3030: When You Have a Voice Telling You You’re Inadequate by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits on Self-Compassion

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 3030 When You Have a Voice Telling You You're Inadequate by Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net and I'm Justin Malik, your very own personal narrator. Hello, old friend. That's not me calling you old. Old stands for Optimal Living Daily.

[00:00:17] And this is where I read articles to you the best I can find and get permission from so that you can have a little dose of positivity, inspiration, motivation, or happiness each and every day.

[00:00:29] So with that, let's get right to another post and my commentary at the end as we optimize your life. When You Have a Voice Telling You You're Inadequate by Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net

[00:00:46] This week I had conversations with a couple of loved ones who struggle with an inner voice that tells them that something is wrong with them. It made me think about many years where I felt this sense of inadequacy a deep sense of not being worthy.

[00:01:01] I still struggle with it sometimes. This is a particularly difficult problem because it affects everything in our lives. It causes us to struggle with trust and insecurity in our relationships, personal and work. It makes us less happy with ourselves and more likely to catastrophize when something goes wrong.

[00:01:20] This last bit makes it hard when we're working on improving our sense of self-worth but then we mess up and because we have a feeling something is wrong with us we are harsh on ourselves and our efforts fall apart.

[00:01:34] So what can we do when we have this inner critic, this voice inside us that doesn't seem to feel that we're worthy? There's no magic bullet but here's what I've found to help. The Practice of Self-Compassion

[00:01:48] The first place to start is with the ancient meditation of compassion and loving kindness. This is because when we have been beating ourselves up for years there's a deep sense of pain and a lack of kindness to ourselves. We need to reverse this every day.

[00:02:05] So the practice is just to take a minute every single morning or evening notice your pain and silently wish for it to end wish for your own happiness then do the same for people you know. For example, you might repeat each of these phrases three times

[00:02:23] trying to genuinely feel these wishes in your heart. May there be an end to my suffering. May I be happy and then thinking of someone you care about. May there be an end to their suffering and thinking of someone you care about. May they be happy.

[00:02:39] What you're cultivating is a capacity to care for yourself and others to be kind, to be friendly and loving. This doesn't immediately cure everything but it's a capacity we don't often have and by developing it over time we're developing a new relationship with ourselves and with others.

[00:02:58] You can apply this anytime you're having difficulty as well. Just pause when you notice you're stressed, anxious, frustrated, angry or hurting then wish for an end to your own suffering and for your own happiness several times with real feeling. A mantra to replace old habits.

[00:03:19] One of the biggest problems here is that we have a story we tell ourselves in our heads about ourselves. It might go something like this, I keep messing this up, what's wrong with me? I can't do anything right. I suck. I suck. I wish I wasn't so terrible.

[00:03:36] Of course your own story will be different and you might have several versions of it depending on the situation but the plain fact is there's a story we tell ourselves and it's not helpful. We feel bad about ourselves. If we're doing this to ourselves, how do we stop?

[00:03:52] How can we flip the script and learn to be more positive? First you need to find some gratitude for your amazingness. There's an inner goodness in yourself that's there all the time. Check on it now. See if you can notice in the area where your heart is

[00:04:09] not only a pain or stress but also a sense of tenderness. This is your tender heart, your basic goodness that's there all the time. It's okay if you don't notice it right now, just check in several times today and see if you can notice that tenderness.

[00:04:25] This is your good heart, the part of you that loves the world, that wants to offer your incredible love to everyone that wants to be happy and not hurt. It's the part that feels hurts so acutely. It's an amazing quality and you were born with it.

[00:04:42] Find gratitude for this goodness and for all your other amazing qualities. List the things about yourself that you're grateful for instead of focusing on the parts you dislike. Second, come up with a mantra to replace your unhelpful story. A mantra is something you can say to yourself repeatedly

[00:05:00] but especially during times when you need it. It's a new story, more helpful than the old one. It's based on the sense of your own inner goodness, the gratitude for the amazing qualities you have. For example, a mantra might be

[00:05:14] I have an amazing heart and the world loves me. The mantra I've been working with is the world craves me and my gift. It helps because it shifts how we see the world. It shifts how we feel about ourselves.

[00:05:29] It's based on this place of gratitude and inner goodness and it radiates out to everything we do. Set yourself a self-care challenge. Taking care of yourself is a loving act and loving yourself in as many ways as you can is a good tonic for the self-harshness

[00:05:48] you've practiced over the years. Set a challenge to do something to care for yourself every day for 30 days. That might include spending time talking with people you love, who give you love. Setting healthy boundaries for yourself, saying no to people, setting limits to

[00:06:06] how much of yourself and your time that you give or using boundaries to take care of your mental and physical health. Do things that make you feel confident from learning a skill that makes you feel competent to walking into a room with your head held tall

[00:06:21] to strolling down the street like a silver-backed gorilla. Get support from others whenever you need it. Asking for help, asking for someone to talk to, going to therapy if it helps, joining a support group, etc. Or do something that helps you cope with stress,

[00:06:38] meditate, go for a walk, exercise, do yoga, take a bath, massage your neck and shoulders, do some deep breathing or drink some hot tea. These are just a few ideas, but you get the picture. Taking care of yourself becomes your default mode

[00:06:56] and when you're taking care of yourself you start to feel better about yourself. With a regular practice of self-compassion, a practice of gratitude towards your amazingness, a mantra that changes how you see yourself and a regular habit of self-care, you'll start to soothe the unhelpful inner voices

[00:07:15] and develop a new, loving relationship with yourself. You just listen to the post titled When You Have A Voice Telling You You're Inadequate by Leo Babada of Zen Abbots, Donnet. Thank you to Leo. I feel like by chance there is a theme this week

[00:07:36] about our thoughts and us redirecting them towards something else that can ultimately reverse these spirals of negativity that we get ourselves into. And while common advice is to meditate, which did come up earlier this week, there are plenty of other ways to work through this.

[00:07:53] Leo mentioned some more to try, a self-care challenge and a little loving-kindness practice. If you're interested in a loving-kindness practice and want some help maybe being guided through it, there are some options. One is to check out our other podcast. It's called Good Sleep,

[00:08:10] and it's an affirmation show. Another is to look up Tong Len, that's T-O-N-G-L-E-N. You can probably find some free videos walking you through one if you have trouble doing it on your own. And I actually walked listeners through one myself when I guest-hosted another podcast.

[00:08:29] If you want that, you can send me a message. You can do that through oldpodcast.com or if you're part of our weekly newsletter, you can just reply to that. I read every reply. And if you send a message,

[00:08:40] I can send you a link to that Tong Len episode. But with that, I hope you're having a great morning, afternoon, or evening, whenever you're listening to this. And I'll see you tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.