Those who love us, strengthen us. When others doubt us, it can diminish us. And yet, we can doubt and diminish ourselves all too easily. When faced with difficulties, if we can feel good about ourselves, it gives us an inner well of strength. When we befriend ourselves, we increase two of our precious, personal qualities – our self-respect and our self-worth. Being more caring to ourselves, helps strengthen our well of self-respect that helps to protect us from the harsh and unkind opinions of others. Many people who respect themselves, show care and respect for others. We sense that they feel comfortable in their own skin Their self-care, creates a magnetic resonance that draws others to them. They feel good about themselves, and they help others to feel good too. For some of us, caring for our friends and family is easy but caring for ourselves is hard.
One
Accept our power
When I was sixteen, my mum asked me…“Who was driving my bus?”
She told me that “if you give that power to someone else, be careful who you give it to.”
Her question often comes back to me. Sometimes I haven’t felt like I’ve been driving my own bus, but I didn’t consciously choose to give the power to someone else, it feels like it just happened without me noticing. The ‘bus question’ has been a useful metaphor to reflect on at different points in my life, marriage and career. Sometimes I’ve focused on the road ahead and make clear decisions on the direction I wanted to take. At other times, my bus has meandered on autopilot. More recently, I’ve thought less about the bus and more about the driver. I need to look after the bus and take care of the driver. “Who’s driving the bus?” has different meanings. It can mean giving control to other people, or when I feel more introspective, it can mean a different part of myself. In all of us, there are different parts of our personalities, different parts of ourselves, with different wants and needs. Some Psychologists have come up with different names for different parts of ourselves – Jung offered that our ‘hearts or heads’ can lead us. Other Psychologists, including Schwartz and Assagioli, offer the concept of subpersonalities with different needs, hopes, dreams, desires and values.. The kinder we are to the driver, and pay attention to our inner drives and desires, the more we will progress our lives in the directions we want to go in and the journey will be more enjoyable.
When choices and decisions are aligned with our values, we will feel happier. When our hearts drive the bus, we will feel good about people we want to join us on our life journey. We’ll accept that at different times in our lives, people will get on our bus and then get off again. Same with different jobs and careers. Throughout our lives, we will make decisions about the direction of our journey. Occasionally, we need to stop and ask the driver how they’re doing. Ignoring the driver, not paying attention to their voice and feelings, is the opposite of being our own best friend. But how and when do we pay attention to ourselves? When we do, it helps us to recognise if something isn’t working and enables us to think about a change of direction. This requires us not only to be the bus driver, but also to be the like the mind-mechanic who gets under the bonnet of our own psychological engine. Learning to do this, puts us more firmly in the driving seat. We feel more empowered to take self-responsibility for all aspects of our lives. This empowerment means that we are more self-aware and able to make changes when things aren’t working.
But there are times in life when the thought of driving a bus feels daunting. Sometimes, we’ll feel too tired and we’ll want to give someone else the keys and ask them to drive. That’s okay if it is a conscious choice and we are happy to accept the consequences that come with this? Sometimes the appointed driver will do a good job and take the bus in a direction that will make us happy. Or, we may discover that we’ve given our keys to a driver with different values from us and it won’t feel great. A more troubling scenario is that we find that our bus is heading for a different part of the country entirely.
We can find a helpful explanation of why we do this (give away our keys, our power) in a theory about control. “Locus of Control” theory, explains this well. Julian Rotter (1966) identified that some people are daunted by the aspect of driving their own bus and they’d prefer not to do it. They don’t want to own their choices and decisions. They value others’ opinions, more than their own. There may be different reasons for this. Perhaps no one has helped them to listen within. Life circumstances have led to them putting others’ needs before their own. Some people feel confused when they have different or conflicting needs within them and that makes listening and choosing difficult. Rotter described this as having an “external locus of control.” Rotter also observed that other people, did not give their away their control or choices to others. He described them as having an “internal locus of control”. People who had an internal locus of control preferred making their own decisions and firmly held on to the keys to their bus. Rotter did not suggest that having an internal or external locus of control was a bad or good thing, nor was it a fixed thing or a trait that cannot be changed. It means there are different ways of approaching situations in life, like a pendulum. We can swing one way or the other. But we also need to still the swing sometimes. Developing the ability to be the still point at the top of the pendulum is important. When we slow the swing down and reach the stillness we can listen. It is in stillness that we decide if we want to give the keys to the next phase of our lives to someone else and let them decide our direction.
One way to neglect being our own best friend is to continually give the keys to others and ignore our own desires. As we journey through life, we meet and befriend many people. Some of them will get on our bus or we’ll get on others’ buses. Life is about relationships. Our ability to tune in to our needs and help others meet their needs is important. When we meet people that we click with, we might want to board their bus and set off on a journey together, hoping it will be fun and rewarding. Sometimes we’ll get on another’s bus and wonder if we’ve made the right choice? These are the times, when befriending ourselves and listening carefully to our own bus driver is important. When we are happy with our choices, we feel comfortable in our own skin. That means accepting how we are, where we are, who we are. It means being kind to ourselves and liking ourselves, the way that we like our best friends.
Two
Being kind begins in our mind
We can reduce self-neglect and increase self-care by learning the skill of introspection. This helps us to build self-awareness and it is a pre-requisite to increasing self-care and self-responsibility. Introspection means slowing down and paying attention to what is going on within us. Paying attention to little things, such as the how we talk to ourselves, paying attention to the words we use, noticing the tone with which we speak to ourselves. When we notice the inner voice, we can begin to notice how our internal dialogue affects our feelings, our mood, our choices and feelings.
Are we encouraging towards ourselves or critical? We need both. The Gottman Institute identified that a ratio of 5:1 (positive to negative comments) predicts long, happy relationships. An 8:1 (negative to positive) predicts divorce. Continually criticising our friends, might damage their confidence. Likewise, continual self-criticism will diminish our self-confidence. We can demoralise or demotivate our-self with the tone we use when we speak to ourselves. Tone is powerful and it impacts on our body. We can use tone to create a downward spiral or elevate our emotions. Why? In our mind and body everything is connected. Our minds send signals to our body through our central nervous systems. Our body sends signals back to the mind. Within the central nervous system is the vagus nerve. The word vagus stems from vagrant, meaning to wander. This nerve is wandering into every area of our bodies – every muscle, sinew, organ and cell. We can send messages of harmony through our nervous system with our tone of voice and choice of words. Or we can terrorise our own nervous system. It’s up to us. We can decide what attention and messages we want to give our body. Is it gentleness or harsh criticism? The skill of introspection gives us the means to pay attention to our own thinking and our own self talk. If we decide not to do this, we dull our self-awareness and without that we cannot self-manage or take responsibility for ourselves. An un-managed mind, left to its own devices, can be unwittingly unkind and unfriendly. Find your kind begins with listening to our own mind.
Three
Stop self-neglect
We neglect ourselves by disconnecting from the communication from our body. Neglect comes from Latin and means disregard. Literally “to not see.” We ignore what we see, what we sense and this diminishes our faculty for insight. We stop seeing ourselves when we continually look outwards at others. We don’t look in mirrors and we can become invisible to ourselves. This would be the equivalent of not giving our friend eye-contact when we are speaking to them and looking away when they are talking to us. It wouldn’t take long before our friend would feel uncomfortable as a result of our neglectful behaviour.
The second sense we ignore is our sense of hearing. We don’t listen to ourselves. Imagine being with a friend who tells you that they feel uneasy about something. We ignore what they’ve said and change the conversation. Or imagine how hurt our friends might feel if we said “I don’t want to hear how you feel.” Our inner voice can guide us to make good choices if we listen to it.
We might overlook sensations and feelings in our body. Our body communicates with us. We might feel tension across our shoulders, a knot in our stomach or have a constant sore heads. Our bodies communicate when something is out of balance in our lives. We ignore our emotions and changes in energy. We feel dispirited at work or drained in relationship and ignore the feelings that are pulling us down and sinking our spirits.
We would never neglect our friends in this way. A dear friend of mine is in love with her new puppy. She is elated. I can see that her eyes are bright and her heart is light with puppy love. If I tell her I couldn’t care less about her puppy, it would hurt her feelings and diminish our friendship. Self-neglect is no different. If we do not pay attention to what’s going on inside and don’t ask ourselves questions. Or, ignore our answers. We refuse to work out what we want and what we don’t want. We want to leave that to someone else, hoping they will sort it all out for us. They rarely do? Again, I refer back to Mum’s advice ‘be careful who you choose to do that”.
Four
Be good to your mood
When we are unkind toward ourselves, it can impact our mood. Developing strategies for managing our mood can help us to find our way back to a positive frame of mind. People around us can tell if we are in a good mood or a foul mood. Freud famously said “we leak what we don’t speak.” Managing our mood is a hallmark of maturity. If our friends aren’t in a good mood, we can help to lift their mood by reminding them of their great qualities and help them to get back to a positive frame of mind. When our friends are in a bad mood, we wouldn’t join in and agree with their poor opinion of themselves. “Yes, you’re rubbish at that. I think you’re worthless.”
We can manage our mood by creating a mood-management system. A system implies that there are a few connected parts that work together. Part of our mood management system can be early warning signals that can alert us to possibility that we are driving down the road of worthlessness. A good mood-management system could act like a governance process in a business that oversees things. Good management assesses situations and makes changes if necessary. Mood management skills work in the same way. We look at the challenges ahead of us and ask ourselves “What needs to be done and what resources will we need?’ If there’s a tough week ahead, we can manage ourselves and our energy by getting to bed earlier. If we’re feeling drained, making sure we plan some activities that lifts our spirits. This can be the simplest of pleasures, watching an uplifting film, or making time for a favourite hobby or person.
The Psychologist Maureen Gaffney, writes that a function of mood management is to assess our perceived supply lines. She suggests that we should ask yourselves a question. “Given what I need to do, do I have enough physical, psychological, emotional, mental and social resources to deal with it?” If the answer is yes, it is more likely that a good mood will follow because we’ll feel in control, ready to drive the bus. If not, we can at least recognise that we need to do something, in order to prevent a negative mood taking over. If the challenge faced is big and our resources are low, then rescheduling might be an option. We can manage our moods by reducing contact with others who bring our mood down. Mood management might enable us to recognise that we need some more time and encourage us to ask for more time or just space to get away when we’re feeling overwhelmed.
The mood management system can send a signal to our bus driver that “we’ve spent enough time dwelling on that, it’s affecting our mood. Time to focus on something more life-giving.”
For many of us, having an inner dialogue on mood can be difficult. We might prefer to work a bad mood out of our system though going for a run or doing yoga. We can manage our minds, by changing our body. Shifting attention to our physical well-being is great way of being kind to ourselves and our mood.
One practical mood management task is to create lists of things we hold dear. This process can shift our mood from a negative state to a more positive one. We can list fifty favourite places or fifty people we love or fifty favourite memories. By re-focusing on things that are life-giving for us, there is knock on effect in our emotions and we begin to feel better.
Five
Tend and befriend
This means giving or allowing ourselves some. We all have simple pleasures that make us feel good. They don’t need to be extravagant. It can be an early night, time to sit and a favourite book, watch a movie, walk in the woods, watching snow fall, watching the sunrise, spending time in our garden, being by water, sitting at a coal fire or favourite park. Think back to things that we loved doing as children – what made life fun for us? Be-friending and tending to ourselves, activates our parasympathetic nervous system. This is where the expression “tend and befriend” comes from. Unlike our sympathetic nervous system which is ready for fight, flight or freeze, our para-sympathetic nervous system is activated by activities that soothe and relax us. We can’t escape all the challenges of life so it is helpful to find strategies to activate this part of our body’s nervous system. Deep, slow breathing encourages a feeling of expansion in our bodies and this allows the body’s own soothing process to relax and heal.
Following these five suggestions; drive our own bus, be kind to our mind, stop self-neglect, be good to our mood and tend and befriend help us keep strong in the face of negativity and give us ways to build our own self-worth. They will help us to be less reliant on the opinions of others and encourage us to pave our own paths with love, meaning and purpose.
Time to...
Reflect
- Reflect on situations and people that are live-giving or life-draining – so that you can manage your exposure to each in a positive, life-giving way.
Action
- Plan one activity a week for the next four weeks that you will undertake to honour and be kind to yourself. When you have completed them, repeat. It only takes eight weeks to build a new habit. Make kindness (to your Self) a happy habit.
- Write in a journal or on capture on a phone, a list of the things that made you happy in each decade of life.
