What to do about self-pity and other things
Harmony and ease don’t come from hiding our truths—even the uncomfortable ones. They come from embracing what’s real and choosing where to focus our energy.
Many of us are scared of ourselves. We think if we allow ourselves to be truly expressed, we will rock the boat into capsizing.
Being ourselves will cause the opposite of harmony, ease and grace, we think.
But harmony, ease and grace are not destroyed when we express our deepest Truth. They are destroyed when we don’t.
If you want to dig deeper into this, Google Carl Jung’s work on the shadow.
Doubling Down On What You Do Well
I have a client who told me that her team had come into a meeting with a bunch of challenges and obstacles to discuss. She runs a marketing company so the agenda was largely about issues with clients.
My client stopped the meeting and said,
“I don’t want to hear challenges today. I want to hear about what is going well.”
So people talked about great client relationships and campaigns that were really humming.
Then, my client said, “Based on what we have discussed, how do we get more clients that we can have great relationships with?” and “How can we reuse the ideas that are great?”
Here why this worked:
If you focus on challenges and problems, you become really great at dealing with clients and projects that have challenges and problems.
If you focus on the things that are going well, you become really great at creating things that go well and you end up with fewer problems and challenges.
Doubling Down on the Good
Another client who leads a team of 12 people came into our session wanting to talk about creating a performance plan for the weakest members of his team.
I asked him: '“Out of ten, what level are they performing at?”
He said: “Two”.
I asked him what the maximum performance level he estimated they could get to.
He said: “Four”.
Then, I asked, “Do you have anyone performing at 6 or 7 who could get to 9 or 10?”
He said, yes.
“Are you sure you want to create a plan for the low performers or shall we double down on the high performers?”
We spent the rest of our time talking about how to support his above average performers into outstanding performers–mostly by making them happier.
How we decided to make them happier?
Well, it turned out that the low performers also create a lot of negativity and bad blood on the team.
So, to help the high performers, he needed to get rid of the low performers.
He decided not to fire the low performers or give them a performance plan, but instead to support them to find new jobs where they might be happier.
Helping above-average performers become outstanding performers was his way of doubling down on the good
Try this:
Where in your life would it make more sense to double down on the good instead of trying to fix the bad?
Supporting Yourself (or Someone Else) in Self-Pity
A dear friend of mine recently confessed:
“I’m feeling sorry for myself. And I feel ashamed of that.”
We’ve all been there, right?
Self-pity gets a bad rap. The common idea is that as soon as you notice you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you should just... stop. Snap out of it.
It’s almost like the moment you notice your fly is down. How embarrassing! I’ll just zip it up. I’m feeling sorry for myself. How embarrassing. I’ll just zip it up.
If you are feeling a bit blue about your life, people might say, “You’re feeling sorry for yourself” as though you’d then go “Oh yeah” and suddenly zip it up and feel better.
Is that your experience? Have you ever been told “You’re feeling sorry for yourself” and it helps you feel better?
I’ve actually taken some time to count up the number of times I have been told I am feeling sorry for myself and it makes me feel better.
Um, zero.
And worse—many of us have learned to judge ourselves for feeling sorry for ourselves. So bad, in fact, that if we anticipate that we will be told we are feeling sorry for ourselves then we won’t share that we feel bad.
In other words, we won’t ask for help in our feeling bad for fear we will be punished for feeling bad.
Fuck that!
What I Told My Friend
So here is what I said when my friend was blue and she worried she felt sorry for herself.
I said, “Well, someone should feel sorry for you sometimes.”
“No. All the self-help literature says you shouldn’t feel sorry for yourself.”
I explained that, in my view, no piece of self-help advice is a panacea for all people at all times. It is true that we can get caught in everlasting loops of self-pity and that those loops may push away our agency and disempower us.
If someone is not functioning well and is in a perpetual self-pity loop then maybe it is good to support them out of the loop. But tenderly. Definitely NOT by saying, “You’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
But my friend is not low functioning and not in a self-pity loop. In fact, she is extremely high functioning and hugely emotionally intelligent. She was just having an emotionally low week, maybe because of the moon, maybe because of brain chemistry, maybe because of tiredness. Who knows why?
I told her:
”If, in fact, you are feeling sorry for yourself, maybe it is because you need a little tenderness. Maybe you need some soothing from me, from yourself, from your partner. Maybe this self-pity feeling is just a signal that you need to be held and supported a little.”
It’s definitely NOT that you need to punish yourself for having a feeling, I said.
Here’s the thing:
With the exception of when we are stuck in an obsessive loop, the way to help feelings change is to feel them. When we focus awareness on them, they actually shift and change and become something else–even, sometimes, a needed action.
Suppressing self-pity because we are ashamed of self-pity? Not a good strategy.
Offering oneself and others tenderness in the face of self-pity. Probably a better strategy.
Of course, this is IMHO. But that should go without saying.
As I always tell clients, when it comes to things I say:
Please chew before you swallow.
A Reflection for You
Where in your life are you trying to force yourself out of feeling bad—when what you might need is some care?
What might happen if you gave yourself tenderness instead of shame?
👉 Leave a comment or hit reply—I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Love,
Colin
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