Ho-Ho-Holy Crap, We Gotta Talk.
*Pinches bridge of nose and sighs forever*
Can we have a bit of real talk? Yeah?
Okay, here it is: 2020 was. not. a. good. time.
You wouldn’t know it though from many of the holiday emails and blogs I’m seeing. With openings like “We’ve all had a hard year,” they then vault into messages of merriment. It seems a whole lotta people are trying to shove a sugar-dusted gingerbread man into the poo nugget that is 2020 and call it holiday cheer.
Look, I LOVE the holidays. I start blasting Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” on November 1st. If you try to remove an ornament from my tree before February, so help me, I will pelt you with figgy pudding. Yet I can’t help but feel that much of what I’m seeing is forced festiveness. So, as per usual, when others zig, we zag here at Bold Introvert! There’ll be no pseudo-merriment this week, just honesty.
We don’t have to forget about the challenges we’ve overcome—or maybe didn’t overcome—in order to be excited about other things. In fact, I’d argue we shouldn’t.
It’s okay to admit that some things are crap and still being grateful for the good things that have come our way. As the reigning Queen of Silver Liningstan, I’m the last person who’ll go doom and gloom on you. But, it’s also dangerous not to be realistic when we’re facing real problems.
2020 was a stress test. It demanded that the population of our little blue dot prove its mettle. It revealed humanity’s incredible beauty, as well as a pretty disturbing underbelly. We have a choice of what to do with this information, and my annoyingly optimistic ass will always side on Team Humanity.
If we ignore the beauty or the beast, we not only miss out on the lessons they offer, but we do ourselves a major disservice. When we close our eyes to reality of difficult things, we’re less likely to grant ourselves the self-compassion we need and deserve to move through those things. Therein lies the rub of magical thinking.
A lot people get self-compassion wrong. They think it’s soft, dare I say fluffy. That it means not holding ourselves to high standards. Or resigning ourselves to a life where our asses permanently mesh into our couch cushions and we waste away under a layer of Oreo dust.
On the contrary, self-compassion is so badass it should dress in head-to-toe black leather. It’s also much less complicated than you might think.
Here’s how it works: Treat yourself the way you’d treat the people you care about most.
If your friend’s business is struggling due to the COVID, would you tell her to stop making excuses and just try harder? Would you tell her that a global pandemic shouldn’t get in the way of her mind-over-mattering her ass to success? I hope not, because then you’d be kind of a twat. Chances are far more likely that you’d feel for your friend, try to understand her circumstances, cheer her on, and remind her of how capable and competent she is.
Self-compassion is the same thing, just directed inward.
The bastard thing about 20/20 hindsight is that it makes it so easy for us to forget that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. When we acknowledge the truth that we did the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time, we’re not accepting defeat, we’re motivating ourselves to keep going. If you’re trying to get from here to there, it’s a hell of a lot easier to do it without a ten-ton shame gorilla doing the cha-cha across your shoulders.
Give yourself the same benefit of the doubt that you do to other people, accept that mistakes and failures are an inevitable part of being human, and embrace the fact that despite the Insta-filtered images that are piped into our noggins every minute of every damned day, every other human is just as imperfect as we are.
Need more proof? Professor and leading researcher on self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff, often discusses the link between self-compassion and success. According to science, self-compassion breeds increased motivation, self-worth, resiliency in the face of adversity and disappointments, and improved mental health.
Wanna know a super-duper secret insider tip about success? It’s amplified by increased motivation, self-worth, resiliency in the face of adversity and disappointments, and improved mental health.
Turns out being nice to yourself is the most effective success hack in the book. Whodathunk?
So as 2020 drags its rickety ass out the door, consider how you want to usher in a new year. Is it by forgetting your struggles? Or is it by learning from them, trusting yourself again, and again, and again—and then lighting this world up like the Saturn and Jupiter conjunction I know you are?