You deserve your own compassion

​Why is it so difficult to extend compassion and forgiveness to ourselves? My journey with self-compassion has been challenging for a variety of reasons...mostly, because I expected myself to be PERFECT .... All. The. Damn. Time. I expected myself to be perfect, even when perfection wasn't realistic (which, if we're being honest, perfection is rarely realistic!).

I used to have zero tolerance for mistakes or failure. When I did mess up, I was incredibly hard on myself.... mentally (and sometimes verbally) judging, criticizing, and berating myself. The negative self-talk would run rampant!

It took me a long time to understand that mistakes and "failures" are actually a good thing. Because if we are messing up, it means we are trying. We are choosing. We are taking action. We are taking risks. We're learning and growing.

We actually do most of our learning during the challenging parts of life. In our mistakes and failures we learn what works and what doesn't. We learn what's important and what's not. Through our actions, choices, mistakes and failures, we learn about ourselves.

In reality, there is no perfection in change. No matter how badly we want to change our behaviors and make better choices for our life and for our self, it is all too easy to fall back into old patterns. It takes a lot of inertia to implement new habits because it's *easier* to keep doing what we are doing rather than changing our behavior. This is NORMAL and doesn't make us a failure. Change is hard.

I like to approach change from the mindset of "practice." I will keep practicing the new behaviors until they become my new natural choice. Sometimes this takes days, weeks, or months. Sometimes it takes a year. It depends on what the change is and what else is going on in our life. As we experience setbacks, challenges, mistakes and failures, let's open to the idea of extending ourselves patience, compassion, and love. Because we deserve it.