I was surprised to find that self-esteem isn’t as straight-forward as I’d thoughtwhat matters more is self-compassion.
This post originally appeared on theCrew Blog.
How Does Self-Esteem Affect Us?
High self-esteem has beenlinked to narcissism, which encourages people to rate themselves higher, subjectively.
It could, in fact, be that good job performance causes high self-esteem.
What Is Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion includeskindness and forgiveness of ourselves.
In fact, people with high levels of self-compassion aremore likely to want to improvethan those with high self-esteem.
How Can We Practice Self-Compassion?
This self-compassion thing sounds pretty good, right?
People with lots of self-compassion still get things done, they’re just nice to themselves along the way.
Sounds like something worth pursuing to me.
So it’s a tricky thing to establish.
There aren’t really hard-and-fast how-to’s on improving your self-compassion.
Reminding yourself thateveryone else makes mistakesas well is a good way to put your own missteps into perspective.
If you’re always learning and improving it’s much easier to find something positive in a bad situation.
To help you express and take note of your feelings, you might want to try someself-compassion writing exercises.
If you’ve got the option to have both, why not, right?
She is a writer atCrewand was previously Buffer’s first Content Crafter and Head of Content at Attendly.
Image adapted fromOstill(Shutterstock) andPSDGraphics.
Photo byJiunn Kang Too(Flickr).
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