The more compassionate you are with yourself, the more compassionate you can be with others.

Whenever we feel we underperform we tend to be hard on ourselves. Maybe we weren’t as patient as we should have, or maybe we buckled under pressure way too early or maybe we keep getting frustrated by something we shouldn’t. It’s good to recognize our shortcomings, it means we’ve stopped blaming circumstances and we started holding ourselves responsibles for our well being. Responsability is a great thing, it’s very empowering.

Once we’re able to tell when we didn’t do as well as we would have liked, the next step is, I think, to realize that we are a work in progress. We are not a finished product. It’s great to hold ourselves to high standards, I think we should, but we should also understand we’re human, which means we’re imperfect.

More times than I’d like to admit I’ve felt unhappy with myself. When that happened I would spend the rest of the day feeling down and wishing that I had been better. Wishing that I could have handled the situation properly.

What I’ve started doing is being grateful that I can be aware of my shortcomings, and if you can too, then that’s a great start. It’s the first step towards being better. Then I try to be as emotionally detached as possible and identify where I underperformed and what I could do next time to handle everything better. Then we have to plan how to perform better next time.

I’m still not 100% sold on the fact that we are a certain way, I’d like to believe that if one is an introvert in some scenarios and wanted to be an extrovert they could, and viceversa. But that doesn’t mean that we should be unhappy because we tend to be this or that. We have to find our strengths and focus on them, everybody has strengths. Sometimes it takes acceptance to be able to see them.

Anyway, these were some of my thoughts on not feeling happy with yourself. What do you think?

The comic for this tought is here.

-Marcos

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