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Hey there, Maureen Cherna here, founder of the Mindsight Academy, neurocoach to executives, leaders, entrepreneurs, and a neuroleadership trainer using insights from neuroscience to help you deliver results by learning to work smarter, be in control of your brain, manage yours and others' emotions, change behaviors, flourish and exceed expectations. Welcome back to another episode of Lead to Excel Podcast. I am so thrilled to be with you today because we are discussing self-compassion and the impact it has on mental health, especially in the workplace or even amongst business owners. But before we get into that, remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to it. Because it will help other people find it and give them the opportunity to understand how they can rewire their own brain to enable them to achieve their goals. So without wasting any more time, grab your cup of coffee or your drink or whatever that might be, put your feet up and listen in. Do you set yourself ambitious goals, then beat yourself up for failing to meet them? Do you set daily to-do lists and struggle to forgive yourself for not accomplishing the tasks? Maybe like me, you grew up in a culture that put you under pressure to excel. Have you ever found yourself thinking thoughts like, I'm not good enough? I'm not smart enough? In my work as a neurocoach and neuroleadership consultant, I have come across too many people with these self-destructive thoughts and behaviors that unfortunately also shows up at work, causing anxiety, poor leadership, disengaged teams, decreased productivity and outcomes. My focus this week is to enable you to start practicing self-compassion, and I'll give you the reason why. Self-compassion means treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would a friend. Many people struggle with this concept and hold themselves to higher standards than they would expect of other people. Developing self-compassion enables you to recognize and accept your own feelings rather than constantly challenging yourself to do better. Self-compassion helps eliminate the crippling yet common habit of self-criticism and making negative generalizations of yourself. As a leader, you can learn to focus on acknowledging and gradually changing unhelpful thoughts or behavior patterns for yourself and also help others do the same. Research shows that this non-judgmental approach will help you bounce back much faster after major crisis. The question is, why do so many people resist self-compassion and believe that having self-compassion will make them egocentric, self-indulgent, appear weak, and think that unless they are hard on themselves, they will not amount to much because it will lead to them being complacent. This is a very deceptive mindset because research also shows that self-compassion does not lower your standards, but rather treating yourself kindly will help you achieve your dreams and goals much quicker. But self-compassion, in fact, is the foundation for resilience and helps you develop the courage to face hard facts. In taking a constructive rather than critical or harsh attitude towards your efforts as a leader, you build your capacity to navigate challenges and unpredictability. This is where it can get a bit complicated. Some people believe that self-criticism helps to motivate them, which it can do to an extent, but it's important to develop self-awareness so that you can recognize when self-criticism begins to have a negative impact and identifying when it's not actually being helpful. This will help you to pull the reins in and be more compassionate than critical. You cannot show genuine love towards others without first showing kindness to yourself. And it's unfortunate that many people have an easier time being compassionate to others than to themselves. It's understandable for leaders to get caught up in fear, doubt, and criticism when facing critical business decisions that will have a major impact on lives and livelihoods. But developing self-compassion is important to enable you manage your own emotions effectively, to enable you get into the trenches and make the tough decisions when required. Christine Nev, one of the leading researchers on this subject, identified three core elements of self-compassion. They are self-kindness in difficult times, mindfulness, which is paying attention to your circumstances in a mindful, non-obsessive way, that is acknowledging and accepting reality without an emotional judgment. And the third core element is common humanity or the recognition that your struggles are part of the human experience rather than it being unique to you. If you are low in self-compassion, you're using too much emotional energy thinking about the negative stuff and not enough addressing the reality of issues. Remember that you see the world not as it is, but as you are. Research shows that the self-compassionate are more psychologically resilient and better able to regain emotional well-being after adversity. The research also showed that people who used self-compassionate language after their divorce, for example, recovered more quickly than those who had a more critical, you know, the self-pitying whime outlook on the relationship's failure, according to a study done in 2012. It's not what you face in life, it's how you relate to yourself when you face very hard times that determines how quickly you bounce back. Many relationships fail because one person gives their all to their partner, they are hard on themselves, they have no self-compassion or low self-compassion for themselves, and they cannot sustain this. It gets to a point that their mental health starts suffering, and sadly, many times it leads to relationship breakups. The question is how do you develop self-compassion? You can cultivate self-compassion by developing emotional intelligence. You can also cultivate it through meditation and acting compassionately towards others heighten self-compassion. Let's talk about self-compassion in the workplace. Because it's become quite evident in our current climate that compassion helps build your capacity to navigate challenges and unpredictability better as a leader by equipping you to develop the courage to adapt in difficult times rather than having a critical mindset and attitude towards your effort as a leader. This ultimately improves productivity and job satisfaction. In an organizational culture where performance and results are dominant, questions such as have I done my job well enough, am I good enough can arise and make people feel pressured to become self-judgmental. So self-compassion can serve as an important personal resource in such challenging circumstances to strengthen the control leaders have over how they deal with stresses in their work environment and how they motivate themselves and others on the job. It's my hope in this podcast to give you the skills to enable you to cultivate self-compassion so that you can gain the internal resource that you need to thrive in your role or business. If you or someone in your organization would benefit from self-compassion training, I encourage you to explore our Emotional Intelligence for Leadership course at the Mindsight Academy. I will leave a link in the description. Does self-compassion make you a better leader? And that's a question that is actually worth addressing here. The challenges of the coronavirus pandemic have drawn attention to valuable leadership attributes, compassion and self-compassion. In order to help organizations and businesses adapt to these unusual circumstances, leaders have had to not just look at the big picture but also recognize that they work with humans who are unique individuals. And this is why I'm so passionate about helping leaders and organizations to be more human. Because this will help you maximize your brain power to enable you to transform how you lead, how you work, and how you live. Studies show that the benefits of self-compassion aligns with several important leadership skills. Emotional intelligence is a massive one because we've seen a lot of studies that indicate that people who exercise self-compassion have higher levels of emotional intelligence. They are able to remain calm better when under pressure and tend to experience more happiness and optimism. Emotional intelligence helps you develop self-compassion by equipping you to cope with life's challenges, lower levels of stress and anxiety, develop healthy habits such as a healthy diet and exercise, and build compassionate relationships. Resilience is another skill. Self-compassion helps you navigate setbacks, regain clarity, and enable you to move forward productively to build resilience in uncertain times. Being self-compassionate will also help you nurture a growth mindset and help you develop personal growth as you become more likely to formulate specific plans to reach your goals rather than avoid challenges which are characteristics of fixed mindset individuals. Self-compassion will enable you as a leader to act responsibly and morally by enabling you to be conscientious and accountable even when you have to make difficult decisions. And this ultimately helps you build trust as well. Leaders who are able to model compassion for themselves build trust and psychological safety that leads to higher engagement and sustainable high performance in teams and organizations. Compassionate leaders are able to understand what their teams are experiencing and then equipped to implement flexible, innovative ways to support them in their role on their tasks. It's important to regularly check in with yourself because if you're not paying attention to your own needs, you will not be able to understand what others need. Take care of yourself, especially when you feel tired, depleted, overwhelmed by prioritizing sleep, rest, and refreshing yourself. Pay attention to what you need for yourself so that you can go out and serve and support others more effectively. This actually helps you set an example for others to be open about how they are feeling to ensure that they get the support that they need. Model the behavior you want your people to have, they will pick up on it and it will go a long way in establishing a growth mindset culture for your team and your organization. So let's look at how you can build self-compassion. Using the core elements of self-compassion are very useful. Self-kindness. This is the easiest place to start by practicing a 5 to 20 minute exercise that you can integrate into your day, reminding yourself of your key strengths, and you can just focus on two key strengths or on two things that you love about yourself. The key is to be kind to yourself. Ask yourself the question, what would be kind right now? Then practice mindfulness. Learn to manage your emotions to enable you to stay calm during challenging times. Draft an encouraging letter to yourself from your inner compassionate voice, answering the following questions. What would your inner mentor say about the challenges you're facing? What might they suggest and how would they encourage you? What would you tell a friend who is struggling with a similar situation? And just draft a nice letter to yourself. Now, how to put the common humanity coin to practice. It's reminding yourself that you're not alone. Other leaders are facing similar challenges. Recognizing that you're not alone supports your well-being and your sense of connection with others, helping you consider the people potentially impacted by your actions. These exercises can be practiced quickly without anyone even knowing that you're doing them. Another way that you could implement self-compassion is to rewire your brain. Spend between 5 to 10 minutes each day meditating on self-compassion because what you think and pay attention to changes the structures and functions of your brain to make these habits become easier. This repeated action will help you build your capacity for self-compassion as you train your brain to incline towards self-kindness and making it a more habitual response when you're under pressure. As we face a world that's more uncertain than ever, the world needs leaders who look for common humanity with their employees, with their clients and customers. Leaders who can connect and uplift others are so needed, and this starts by exercising kindness first and foremost towards yourself. Connectedness is important for well-being, and this is why this pandemic, by infringing on our natural survival need, is creating another pandemic, mental health. We are wired to connect. So what can we do? The key is to develop self-compassion because self-compassion is a powerful predictor of mental health. In a report in 2013, Kristin Neff reported that self-compassion is negatively associated with self-criticism, depression, anxiety, rumination, thought suppression, and neurotic perfectionism while being positively associated with life satisfaction and social connectedness. Increased self-compassion has been found to predict enhanced psychological health over time. So I really hope that you make it a point to start from today to start practicing self-compassion. Love yourself, be kind to yourself. You so deserve it. Thank you once again for tuning in. And remember that if you haven't subscribed to this podcast, click on the button wherever you listen to it so that you don't miss an episode. And I would really appreciate you leaving a review as well or even a comment on the podcast or ideas of topics that you want me to talk about in future. I've got some exciting episodes coming up with some interesting guests that you really wouldn't want to miss. So, in this climate, wherever you are, do remember to keep safe, look after yourself, and I truly wish you perfect health. Stay limitless, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Bye for now.