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Bite-sized chunks of wisdom about self-leadership for you to chew on.
How to Increase Your Powers of Compassion
Episode 33
Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.
Kate Arms:
Today I want to talk about compassion, what it is, why it's important and how we can cultivate greater compassion.
And I'm really interested in not only cultivating greater compassion for each other, which I think the world desperately needs, but also creating a sense of compassion for ourselves that is constantly there.
We are imperfect human beings, all of us. And if we don't have compassion for ourselves, then when we feel shame because we haven't met our expectations for ourselves or for other people, we can fall into a trap of toxic shame. Toxic shame becomes a cycle where we feel shame and then we beat ourselves up about it and then we are under threat from ourselves. And when we're under threat, then we get scared.
When we are scared, we are not at our creative, loving best. And so in order to actually be able to love and have those relationships that are grounded in openness and honesty and integrity and actual connection with each other, we need to have compassion for ourselves.
Compassion and shame together can actually be great motivators of incredible personal growth, because shame is a natural occurring response to having disappointed ourselves or having disappointed others. When we believe that there is a version of ourselves that is better than who we were in a previous moment, we become shameful. And when we have that shame and compassion for our failings, then we have the opportunity to look at ourselves and say, "Okay, I didn't live up to my goals for myself last time. What can I do differently next time? And how will I move forward?" And it becomes a learning opportunity, not an opportunity to berate ourselves.
We all fail from time to time. We all miss the mark. None of us lives up to our expectations all the time. And healthy shame works with compassion to actually fuel our growth. So if you tend to be someone who shames yourself or shames others, these practices of cultivating compassion are incredibly valuable. They will transform your relationship with yourself and your relationship with other people.
So first I want to actually define compassion. Compassion is when we feel with somebody in their suffering. It's different from pity because with pity we take a distanced perspective and we see ourselves as not having the suffering, not feeling the suffering. We are better than that in our relationship to the feelings. And so when we pity somebody, we might feel bad on their behalf, we might feel bad that they feel bad, but we don't feel their feelings with them.
Empathy and compassion, as distinguished by Oren Jay Sofer whose definitions I really love, the difference between empathy and compassion is that empathy is when we feel with other people no matter what they're feeling. We can have empathy for someone's joy. We can have empathy for someone's delight. We can have empathy for someone's mischievousness and gleefulness and simple happiness or contentment.
Compassion, however, is that subset of empathy where we are with them in their suffering or as they suffer. Now, the difference between healthy compassion and toxic compassion is that in healthy compassion we feel with them and we know that the circumstances are theirs and not ours. And so, we have enough distance that we don't get sucked into being swallowed whole by those feelings.
If we have not learned to separate ourselves from our feelings and we think of ourselves as just being this experience of feelings, it can be very, very difficult to feel compassion or empathy. Because what we actually experience is that our identity is other people's feelings. And if we aren't aware of our own feelings, our own internally generated sense of self and feelings based on our own experience, it can be overwhelming to let somebody else have feelings in our space and to stretch ourself open to feeling with them.
So part of being able to develop true compassion is also doing the work to build your own sense of identity, which is where compassion for yourself is very, very powerful. Because when you reflect and spend time with yourself so that you get to know what your inner experience is, then it becomes easier to separate your inner experience from their experience that is influencing you.
The heart of a truly powerful relationship is one where you each have your own individual identities and you are open to influence from the other without being completely driven by the influence of the other. It's a balance where you maintain your own integrity of autonomy and choice, but are influenced by the other. So this process of compassion for yourself, empathy for yourself, knowing yourself, and then also opening up to compassion and empathy for others is a very powerful tool for building better relationships.
Oren Jay Sofer has a book called, Say What You Mean, that I will put a link to in the show notes, which is hands down my favorite book on communication skills that honor this dance. So I highly recommend Oren Jay Sofer's book. Now, this is all well and good as a piece of theory, but how can we cultivate compassion for ourselves and for others? What specific tools can we use?
I'm going to give you three, and I suggest that you try them all, see which one feels most natural to you, and just spend time with that one. Like everything else, you should try on a new technique and see what works for you and use that and know that at some other point in your life, maybe the other techniques will also work and you can come back to them. But there's no point in taking all of them on, one at a time is perfect.
You may have encountered the Buddhist practice called Loving-Kindness or Metta practice. This is having a real moment in the culture right now, and so you may have run across it. That practice is a practice of meditation where after you've settled yourself into a quiet, calm space of being present with yourself, you repeat to yourself phrases of compassion, first directing them to yourself, then directing them to someone who has been kind to you, then directing them to somebody who you feel neutrally about and eventually directing them to somebody that you actually have a challenge with. And for many of us, the only one of these that feels easy is the one that is being compassionate for someone who's been kind to us. But with practice, we can get better.
So the practice is that you get yourself into a present, calm space and then you bring to mind the person you're thinking of. So you start with yourself and then you find some phrases that work for you in which you express your desire for the person, starting with yourself and then the other people as you proceed through the process, what desires do you have for them?
The classic phrases are, "May you be safe. May you feel at ease. May you be at peace. May you be healthy." And the idea is that you tap into that part of yourself that genuinely desires that for that person. May you be at peace. May you be safe. May you feel freedom. Find the phrases that work for you. These universal human needs for safety and security and approval and health, connect with those. And this is a process of just reinforcing the wiring of knowing that you have these desires, that people in the world have these fundamental human needs met.
There's an exercise that takes a very different approach to this using the imagination. When you see somebody, yourself, somebody else, having a difficult time, imagine them as a child. Imagine them as a young child before the world started civilizing them, when they were gleeful and joyful and enthusiastic and exploratory. And imagine this childlike wonder and this innocent naivete and this openness to the world in the child that this person used to be.
When you're working on this for yourself, it can be useful to find a picture of yourself when you were that young that has you with a beaming smile in it, so that you can remember that version of yourself. Know that that version of yourself still lives in you and that version, that child's version of each person still lives in them. And how would you be with this person or with yourself having this difficulty, having this challenging behavior because this behavior is trying to meet a need and it's unskillful, and it's not working, and the frustration is building up? How would you be with that person if they were a toddler rather than a grownup?
For most of us, we imagine people having this inner child in them, it's much easier for us to go, "It's okay, honey. You're scared. You're unsure. You don't know what's happening. This really matters to you and it's not going the way that you want, and we're just going to be here together and get through it." It's that being here together and getting through it that is the compassionate moment. "It's okay, you're just scared."
There's another technique that comes from non-violent communication that I'm going to add to the mix of things that you can try, and this is more intellectual and cognitive and rational, and that is as you are listening to somebody, listen for what are the universal needs that they have that they are trying to meet with their behavior and their words.
All behavior and all speech is trying to meet a need, a need for control, a need for security, a need for approval, a need for respect, for appreciation. If you can listen for those needs and know that you have those needs and they have those needs and you both have those needs, it's a way of connecting and feeling with. This is also great when you're feeling a negative emotion, when you're feeling shame, or guilt, or fear.
A way of being compassionate with yourself is to notice, "Oh, I'm feeling this shame because I was not as kind in that last communication as I wanted to be. And I want to be in good relationships. I want to belong to communities of kindness, and I am ashamed at not meeting up to my own expectations." And just like I'm ashamed when I don't meet my own expectations, everybody else on the planet is ashamed when they don't meet their own expectations. And shame is just a thing that we all have. And here it is, sucking and human.
And that connecting your universal experience with other people is a way of having compassion for yourself. Look at us all being human and humans are wonderful, messy, glorious things, and we feel all these feelings. So there are three techniques. One that uses your imagination to envision the child, one that uses cognitive processing, listening for the needs, and one that is actually a physical practice of meditation or a training practice of meditation. Try them on, see what works for you, and I would love to hear from you about what your experience is. The world needs compassion. You need compassion. You deserve compassion. I need compassion. I deserve compassion.
Compassion is actually something that we all need. We all need people who feel with us, because when people feel with us we know that we're okay, we believe that suffering will not leave us without community. When people can't be with other people in their suffering, we create cultures where people suffer alone. And this makes things worse.
When we experience our griefs and our sorrows and our shames in a community where we feel together without judgment, we create greater ease, peace and contentment even if we can't solve the problems.
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To take this work deeper and learn how I can support you personally as your coach, email me at kate@signalfirecoaching.com to schedule a free consultation.
Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.