying to correct their weaknesses and more time enhancing their strengths. Through research with millions of people, they parsed out 34 distinct themes of talent.
Now Gallup offers sophisticated reports about the talent themes, complete with action guides about how to develop them into strengths. They also provide a more customized report about how the top five signature themes for any given person work together and create a coherent whole. These Strengths Insights convey how you stand out from among the rest.
So your second assignment is to take the StrengthsFinder 2.0. Then read the reports, record your findings in your workbook or journal, and share your results. Put your top five strengths on your bathroom mirror, on your computer screen, behind your desk, or on your phone—somewhere you’ll see often. Let yourself reflect on and absorb your strengths as you begin to own them and grow into them. There is no substitute for this, so be sure to do it!
Kolbe Index
Another powerful strengths assessment is the Kolbe ATM Index. The Kolbe Index measures “conation”—the third aspect of the mind. We all have an instinctive way that we go about accomplishing tasks and goals. Whether we need to gather facts, improvise, follow procedures, or use our hands to implement change, we each have an instinctive style, and that’s what “conation” refers to.
Many of us don’t know anything about our instinctive style. I had been a psychologist for twenty-six years before I heard of conation! For me, taking the Kolbe Index answered the question of whether I was lazy. If you put me in a room full of dishes that need to be washed and food put away, I’d just as soon walk out of the room and buy new dishes as begin to sort and clean.
I also don’t like to garden, weed, or do yard work. I don’t like to change lightbulbs and may endure a dark room for weeks before I put in a new bulb. For the longest time, I thought I was lazy. Unwilling. But that didn’t make sense with other patterns in my life. I was told more than once that lazy people don’t get PhDs. Lazy people don’t start businesses. But I wasn’t sure. Until I took the Kolbe Index, I didn’t understand how these patterns fit together.
The Kolbe Index measures an enduring style of being in the world. Kathy Kolbe, the author and designer of the assessment tool, refined the theory of conation following a car accident that impaired her cognitive functioning and sent her emotional regulation system on a roller coaster.
Over time, she realized that though her thinking capacity was altered and her emotions were all over the place, her way of approaching problems and goal-directed behavior was the same as it had been over her whole life. So she studied this and through careful psychometric work was able to develop an assessment that reliably measures these clusters of behavior derived from the instinctive nature of each person.
It matters a lot that the Kolbe Index is strengths based. In the report that follows the assessment, Kathy Kolbe’s voice comes on as she talks about what a wonderful combination this particular modus operandi is. When we become aware of our instinctive style of solving problems and going after goals, it adds to our ability to function effectively on our own and within a team.
This increases our personal power in the areas of cognitive and emotional functioning, personal energy, boundaries, and quality of relationships. Many conflicts within a team or in a relationship can be traced to differences in these instinctive styles. Working with our strengths can also increase our power in the financial realm.
If you want to become more self-aware and have more knowledge about your strengths and how to work in ways that naturally rely on them, go take the Kolbe Index assessment. In the complimentary workbook, there is a section for you to explore and record your findings and insights from this assessment.
There are other packages available on the Kolbe website (http://www.kolbe.com) as well, so employers can see how well their expectations match up with their employees’ MO, expectations within a relationship, and information about how we would tackle different professions and jobs. But if you just want to get started, take the Kolbe A and learn about yourself and your style of striving. Then accept what you learn, embrace your MO, and expand into your strengths!
100% Responsibility
Another aspect of expanding into our life and our strengths is to take FULL RESPONSIBILITY for ourselves—100% responsibility. This sounds much easier than it is. To truly take 100% responsibility for ourselves, we must be self-aware. We need to understand our motivations, our feelings, and how they impact our behavior. Without this awareness, we end up blaming others for our mistakes or misattribute feelings that we’re not willing or aware enough to own.
So part of expanding into our strengths is developing and enriching our relationship with ourselves. Valuing and accepting who we are. Being interested enough to get to know who we are. Challenging ourselves to be both accepting of who we are and to dedicate ourselves to being our very best selves.
That’s what taking 100% responsibility for ourselves can help us do. It calls us to become the best possible version of ourselves—to step up and offer who we are to the world and to take responsibility for ourselves in relationships, offering ourselves compassion when needed, so we don’t badger our partners into agreeing with us or seeing our point of view. In this way, we increase our power in the dimension of relationships.
Taking 100% responsibility for ourselves also creates more power along the boundaries dimension. When we can take 100% responsibility for ourselves, we underscore the boundary between ourselves and others. It is a challenge sometimes not to take responsibility for those we love, for their feelings and for their decisions. But it is a losing proposition to take responsibility for others (parents, spouses, siblings, children, or friends) when we are not in the driver’s seat of decision-ma
king.
It can be crazy-making to accept responsibility for feelings and consequences that arise from decisions we did not make. Staying clear about whose responsibility is whose is critical for our sanity, health, and well-being, and enhances both our felt sense of personal power and the actual amount of power we possess.
Staying clear about our boundaries has implications for our personal energy as well. Vernon Howard, American spiritual teacher, author, and philosopher, writes, “When you are genuinely strong, you neither attack nor defend and so retain your energy.” When we unflinchingly take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and the consequences that follow, and do not take responsibility that doesn’t belong to us, we are freed up to be powerful and strong.
Taking full responsibility for ourselves can also help us take risks. When we are determined to be fully ourselves and to accept with compassion our successes and failures, we can venture out and try things we might otherwise be afraid to try. We can voice our opinions to our partner, our parents, and our community without fear of rejection—because, in the words of one of my clients, “When I’m with myself, I’m good.” We don’t need the approval or acceptance of everyone else when we’re able to provide that for ourselves.
Taking full responsibility for ourselves also inspires others to be their best selves. In the well-known quote by Marianne Williamson from her book, A Return To Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles, we read:
