Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #192| How Self-Compassion Help You Ditch Overwhelm
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: If you're already stressed and overwhelmed, adding that extra layer of negative self-talk just like doubles down on the badness of the situation.
- 0:08Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:20Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:25Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:30Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:40Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend.
- 0:41Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes when you're feeling stressed and overwhelmed, or maybe even when you're not, when you're just hanging out, does your brain ever serve up some real mean thoughts about you?
- 0:49Michelle Gauthier: It might sound like, what's wrong with me?
- 0:52Michelle Gauthier: Or I should be able to handle this better, or I should have this figured out by now, or I'm a terrible mom, whatever it is.
- 1:01Michelle Gauthier: First of all, you're not alone.
- 1:02Michelle Gauthier: Everybody has these thoughts.
- 1:04Michelle Gauthier: Our brains just drop in some mean thoughts sometimes.
- 1:07Michelle Gauthier: But the trouble is, if you're already stressed and overwhelmed, adding that extra layer of negative self-talk just like doubles down on the badness of the situation.
- 1:17Michelle Gauthier: Sometimes the real suffering is not even the circumstance, like whatever it is that's making you feel stressed out, but that negative self-talk can even weigh more heavily and be worse.
- 1:29Michelle Gauthier: So if you're like, okay, sounds good, I hear what you're saying.
- 1:33Michelle Gauthier: How am I supposed to magically stop being so hard on myself?
- 1:36Michelle Gauthier: You're in the right place.
- 1:37Michelle Gauthier: When you listen to this episode today, you'll learn what self-compassion actually means and how it builds real emotional resilience.
- 1:46Michelle Gauthier: And then I'll give you two quick ways to get yourself out of that negative self-talk loop when it happens to you.
- 1:53Michelle Gauthier: Before we jump into today's episode, I wanted to tell you that I have been working very hard behind the scenes on a new offer, which is a class called People Pleasing Purge.
- 2:05Michelle Gauthier: Kind of hard to say.
- 2:06Michelle Gauthier: People pleasing purge.
- 2:08Michelle Gauthier: And eventually this class will be video only to watch at your own pace.
- 2:13Michelle Gauthier: But for the first round, I'm going to be teaching it live and doing live coaching throughout as you're learning how to stop people pleasing.
- 2:23Michelle Gauthier: So if you are a person who says yes when you want to say no or has a schedule that's just full of stuff that you don't even want to do, but somehow has appeared on your calendar, or you always do whatever your mother-in-law says, even when you don't feel like it, come and join my class.
- 2:38Michelle Gauthier: I'm going to open registration next week.
- 2:40Michelle Gauthier: But if you're a podcast listener, you can register right now.
- 2:44Michelle Gauthier: I will put the link in the show notes.
- 2:46Michelle Gauthier: It has all the information.
- 2:47Michelle Gauthier: It starts on November 3rd.
- 2:50Michelle Gauthier: Okay, back to self-compassion.
- 2:52Michelle Gauthier: So let's get into what self-compassion is.
- 2:55Michelle Gauthier: First, let's just start with compassion.
- 2:57Michelle Gauthier: The word compassion.
- 2:58Michelle Gauthier: If you break it down, the C O M part means with and passion in this case means suffering.
- 3:05Michelle Gauthier: So compassion is with suffering.
- 3:08Michelle Gauthier: Let's take an example.
- 3:09Michelle Gauthier: If you have a friend who's going through a really hard time and you are compassionate, you are with their suffering.
- 3:17Michelle Gauthier: So you are with them in their suffering.
- 3:20Michelle Gauthier: You are not making their suffering worse.
- 3:22Michelle Gauthier: You are with them in their suffering.
- 3:24Michelle Gauthier: And I'm betting that you probably are a compassionate person.
- 3:27Michelle Gauthier: I bet you're great at taking care of other people and great at being compassionate to them.
- 3:32Michelle Gauthier: So now let's turn it around to self-compassion.
- 3:35Michelle Gauthier: It's essentially taking those very same skills and turning them to yourself to give yourself self-kindness in situations where you're the one who needs the compassion.
- 3:47Michelle Gauthier: There's a researcher whose work I absolutely love, and I have modeled a lot of the things that I do in coaching after what I've learned from her.
- 3:54Michelle Gauthier: Her name's Dr.
- 3:55Michelle Gauthier: Kristen Neff, and she's a leading researcher on self-compassion.
- 3:59Michelle Gauthier: And she's she puts it really simply.
- 4:01Michelle Gauthier: She says, It really means just treating yourself the way you treat someone else who you love when they're struggling.
- 4:07Michelle Gauthier: If you had a friend who comes to you, let's say you're at work and your work friend comes up to you and is almost in tears and said, Oh my gosh, I just had the worst presentation.
- 4:16Michelle Gauthier: I totally screwed it up.
- 4:17Michelle Gauthier: I don't think I can do this job.
- 4:18Michelle Gauthier: I should just quit.
- 4:20Michelle Gauthier: Would you say, Yeah, you're right.
- 4:22Michelle Gauthier: You probably did it up.
- 4:24Michelle Gauthier: You should probably just quit.
- 4:25Michelle Gauthier: No, of course you wouldn't.
- 4:26Michelle Gauthier: You'd be like, oh my gosh, you're allowed to mess up.
- 4:30Michelle Gauthier: It probably wasn't as bad as you thought it was.
- 4:32Michelle Gauthier: This one thing doesn't define you.
- 4:35Michelle Gauthier: Let's go get a diet coke and figure out how to move forward.
- 4:39Michelle Gauthier: Imagine if you could turn that level of just natural kindness, because I'm betting in a regular situation, that's exactly what you do.
- 4:47Michelle Gauthier: Different words, different suggestions, but same kind of thing.
- 4:50Michelle Gauthier: Imagine if you could do that for yourself, how much better you could feel.
- 4:55Michelle Gauthier: So if you feel like your brain offers some pretty mean thoughts and offers them pretty regularly, if you start paying attention to it after hearing this podcast, and you start noticing when your brain throws out some unkind thoughts, you may be surprised with how many negative thoughts are coming to mind about yourself.
- 5:12Michelle Gauthier: Remember, you can't control those.
- 5:14Michelle Gauthier: You can't control what's coming into your mind and just notice them without judgment.
- 5:18Michelle Gauthier: And here are the three things that you can do to turn that around.
- 5:23Michelle Gauthier: Number one is mindfulness, one of our favorite things to talk about on this podcast.
- 5:27Michelle Gauthier: So just simply noticing it, noticing what you're actually upset about, and then what the negative self-talk is that is on top of that.
- 5:36Michelle Gauthier: So, for example, if you're having a really hard day at work and you're having a really hard day at work and you're like, I can't believe this job sucks so bad.
- 5:47Michelle Gauthier: Anybody else would have gotten a different job by now.
- 5:50Michelle Gauthier: You're terrible at this job.
- 5:52Michelle Gauthier: This makes you terrible at home at night because you're in a bad mood, etc.
- 5:56Michelle Gauthier: Just if you were to take the approach that from a mindful perspective, if you were to just narrate that situation from the outside, this is the way that you would handle it with mindfulness.
- 6:06Michelle Gauthier: You would say, I'm feeling overwhelmed with work today, and my brain is offering a lot of negative thoughts about me as a person.
- 6:14Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so that's step one mindfulness.
- 6:17Michelle Gauthier: Just describe to yourself what is happening without judgment.
- 6:21Michelle Gauthier: Then the next thing you do is something that Kristen Neff calls common humanity.
- 6:26Michelle Gauthier: So when you're suffering like this, it's really easy to feel like you're the only one.
- 6:30Michelle Gauthier: For some reason, and I talked about this last week, we did two episodes on comparison last week, but there's just something about feeling bad about yourself that makes you feel so alone, like you're the only one.
- 6:41Michelle Gauthier: So after you've done the mindfulness step and acknowledged I'm feeling overloaded with work today, my brain is offering a lot of negative thoughts about myself.
- 6:50Michelle Gauthier: Use the power of common humanity to tell yourself, I'm not the only one.
- 6:55Michelle Gauthier: All humans struggle, all humans get overwhelmed, all humans mess up, other people feel this way too.
- 7:02Michelle Gauthier: This is part of being human.
- 7:03Michelle Gauthier: I'm not the only one going through this.
- 7:05Michelle Gauthier: The person sitting in the office next to me could very well feel like this.
- 7:08Michelle Gauthier: Whatever it is, just consciously connect yourself to the rest of the world, knowing that you're not alone in the way that you're feeling in that moment.
- 7:17Michelle Gauthier: And then the third step is to talk to yourself like you'd talk to a friend.
- 7:21Michelle Gauthier: The way I often phrase it to my clients is if your best friend were going through this exact situation, what would you say to her?
- 7:27Michelle Gauthier: And when I ask myself that question, I will literally picture my friend and picture her being so sad and upset and think what I would say to her, which is, oh my gosh, that sounds really hard.
- 7:39Michelle Gauthier: I can see why you're upset.
- 7:41Michelle Gauthier: Everything's gonna be okay.
- 7:43Michelle Gauthier: What do you need right now?
- 7:45Michelle Gauthier: Do you want to talk about it?
- 7:47Michelle Gauthier: I think you're doing the best you can with what you have right now.
- 7:51Michelle Gauthier: So it's not about lying to yourself or like toxic positively positivity, everything is great, everything is amazing.
- 7:58Michelle Gauthier: It's really just about giving yourself the same grace that you give to other people and letting that kindness carry you forward so that you can solve the actual problem.
- 8:08Michelle Gauthier: Because remember in the example I gave, you're just feeling overloaded with work.
- 8:12Michelle Gauthier: But what's really weighing you down is the negative thoughts about it.
- 8:15Michelle Gauthier: So if you can remove those and be with yourself in your suffering and non-judgmental of yourself, then you can solve the actual problem.
- 8:23Michelle Gauthier: If you want to go a little deeper on this, you could try doing a journaling exercise and think of a time when a close friend of yours was really struggling.
- 8:31Michelle Gauthier: What did you say to her or him?
- 8:33Michelle Gauthier: What was your tone?
- 8:35Michelle Gauthier: How did you support them?
- 8:37Michelle Gauthier: And then think of a time when you were struggling.
- 8:39Michelle Gauthier: What did you say to yourself?
- 8:41Michelle Gauthier: What was your tone?
- 8:42Michelle Gauthier: How did you treat yourself?
- 8:43Michelle Gauthier: And then notice what differences there are between those two and see if you can model the way that you treated your friend when you need to treat yourself that way.
- 8:54Michelle Gauthier: So remember, when you notice that you're having negative thoughts, the things to practice are mindfulness.
- 8:59Michelle Gauthier: Narrate what's happening, how you're feeling, what you're thinking without judgment.
- 9:03Michelle Gauthier: Remind yourself of common humanity.
- 9:05Michelle Gauthier: Everybody feels this way sometimes.
- 9:07Michelle Gauthier: And then speak to yourself with kindness.
- 9:09Michelle Gauthier: Maybe you should send this episode to your best friend and say, hey, I just listened to this episode and I'm going to try to treat myself like I would treat you if you were having a bad day.
- 9:18Michelle Gauthier: Do you want to try this with me?
- 9:20Michelle Gauthier: And maybe together you guys can work on having better self talk.
- 9:23Michelle Gauthier: That's it for today.
- 9:24Michelle Gauthier: Have a great week.
- 9:26Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 9:33Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 9:39Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.