Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
Here is a belief which is worth examining – if you ease off on yourself even slightly, the whole thing falls apart. The standards drop, the work suffers, and you become someone who settles. So the harsh voice gets kept, carefully, the way you hold onto any tool you believe your success depends on.
But what if that belief has never actually been tested?
In this episode, we look at self-compassion and the view that it’s a soft option. We look at what the harshness is doing to the quality of your work, at the distinction between self-compassion and self-indulgence that most people never make, and at why the standard and the harsh delivery were never the same thing, even if they have always arrived together.
Key Themes
- The untested belief that harshness is what drives quality
- Your best work and what you were actually feeling while you did it
- Self-compassion versus self-indulgence: why they are not the same thing
- The standard and the harsh delivery are separable
- What pressure-based motivation eventually costs you
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. I’m going to share a belief here, and I’m curious as to how well it sits with you. The belief is that if you ease off on yourself even a little bit, the whole thing just falls apart. The standards drop, the work suffers, and you become someone who settles. Now, what if that belief is the very thing that’s keeping you tired? That’s what we’re going to explore in this episode 33, Self-Compassion Is Not Weakness. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach.
Now, in the previous few episodes, we spent a bit of time looking at the approval pattern. And we ended up in the most recent episode by looking at shame, looked at what happens when you fail in front of the audience that’s in your head. And we finished that episode by pointing at something almost in passing, and that was the idea of treating yourself with a little bit of the decency that you offer anyone else. Now, for a lot of high performers, that doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like a threat. So for the next 2 or 3 episodes, we are going to turn to face the critical voice directly. And we’re going to start right here with the thing that makes many people flinch, self-compassion, and the deep suspicion that it’s a softer option. Before we get into it, if you haven’t already, do follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to.
These episodes build up week on week, and giving us a follow is the simplest way to make sure that you keep up to date with all the latest episodes. As they build. So let me start with the objection because it deserves our respect rather than just being glibly dismissed. When people hear self-compassion, a lot of very capable people actually hear permission to slack. Now they picture themselves going easy, letting things slide, patting themselves on the back for work that didn’t really earn it. And they think quite reasonably that’s not going to make them feel better. They feel it’s going to make them feel worse. Underneath all of that, there’s a belief which is never really usually examined because it’s, it’s never needed to be examined before.
And that belief is that the harshness Is actually the engine. That the sharp inner voice, the one that catches every flaw and lets nothing go, is actually the thing driving the quality. That’s the belief underlying all of this. And when you take that away, it feels as though you’re going to take away the drive. So that harshness gets kept and it gets kept very carefully, the way that you hold on to any tool that you believe your success depends upon. Here’s the thing to notice today, right now. You have almost certainly never questioned or tested that belief. You’ve assumed that the harshness is vital, fundamental.
It’s a load-bearing wall, part of your structure. you’ve never actually taken it out to see whether the structure stays up. Let me give you a version of this, and this is a pattern that I have seen many, many times. This particular person, I’ll describe them as a senior professional. Now, they were very good at what they do, driving themselves hard. Every piece of work gets the same internal treatment. Before it’s finished, they’re already listing what’s wrong with it. Sound familiar? They speak to themselves about their own work in a tone that they would never use with a colleague.
And if you ask them why, they would say, well, hey, it’s what keeps my standards up. If I went easy on myself, I’d get sloppy. So one day I asked this person a very simple question. I asked them to think of the best work that they had done in the previous 12 months, the piece that they were the most proud of. And then I asked them to remember and realise what they’d been feeling when they did that work. And they thought about it for a few moments. And what they described, interestingly enough, it wasn’t the harsh voice at all. It was absorption, interest, a kind of calm focus where the work just flowed and the commentary went quiet.
Then I asked them to think about the worst period, the worst period over the past year, that time where the inner voice had been loudest and probably cruelest. Thinking about the work from that period, yeah, they conceded it wasn’t their best work. It wasn’t even close. It was careful, it was defensive, it was slow. They’d had the evidence the whole time. The harshness had never been driving good work. It had only ever been shouting over the top of it. So let me put that to you directly.
Think about your own best work, the thing that you are most proud, most proud of having created. Think back to while you were actually doing that work, actually making that thing. What were you actually feeling? Was the harsh critic voice running the show, or was it something calmer than that? Somewhere Much more absorbed. Do take a moment with this. Take a moment to think about this. Pause the podcast if you need to, because the answer tends to be quite revealing when you take the time to really think about it. Now, I would like to share with you a distinction today, because the objection we started with rests on blurring 2 very different things: self-compassion and self-indulgence. Now, self-indulgence, that lets you off the hook.
It avoids the hard thing. It hides from the honest assessment. And it calls doing that kindness. It’s actually avoidance wearing a friendly face, and capable people are quite rightly wary of it. Self-compassion, that does almost the opposite. It faces the hard thing squarely, and it does so without cruelty. It can look at a piece of work and it can say plainly, That it isn’t good enough yet, and here’s what’s missing. Deliver that assessment in the same steady tone that you’d use with someone you respected.
The standard stays, but the contempt is banished. That’s the direction that matters. The critic bundles 2 things together, the high standard and the harsh delivery, and it insists they are inseparable. They Are not. You can hold the standard exactly where it is, that high standard. You can hold it high. And you can change absolutely nothing except the voice that you deliver the criticism in. Drop the harshness.
And there is a second thing hiding underneath this. And this, it’s all about motivation, this second thing. You see, there is motivation that runs on pressure, the kind that needs a threat to function. And then there’s the motivation that keeps going without pressure, without that threat. Don’t get me wrong, pressure works for a while until it doesn’t. And it has a cost. And that cost builds and builds and compounds. And eventually, the thing driving you becomes the thing that’s exhausting you.
So let’s just spend a couple of moments going a little bit deeper because I don’t want this to sound like, oh, that’s a nice idea, but there’s nothing underneath it. Let’s dig a little deeper. Take a look at how you treat other people that you care about. So when a good colleague makes a mistake or a valued member of your team has a hard week, You don’t rip into them, do you? No, you steady them. You help them to see what happened clearly. You keep your standards and you do it in a way that leaves them able to think rather than cornering them and making them all defensive. And here’s what you already know if you’ve ever managed anyone. That approach works Far better.
People do their best work when they’re steady, when they’re valued, not when they feel threatened. You know this about everyone in your life except for one person. There’s a reason that voice runs the way it does and where it comes from, what it’s actually trying to protect. That’s more than we can properly explore in just one episode. That’s what we’re exploring this month in the Overachievers Club. goes into a lot more depth than we can go into in this single episode. But for today, the point is simpler. The kindness that you extend to others is not a drop in your standards for them or for you.
You hold them to a high bar and you remain decent about it. The strange thing is You’ve decided the one person who doesn’t deserve that treatment is you. So what do you do with this? There’s not a technique. There’s simply a shift in how you perceive that voice. So for the next week, when the harsh commentary starts up, as it inevitably does, I invite you To notice one thing. Notice whether it’s actually helping with the work or whether it’s just making you feel worse while you do that work. They’re not the same thing. They just often feel the same thing in the moment.
But notice, notice the difference. If you catch the voice tearing at you over something, Just ask, how would you say the same thing to a colleague that you respected? How would you get that same message over to that well-respected colleague? Not softer, not lower, just the same message without the contempt. You’ll usually find there’s a version that keeps every bit of the standard It drops none of the substance. It simply stops the aggravation, the aggression. You’re not being asked to lower the bar. Far from it. You’re being asked to stop punishing yourself for where that bar is set. Those 2 things, they got fused together a long time ago, but they were never, ever The same thing.
Next time, we’re going to take— we’re going to gently prise that fusion apart, because the belief underneath all of this is that the standard and the self-punishment come as a pair, and that you can’t keep one without the other. Next week, we’re going to examine that. We’re going to test it directly. And we’re going to ask what it would mean to raise the bar without punishing yourself for it. Until then, here’s a question for you to mull over, to ponder, to cogitate upon. If the harsh voice, you know, that harsh nagging voice, if that disappeared tomorrow, but your standards stayed exactly as high as they are now, What would be different about your work? I invite you to give that some real thought over the next few days, because the answer tells you exactly what the harshness has really been doing. If today’s episode resonated, and I certainly hope it does, it would mean a lot to me if you would leave a review or a rate— a rating on your platform. Helps other people to find the show, helps me to know what’s coming across well for you.
Do share it. Share this episode with someone who’s hard on themselves in a way that really you wish they weren’t. And if you haven’t already, remember to hit follow or subscribe so you’re ready for the rest of these episodes. Head over to KeithBN.link/TOP where you’ll find all of the episodes. Find this particular episode, And you’ll find the show notes along with some additional resources which are well worth exploring. That’s it for this week. That’s it for this episode. I will catch you in the next one.
In the meantime, I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I will be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
