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April 20 - April 30, 2025
Feelings are ephemeral and easily swayed by the most basic external circumstances—a rainy day, being hungry or hot, getting a free sample. Instincts are incorruptible. Instincts don’t change based upon your surroundings, mood, or energy level.
Sometimes your instincts tell you to wait and see, to take it slow, to move one inch forward so you can peek around the corner. When your instincts are telling you to give yourself more time before you make a decision, it can feel like you’re taking a passive role in your life. Patience is not passivity.
You can’t force clarity by writing out the pros and cons list for the twentieth time. Gray moments of ambiguity are invitations to trust yourself. If you regularly check in with yourself, when the right thing to do becomes clear, you’ll recognize it.
When you don’t know what the right answer is, use your instincts to identify the wrong answers and move away from them.
The more you distance yourself from the wrong paths, the more likely it is you’ll stumble onto the right ones. It’s okay if you find what’s right for you through stumbling; that’s how a lot of people find what’s right for them.
Listening to your instincts when they speak to you quietly about small things is as critical as listening to your instincts when they scream at you loudly about big things.
Letting go of control and stepping into your power looks like trading the question “What should I do?” for “What are my instincts telling me about this?”
Intentions are expressed not through what you do but through how you do it, not if you do it but why you do it. Your intention is the energy and purpose behind your striving; your goal is what you’re striving for.
Another way to say you’re honoring your intention is that you’re consistently animating your values.
When you operate from an intentional space, the primary source of reward lies in honoring the intention, not in getting credit for it.
When you only set a goal, you win on one day, the day you achieve the goal. When you set an intention, you start winning from day one because you keep getting the opportunity to honor the intention.
There is no other way to rise towards your potential than on your own terms. Letting go of a goal that isn’t aligned with your values isn’t quitting-quitting, it’s power-quitting.
When determining their level of success, maladaptive perfectionists ask, “Am I meeting my goals?” Adaptive perfectionists ask, “Am I living up to my intentions?”
We don’t receive meaning automatically; meaning comes when we understand what’s important to us.
When you learn to be compassionate with yourself no matter what, you carry safety with you wherever you go.
Neff begins her definition of self-compassion in this way, “Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.”[1]
To practice self-kindness, Neff says, instead of judging yourself, criticizing yourself, or feeling pity for yourself, you first need to recognize that you’re hurting. Instead of focusing on your mistake as the primary issue, acknowledge your pain as the primary issue.
Once you acknowledge that you’re in pain, you need to respond to your pain with kindness instead of criticism.
Feeling bad for people without working to understand or connect to them is pity, not compassion. Compassion is active; pity is passive.
Self-compassion makes you feel understood and strengthened; self-pity makes you feel powerless and pathetic. Self-compassion requires kindness. Kindness means you act with generosity and without an agenda.
Think about the last time someone was kind to you—not just polite, but kind. Think about how that kindness melted something in you. You deserve to feel that way now.
If you don’t choose to treat yourself with kindness, what are you choosing instead?
Neff’s second component of self-compassion is common humanity, defined as “recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience—something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to ‘me’ alone.”[3]
The more you see your problems as uncommon, unrelatable, and unnatural, the closer you move towards self-pity, not self-compassion.
Neff’s third component of self-compassion is mindfulness—feeling your feelings while also recognizing that you’re more than what you feel. As Neff explains, “Mindfulness requires that we not be ‘over-identified’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.”[5]
Perfectionists waste so much energy trying to churn their disappointment into something else. We keep asking, “How can I get rid of my disappointment?” The better question is “What else do I also feel?”
A compassionate response is not a response that offers a plan or emphasizes a way to control the situation. A compassionate response is a response that offers connection.
Self-compassion is a resiliency skill that involves acknowledging pain, holding perspective, and acting with kindness. Even if you’re annoying the hell out of yourself, even if you can’t stand yourself, you can still do those three things.
Retreating into your imagination or otherwise disassociating is adaptive in powerless situations. However, the same responses that were adaptive when you were a child with no power become maladaptive later in life, when you do have power.
To simply be seen, accepted, and embraced without conditions is what the child, who is now an adult, has been obsessed with—not perfection. If you didn’t have a sense of emotional safety growing up, that’s what you wanted more than anything.
We’re not playing hot potato with our pain anymore, remember? There’s no agency in blame. Your power lies in practicing self-compassion, then taking ownership over your life now.
Learning a new language is impossibly slow, until it’s not. For what feels like an eternity, you experience the new language from the outside in. If you stay committed, eventually you’ll experience the new language from the inside out.
You stay committed to the language of connection both by practicing self-compassion and by surrounding yourself with people who speak connection fluently.
When you’re not connected to yourself, connecting to others can seem pointless. It’s not.
One study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that watching reruns of your favorite show “buffers against drops in self-esteem and mood and against increases in feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.”[7]
When you’re in a liminal space, you’re in a state of transition. You have left one place and you’re near the entrance to the next, but you’re not quite there yet.
In a liminal realm, your emptiness and your potential are the exact same thing. When you block your emptiness from existing, you block your potential from developing.
You have to have done a lot of grief work to be in a liminal space. Grief is always the admission charge for major transition. You have to let go of the parts of you that you’ve outgrown, hence, the emptiness.
Being in a liminal space is like being in a waiting room with no cell reception and nothing to do but flip through last year’s magazines. It’s relaxing for four minutes tops, then you start to squirm. The calm feels unsettling.
Boredom is a good sign that you’re in a liminal space.
To access power in a liminal space, you need to remember that you’re not passively feeling bad, empty, or bored for no reason. You are actively choosing to stand firm on the threshold of a boundless, more authentic you. Do not retreat from liminal space.
Meeting yourself with compassion instead of punishment is not a one-and-done choice. You have to make it over and over again for your whole life.
Overthinking involves either dwelling on events that have already happened and about which you can do nothing (known as ruminating) or worrying about things that haven’t happened but could theoretically happen, through the lens of a worst-case scenario (known as catastrophizing).
Engaging a broadened perspective is how you exercise power. When you make a perspective shift, you automatically see things in a new way, a way you can’t unsee. Perspective shifts change your thoughts in one fell swoop.
Old ways of thinking can exist alongside new ways of thinking. The point is not to get one brand of thinking to dominate over the other; the point is to stay open enough to understand that your perspective is a choice.
Counterfactual thinking is when your brain creates alternative scenarios for events that have already taken place.
You need upward counterfactuals to generate progress because if you can’t imagine a scenario that would yield a more desirable outcome, you’re not going to try to improve.
Upward counterfactuals also serve a preparative function.[6] You go hiking, and your feet are freezing the entire time. You keep thinking, “If only I would’ve worn warmer socks.” Guess who’ll be bringing warmer socks next time.
Subtractive thoughts yield only one solution, which is to remove X. Additive thoughts rely on creative problem-solving, which is a better approach because it yields a greater number of possible solutions (increasing both personal agency and motivation, which operate in tandem).[8]
Understanding the psychological principle of contrast effects helps clarify how counterfactuals impact satisfaction levels.[11] The term refers to the way your perception or experience changes based on whatever information is most salient to you at the time.
