Hey there 👋 

Welcome to the third episode of the Silent Strength Newsletter.

This is what you will get with today’s newsletter:

1. Being too hard on yourself? How to stop being overly self-critical

2. 3 Practices to find kindness towards yourself

3. Tip of the month: Balance Meditation App

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And now: Let’s go! 🚀 

New Blog Post

🧠 Being too hard on yourself?

How to stop being overly self-critical

Maybe you know such thoughts:

• „Oh, that was so stupid of me!“

• „I should have spoken up earlier!“

• „I put way too much effort in this!“

There are situations during our busy days where our tiny inner critic is sitting on our shoulder and is evaluating us by saying things like this. He’s part of our inner team that wants to guide us through life. But often he’s not just sitting there to help us with our constructive and compassionate self-critism.

At a certain point in time my personal inner critic got louder and louder and was kind of the only person in my inner team. This is where it started to become negative self-talk that wasn’t helpful anymore. In this article I want to share some of my learnings and helpful practices I experienced during this phase. Hoping that it helps you in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

💡 3 Tips to practice Self-Kindness

During my own journey through kindness towards myself, I found those three practices very helpful. All all of them are different and can be done separated from each other. If you are struggling with being being too hard on yourself, just find the one that fits for yourself and do experiments, inspect and adapt. There is no right or wrong.

🌱 Write a Gratitude Diary

Write down 3-5 things that you are thankful for. Every morning or evening. Be specific. Try to describe feelings, persons, the situation that you are thankful for. This technique is introducing „new paths“ into your brain which tends to use paths for rather negative thoughts. Several studies show, that this technique can be helpful to increase emotional balance and kindness.

🌱 Practice Loving Kindness

Loving Kindness is a meditation practice that is fundamental in buddhism meditation practice (Metta Meditation). It’s a set a positive mantras that you tell yourself to be kind to yourself and others. It can have several levels and lengths. I recommend to start with a set of 3-5 short sentences that refer to yourself and go from there. Read more about this technique and its benefits

🌱 Give yourself permission to be kind to yourself

Explicitly allow yourself being kind to yourself and write it down. For example: If you tend to be too strict to yourself by thinking „I should learn such things a lot faster“, write down „I allow myself to grow slow“. Or „I allow myself to change my decisions“ or „I allow myself to say no“ or anything else where its time to allow it to yourself. Find at least 3 permissions like this and write them down 3-5 times during the whole day. For at least a week. This technique has similar effects than the previous ones and for me there is additional power in it by writing and reading at the same time.

🦊 Tip of the month: Balance Meditation App

👋 Need support or want to get in touch?

– See you next month. Thanks for reading, stay well ♥️