Last night I read an advert for an online event by Kristen Neff on Facebook. It was titled Self Compassion for Helping Professionals: Caring for Others Without Losing Yourself. This got me thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague earlier in the day. She is going through a lot of challenges at the moment, both at work and in our home life. At the end of the conversation she said that when life gets challenging she finds comfort in helping others. She is so correct that is exactly what I do, I go into super sensitive rescue mode. When life is challenging it is comforting to immerse yourself in other people’s difficulties, and support them. It answers our narrative of ourselves as being caring compassionate human beings, whilst distracting us from our own troubles.
In truth you are not helping anyone. Our support we give to others is often very directive and short term. When I am in this state of mind I will often go into problem solving mode, seeking to find a solution for the person in front of me. I want to fix them, because if I fix them it will make me feel better. It will give me a sense of control, in a world where I feel increasingly out of control. At best it will work in the short term. The person feels supported, responds well to my problem solving approach and they are very grateful to me, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. However I have to go back to facing my world, for which I do not have an answer. At worst the person I am helping does not feel heard and becomes frustrated with the advice I am giving them and leaves feeling unsupported, which clearly in turn makes me feel worse.
When I fall into this mode it is so easy to lose myself in this desire to help others in the belief that it will make me feel better and restore me without me having to understand what is happening in my own world. I am pretty certain that this happens to all of us, and not just those of us that work in obvious helping professions, but anyone that provide a service to others. I suppose that can include all of us in one way of another, as we all attend to the needs of other people to a greater or lesser extent.
How do we all then guard against losing ourself?
From my experience it is an incremental process of forming habits of self-care and being prepared to be as compassionate to myself as I am to others. That I would say is incredibly difficult to do, and therefore requires you to form a habit of self-compassion through practice. I started with noticing when I was being self-critical, to be honest I was shocked and continue to be shocked at our unreasonable I am towards myself. Once I was able to be conscious of my thoughts and recognise my inner critic, I could then practice asking myself if I would hold others to the same standard I am holding myself to, in particular my loved ones. If I wouldn’t then could I hold myself to the same standard and offer the same level of compassion to myself as I would to them. This takes time and continual practice. I still slip into extreme self-criticism especially when life is extremely challenging.
Next I took time to get to know what is important to me. I have talked about this a lot and I cannot emphasise the importance of this enough. I use my values as a guide for all the actions I take, this level of awareness has been a gamechanger. Being clear what I value helps me everyday to understand the emotions I am feeling, and therefore help me identify the needs that are not being met that are driving these emotions. If you are not clear what your values are there are a number of exercises available including in a number of blogs I have previously written. I also provide a 1:1 values sessions either as a one off or part of a coaching programme.
Once you are equipped with the ability to be more self-compassionate and be able to be curious about why you think and feel what you think and feel, based on the values you hold, you can then start to make changes in your own life that ensure you remain connected with yourself and therefore be able to connect effectively with others. People then get the real you helping and supporting them in a consistent compassionate way without the baggage of your personal pain.
I offer a programme of coaching called Connected Living which takes you step by step through this process to ensure the habits you start to stick for you. If you want to know more please contact via the platform you accessed this from, or email me via matt@mattycoach71.com
Connected Coaching 