Especially during these pandemic times it’s important to relief the pressure we put on ourselves and to be more gentle and more compassionate towards us. Besides the motivational advices that come with the purpose of self-help and advocate the need for doing more, it is important to look beyond objectives. Personal development doesn’t come always when we get ahead of ourselves. This tendency often leads to feelings of guilt and self-depreciation when we don’t achieve what we expected to.

Here are three advices that could help you to show more compassion towards yourself: 

1. Adapt your expectation to the constraints of reality. The highest disappointment comes when we have high and rigid expectations. The key word here is “rigid”. It is not bad to have high expectations, to want to thrive in your domain or in your personal life. But when this is the ultimate goal, no matter what, we risk to face a high disappointment when things are not under our control. When circumstances are not that favourable, the healtiest approach would be to reduce the expectations and to adopt a realistic strategy. Being in relationship with the reality is an important sign of mental health, and it doesn’t concern only the rational part, but the emotional and motivational ones as well.

• Take a momentum to appreciate the achievements you’ve made during these time as well as to show empathy for you. Being at the end of one year and at the beginning of another one, it is a moment of retrospective and you should take profit to highlight and recognize your achievements, no matter how small they are. Recognizing even the most unsignificant aspects of you life (apparently unsignificant), you succeed to focus on the positive part and to reward yourself. Besides the achievements, try to remember the effort you put in order to realize a project, as well as the energy invested. Even though you haven’t reached the expected level of performance, all these experiences could be valuable lessons for next year. You have now the opportunity to take a look at yourself from the outside, to be the witness to the film of last year, in which you were the main character.  For sure you are seeing all the struggles and the difficulties and you are not in the position of perceiving you as a human being, sometimes vulnerable. Show for some moment a little empathy for yourself.   

• Show gratitude for the good things that have happened in your life during the past times, as well as for the good present ones. Even the challenges we faced could have represented an apportunity for evolution and development and we should be grateful. All these situations provided us the opportunity to develop and to express a particular strength, to evolve especially at spiritual level. If we practice gratitude and start to appreciate people around us, things, events, our health, we definitely nurture a positive attitude towards life itself.   

Being compassionate can really improve your life in many ways, from making you feel happy to helping you get along with others better. You should start with yourself!