It's mid-January, which means some of you out there may have already stumbled a little bit out of the gate on those New Year's resolutions. If you're anything like me, you know what comes after that. Self-criticism, self-doubt, frustration. "You couldn't do it." "Here's another thing you failed at." "You just aren't good enough."
It's an inevitable feature of our minds. We think we should be able to accomplish something, but the second we face an obstacle in getting there, we descend into a spiral of self-condemnation. This feeling makes any action to achieve our goals even more difficult, as we're now operating under the assumption that we don't have what it takes.
The way out of this cycle is self-compassion, and it's impossible to talk about the modern movement for self-compassion without talking about Kristen Neff.
