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December 29, 2023 - January 20, 2024
intention is more sophisticated.
Intentions are expressed not through what you do but through how you do it, not if you do it but why you do it.
intention is the energy and purpose behind your striving; your goal is wh...
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honoring your intention is that you’re consistently animating your values. If kindness is a value, you’re not just kind when people are watching, you’re kind all the time. You’re not kind because you get credit, and you don’t need external validation to tell you whether you’re being kind or not; you already know.
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 set an intention, you’re giving yourself a way to feel success, satisfaction, and enjoyment during the process, not just in the afterglow of goal attainment.
adaptive perfectionists find a way to enjoy the process of striving towards a goal, whereas maladaptive perfectionists don’t. Perhaps that’s because adaptive perfectionists set intentions and goals, whereas maladaptive perfectionists only set goals.
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. People who don’t set intentions will do some cutthroat shit to achieve their goals, then call their behavior “ambition.” This doesn’t happen because they’re terrible people, it happens because they’re desperate for validation....
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Letting go of a goal that isn’t aligned with your values isn’t quitting-quitting, it’s power-quitting.
You can build your idea of success around what’s important to you, or you can build your idea of success around what’s important to other people who are not living inside your mind, your heart, and your life. The power to honor that which brings you meaning is yours.
the false belief that we learn more through punishment and suffering than we do through compassion and joy,
we don’t understand that self-compassion is the primary solution.
Neff wrote the book on self-compassion (several books, in fact) and was the first to examine self-compassion from an empirical standpoint.
being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.”
self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.
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. As Neff explains, “We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time.”[2]
Self-compassion begins with giving yourself permission to encounter what you feel. Once you acknowledge that you’re in pain, you need to respond to your pain with kindness instead of criticism.
Compassion means “to suffer with”;
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.”
that we all encounter pain, we all get lost, we all have drama in our families—we all have so much happening behind the scenes.
giving yourself permission to feel disappointed while also acknowledging that “disappointed” is not the only thing you feel.
The second thing clients come to acknowledge is that their desire was never to be perfect; it was only to be loved. To simply be seen, accepted, and embraced without conditions is what the child, who is now an adult, has been obsessed with—not perfection.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is
belonging and decreases loneliness;
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.”
your favorite book, listening to a podcast by a host you adore,
Liminal spaces are necessary for personal growth. When you’re in a liminal space, you have to allow yourself to exist in between dichotomies without putting pressure on yourself to pick a side.
For perfectionists who are losing control and gaining power, this looks like allowing yourself to be in the transition space of no longer feeling that your worth hinges on external validation and yet not feeling fully confident that you’re worthy of all the love, joy,
freedom, dignity, and connection the world co...
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Live your worries through, and your spirit will wake from its fever,
When you ruminate, you mistake replay for reflection. When you catastrophize, you mistake worrying for preparation.
Perspective shifts change your thoughts in one fell swoop.
The most powerful perspective shift you could ever make is understanding that you’re already whole and perfect. While you may sometimes need medication or coffee or music or therapy or some other kind of ameliorative tinkering to get you thriving, that doesn’t mean you’re broken; that means you are a human being alive in the world.
Upward counterfactuals
PROBLEM-BASED: If only I had had more ways to adjust for the higher production cost, I could have maintained the profit margin. CHARACTER-BASED: If only I weren’t such an idiot, I could have maintained the profit margin.
easier it is for you to imagine the counterfactual scenario unfolding, the more influence the counterfactual thought will have over your emotional reactivity in either direction (negative or positive).
The outcome is the same in both scenarios (you gotta catch the next bus), but you’re not basing your emotional state on the outcome; you’re basing it on the intensity of your counterfactual thought.[10]
The term refers to the way your perception or experience changes based on whatever information is most salient to you at the time. For example, if everything in a store is more than one hundred
When you become brave enough to risk failure, you’re going to play with some heavy hitters and you’re going to lose. The loss is proof that you’re not allowing yourself to be intimidated by the risk of unknown outcomes, you’re bold enough to go for it, and you’re allowing yourself to fail forward. Yes, your reflexes will kick in; that’s what reflexes do. You don’t have control over your unconscious reactions, but you do have the power to choose a conscious response.
Self-imposed upper limits on what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot be are control tactics. You’re trying to control your vulnerability to getting hurt.
Keeping your world small is a protective mechanism enacted by the part of you that does not understand that when you’re connected to your inherent worth, you have a built-in protection system. Yes, you will fall, and yes, you will feel the fall. But because you know your worth, the fall will not define you.
What matters is that you’re living your life according to your values.
There’s no point in comparing yourself to others because for one thing,
And for another, no one has the exact same set of ...
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Enacting your power looks like compassionately telling the part of yourself that wants to keep your world small the following message: What hurts me more than f...
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Anticipatory joy
event doesn’t need to continue for you to continue to extract enjoyment from it.
“Often the threat of being hurt and actually being hurt are experienced in the same way.”[25] Nothing is happening, and yet you are distressed.
Sustainable strategies for growth are marked by subtlety, not aggression. Incrementalism—the idea that change faithfully made in small degrees adds up to significant progress—is an example of a subtle approach to growth.
