Hello there, my friend, welcome to the Mindset for Life Podcast. I'm glad you're here. And if you're here, that means you want to know something about mindset and what we're going to talk about today, the topic is self-compassion.

Now normally, my podcast focuses on mindset, and typically we're talking about positive mindset. Like how to wake up happy, how to get out of bed excited in the morning, something like that. But today, we're going to talk about self-compassion. This is an interesting new concept for some people, so I hope you'll stay with me.

Achievement, habits, routines, strategies, attitudes; these are all tools to be our best. To move forward, to achieve our goals, to do things that we never thought we could do. And they serve us well most of the time. But as you know, life is like the waves on a sandy beach; it actually ebbs and flows. The tide of our lives rolls in and out. Sometimes things are going very well. Sometimes we're succeeding. Our efforts will lead to those achievements and the changes that we want to have.

And sometimes we experience the totally unexpected. Perhaps it is that something just didn't turn out the way we planned. Or there's an unexpected stall or interruption in our progress or our plans. And sometimes it's much more. Perhaps it's a permanent change, loss. There's grief and pain. We're not really sure what to do. How do we talk to ourselves in times like these?

Over the past six months, I've had a lot of family things happening. About six months ago, my mother had a health change. And now she's at home in hospice care and everything is different. It's been a truly emotional time and not one that we anticipated or really wanted to welcome into our lives. I stayed overnight because mom's health was not good. Things were not looking great. And we just wanted to both be with her, so my sister and I were there. And I probably got about four hours asleep. I finally realized it was time to go home and to meet my husband, who was coming home from a motorcycling trip with some friends.

He had a major motorcycle accident. The long story short is that we ended up going to the emergency room and found that he had broken eight ribs on the left side and bruised a lung. He'll have many more weeks of recovery right now.

I put these two events together because one was unfolding over a long time and I was engaged in that. The other one came suddenly.

And both events with my mother and my husband were things that none of us would have wanted in our lives. We wouldn't have invited the health challenge with our mother. And we would never have invited my husband to have a motorcycle accident. Both of these things present a lot of challenges,  ongoing, and it would be easy to be self-critical of a lot of things. It would be easy to be self critical of like not measuring up to helping people, or I need to work harder. Why am I not getting enough done? Or something like that. There are a lot of thoughts that any of us in these situations could be having.

And some of us have inner thoughts that are super unkind, like a mean, inner critical thought. We might give grace to everyone else if they were in a similar situation, but not to ourselves.

We're not sure how to move through that experience.

And we might forget things. We might struggle to achieve at the rate we used to, we have to keep going to work. We might take a few days off, and then we have to get back into the flow and go back to work. There's a lot going on with all of this.

This idea of self-compassion is a really helpful antidote to all of the angsty feelings and the negative inner critic that might be coming in during situations like this, or even those feelings of deep despair that we're having. I'd like to give you a few tips. And then I'm going to talk a little bit more about self-compassion. So  If you're going through it right now, through something hard, something really challenging or unexpected,