A couple of quick reminders in case you’re among the many of us who could use them:
1. Planning does NOT equal Catastrophizing
Planning is a form of thoughtful doing with a focus on what we hope to be our future. I hope to have a long life and so I plan my money and food and movement around supporting that hope.
Catastrophizing is a form of daydreaming that feels like certainty about forthcoming disasters mixed with magical thinking that says that anxiety now is somehow protective.
I promise you: As incredible and creative and expansive as your brain is, life is exponentially more creative and surprising in all the ways – its delivery of hardships, for sure, and also its generation of surprising delights.
2. Self-Compassion does NOT equal Permissiveness
Self-compassion is acknowledging your own imperfect humanness with the gentle, loving acceptance you might far more easily give to a beloved other in your life.
Permissiveness is allowing yourself to enact (and, often, reenact) behaviors that you know will ultimately detract from your happiness – putting off the work or eating the thing or saying the thing or what-have-you.
While we often confuse these two, thinking we must punish ourselves to motivate ourselves, permissiveness is actually a sneaky form of self-sabotage while self-compassion is a sneaky form of go-juice.
When this masquerades as that – and it often does in this complex world of ours – we inadvertently hamper our route toward bigger and badder.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the key to seeing through the disguises is right there in our feelings. Self-compassion and planning may both happen in the context of discomfort – sadness, disappointment, fear, and even guilt – and yet the way they empower us tends to lift our heads a little higher and straighten our backs a little more.
Stand tall, friend, and you’ll find the way. |
|
