The Most Powerful Influence in Your Life is in Your Head: On Self-Compassion with Dr. Kristin Neff

The Sonya Looney Show

"The person inside your head that you're with 24/7 is yourself. So you have to be your own supportive friend. I tell people you have a choice. you can be an inner ally or an inner enemy. It's that simple. The voice in your head can either be kind, supportive, encouraging, nurturing 24/7 or cutting you down telling you you're a loser, you're no good, you're not good enough." - Dr. Kristin Neff

The voice inside our head is possibly one of the most powerful influences on our lives. Most people are very self-critical and hard on themselves. Have you ever noticed that if a friend makes a mistake, you say "oh, that's ok, everyone makes mistakes" but if you make the same mistake yourself, you might say, "Ah Gosh! I'm such an IDIOT!" How we talk to ourselves is extremely powerful and being mindful about your self-talk is the key to getting started. One of my favorite quotes is "The voice inside your head that says you can't do this is a liar." I first learned about training my inner voice to be more supportive and gentle with the spiritual element of my yoga practice. The good news about the voices in our head is that they are trainable and it starts with self-compassion. That's where I found Kristin Neff, PhD.

Kristin Neff, PhD is a pioneer in Self-Compassion is and widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts is creating measurable research in her field. She developed the first Self-Compassion scale enabling academic studies to be conducted about self-compassion in human beings. She also is an author of the book Self-Compassion. She is also a speaker and associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin's department of educational psychology.

The interesting thing about learning how to work with our inner voice in the light of self-compassion is that it actually makes us less afraid to fail and more accepting of who we are. That makes us show up in a more easeful manner to the people around us as well.

Topics Discussed in the Podcast

• self-compassion vs self-pity
• 3 components of self-compassion
• techniques to work with the voice inside your head
• will you lose motivation if you have more self-compassion
• empathy vs compassion
• constructive criticism
• how to use social media for good

Links

• Her Book: Self-Compassion
• Get her book on Audible (audiobooks)
• Self-Compassion.Org
• Dr Neff's Guided Meditations
• Kristin's TED Talk
• Horse Boy Mongolia Documentary and Book
• My TED Talk on Redefining Success

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