 That's where the compassion starts, really. When we are sharing, we are not anymore in the competition. We are human beings, and this experience of being self-critical is painful. We all know it, we feel it, but sometimes we feel alone with that, and that loneliness that is really killing us on the inside. What's up everybody, and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Well, I think in a lot of us, it's striving and looking to become a top performer to meet our own expectations, and if they are high, it can be challenging. To hear self-compassion, I could see would lead some people to believe, well, isn't that gonna mean I'm taking it too easy on myself? I'm slacking off, I'm letting myself off the hook by saying I'm already perfect as I am, I'm complete. When the goal is just here, it's just a little bit further ahead. I'm not at the goal. It sounds counter-intuitive. So what do you say to our audience members who are like, self-compassion sounds like I'm just taking it easy on myself? I wanna add to that as well. And AJ, perhaps you remember the interview that we did, but we were discussing these ideas culturally where in America, and it's even separated from the West and France and in Europe, where America, in its culture, in its DNA of this self-reliant and you and I growing up in Midwest industry, household, factory households, where no matter what you are feeling, it's stiff upper lip and you go in and we call it grinding. It's not about anything. Grinding means no matter what you're feeling, you deal with it and you push through. Now, AJ mentioned that this would lead to some outbursts from his father. I could definitely tell you it was the same in my household. I certainly have many memories of my dad flying off the handle, and I just thought that was part of being a dad and grew up accepting that idea. And I would even say that for a lot of myself, when we were discussing how does this affect us, and this is probably have gotten from my dad where I've channeled for the good parts, at least as I'm older, the good parts of anger and the fuel, whereas when I was younger, I allowed that anger as fuel to lead to destructive patterns and behaviors. Whereas I've gotten older, I've learned how to use it for the fuel that I needed to be to propel me forward and then channel my emotions and focus and constructive patterns. Yeah, our conversation with Bruce Feller, we talked about this exact narrative that's built into the American dream and how we are taught to grind and hustle and work hard regardless of our station in life, because just the other side of that is success. Is the white picket fence, is all of this? And I'm picturing myself, let's say sixth or seventh grade, coming home with a couple A minuses and a B plus on my report card, my dad staring across from me at the kitchen table and me telling him, dad, I'm complete, I'm perfect as I am, right? There's no way my dad would respond in agreement to those statements, right? So those expectations have followed me. I came home with that report card, we were going to the Sizzler that night and there would be a party going on, I'm just telling you. You guys, I'm in Ohio, man. I'm in the Midwest and from Dayton where the big GE factory was, so all my friends and my dad was, yeah, what you're talking about is so right, rugged individualism, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The stuff we were even taught in history class and it all builds this, my psychologist dad flipped out when I was skipping school and I said, dad, I'm not going, that school sucks, man. I'm not going back there. And instead of asking me, son, what's going on? Why not? He said, your job is to go to school, my job is to go, I got to go to work. And I said, no, dad, I'm not going. And he said, listen, you know what? You got to go to school and it escalated. And I finally said, oh, fuck you. And he chased me out the door, tackled me in the backyard with his suit on. My friend Jason said, your dad's kicking your ass. And my dad, we've told this actually professionally of how this happens is grinding, you know, you got it. And I asked him and then he apologized. We were crying on the ground and he punched me in the back of the head. He doesn't remember that. And we're crying. And I didn't remember he said he was sorry, but he said sorry that night. And it was one of his colleagues that, man, you got to say you're sorry. And he goes, dude, how's he going to learn? And then he's like, oh God, you're right, man. You're right. And, but he came from that grinding itself. Immigrant father, you know, mother was, you know, dad's, you know, just rough shit. And so it's not our fault. So when we take this fierce compassion, I want to add fierce. It's like standing up to that part of you. And yet you're whole complete, you're perfect. But really it's an inner criticism. You can grind for so long, but what happens when you burn out? What I mean, it's like the carrot, you know, it's not the carrot, it's the whip. And after a while, you just say, I don't give a shit. I'm burned out. I'm coped out. I'm tired. I pushed. And that is like when we find that moment where we can turn inwards and have a different relationship with ourself. Usually, and it's that it's come to Jesus or Allah, Buddha moments when you go, oh God, I have lost it. I am at the end of my robe. I freaking hate. I remember saying I hate myself once, you know, and it's like, ouch, you wouldn't say any of that. I mean, some of the shit we say, the stuff we say to ourselves, we would never say it to anybody. And then I get fired up when it comes to this guy. So, Isabel, please jump in before I just, you know, my head pops off or something. Yeah, so let, help us here, Isabel, because I can tell you myself, I've expressed that self-hatred. And when I hear self-love, my eyes kind of roll and I glaze over. And it's been a conversation I've had in my men's group that I can't even remember a time where I just bathed in self-love and I really looked at myself and said, AJ, you are complete, you are good enough. And when I look at it, externally, I'm like, well, I've been able to achieve great things in life because of this burning desire and this feeling of being incomplete. And then when I hear this self-compassion and I think about self-love, I really struggle with it. So what is your perspective on that, Isabel? And how can we start to develop this self-compassion? And AJ, I want to add to that as well. And where those feelings are, when you have that opportunity to turn inward and be compassionate for a lot of folks, it is rather than that, it's define escapism. And so to sink into computer games or a movie or anything, rather than having to come face to face with themselves. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And that's why I wanted to thank you both and also Chris for sharing because that's where the compassion starts really. When we are sharing, we are not anymore in the competition. We are human beings. And this experience of being self-critical is painful. We all know it, we feel it. But sometimes we feel alone with that. And that slowniness that is really killing us on the inside. And so by expressing it to ourselves by saying, oh, I'm being hard on myself or by sharing it with others, it's really already self-compassion. Self-compassion is based on three things. It's based on awareness, it's based on shared humanity. I'm not alone with this suffering. I'm not the only one who hates myself. I'm not the only one who has pain in my body, who has unmet desires, et cetera. And it's also being kind with ourselves in this situation because yes, this is cultural and we are in a very competitive world. And of course, we want to succeed. We want to be the first one. But really competition is not something that is excluding compassion. When you look at great achievers, research shows that they have very high levels of self-compassion really. Why is that? It is because to achieve difficult things, you need to go over mistakes. You need to keep your motivation even if you fail. Someone who succeeds is not something, someone who succeeds the first time, is someone who fails again and again and again and keeps the motivation and keeps the goal. And to do that, we need to be able to self-heal, to welcome these difficult moments and to go beyond. So really competition is something that creates a fear of compassion, but it's not something that excludes compassion. We really can have both and succeed. It's such an interesting point because when I think about the failures, whether it's dieting or whether it's in your career or in your hobbies or your passions or pursuit, it's those are going to be there. And if you don't have a level of self-compassion, well, you'll quit the diet. You'll go back to eating poorly. You'll quit the workout and not go back to the gym. You'll quit your job and walk away from it. So it does take a level of self-compassion to overcome failure. And we know as we've talked to almost 900 guests on the show that a failure is a big part of them unlocking their X factor and achieving great things in their life. So we talked a little bit about core values earlier, but I'd love to circle back on how core values really come into the equation when it comes to self-compassion. And some in our audience still struggle with just the concept alone of like finding their core value. So as both of you give the chance to unpack core values for our audience, I'd love to hear your own journey in finding and defining your core values. I have an example of using anger to find one of my values. It's an old story actually. It was 20 years ago, I was an intern in psychiatric ward and there was so much suffering there and I kept working after the day was over. I kept reading the files and I was searching and searching for meaning. How could so much people suffer? And this really was feeling very unfair to me to see these people in so difficult situations. I felt anger, more and more anger. And at some point I was walking in the field and I felt on my knees and I really let the anger out and I started screaming, why, why? And then all of a sudden I had this flip in my head and I realized that it was not up to me to decide what the world was going to how the world would be organized and what was the meaning of the world and maybe the world was unjust but I had to learn from this world and learn the rules and the laws that I could understand. And really this flip of understanding the world was really important in my work because in therapy we meet suffering every day and we always try to make sense of suffering. We always want to know why these people seek and maybe this person has cancer because they smoke and we feel relieved because it makes sense and we have control of the situation but it's not that simple, it's never that simple and I learned to work with unknowing and really it is one of my core values to make room for the unknown in my work when I meet suffering. So that was through anger that I made that value. Wow, I wouldn't have expected to think of anger as something that could help us find that core value but that example really resonates with me too. I think again in Western culture especially we tend to label anger as a bad emotion and negative emotion and it's very hard to find anything positive about it. So for you to be able to flip it on its head I think that's a very useful exercise for those in our audience who might be struggling to identify core values that don't just pay attention to the quote unquote positive emotions that we talk about, happiness, joy, excitement, enthusiasm but also look at some of the negative emotions and those could be a guiding light towards uncovering that core value for you. What about you Chris? What has been your journey in discovering your core values? It's interesting because as Isabel says that made me reflect one of the reasons I became a therapist was because when I was very young in school I had dyslexia in a 10 of type ADD in learning disability and so like feeling so sad and so like misunderstood putting coat closets so I could pay attention and then falling asleep on the ditto papers and waking up and being shamed and the anger and I remember saying somebody needs to do something about this. There's such a lack of compassion and understanding to care and I remember my dad and mom in graduate school arguing and my mom crying and slamming the door and calling up on her bed and rubbing her back as a four year old and it's okay mom and wanting to bring peace and wanting to create harmony within the world and relationships and that little boy and that instinct of a child to try to help their mom and that's just instinct. You don't want them to suffer and to relieve suffering and other people and not have people go through and I said somebody needs to sit in that freaking therapy chair who's been through this. I about dropped out of school a billion times and that core value of hope going beyond what your mind and other people said is even possible for you. People go, you're on a podcast, you wrote a book and I was like, yeah I wrote a book but I had to ask for help. So what? It's that that's out of the suffering, out of the anger, out of some of those difficult moments came these core values of hope, of kindness, of going beyond what's in and using transforming my anger instead of just being stuck with it. So that's, and I could go on but that's sort of my story and I try to go back and get in touch with that because it's so easy to forget and as we hold our core values it can really guide us in those moments of distress when we think we can't go on and I can go back to that little kid and say, hey man, I'm doing this for you buddy, I got you. I got you, you're shitting yourself before this podcast, I got you. You're all right. You got stuff to say.