Читать книгу Strength - Sue Patton Thoele - Страница 52

Unlike self-criticism, which asks if you're good enough, self-compassion asks, what's good for you?

—KRISTIN NEFF

I'm having a serious nap-attack. If I were to ask what's good for me right now, what would the answer be? Lie down, Dearie. As an experiment, and because I was really tired, I followed the advice and stretched out on the guest bed for a thirty-minute rest with my little dog, Lily, tucked against my side. Although I'd love to say we drifted off into a sweet slumber filled with even sweeter dreams, that didn't happen. Real life happened, as it often does. To start with, Lily was shivering. For an almost-ten-pound dog, her shivers are surprisingly intense, more like Lilliputian earthquakes. When she finally got warm enough to stop trembling, my husband came creeping in—I had forgotten he wanted to take her on a late afternoon walk—and took her off the bed. Fifteen minutes had elapsed. It took him another five minutes to get them both ready to go. (All this was happening right outside the room where I was “resting.”) As you can imagine, I did not peacefully nod off in the remaining ten minutes. After the annoyance passed, I chuckled, guessing you'd probably be able to relate to my aborted foray into asking what was good for me.

Even so, asking what's good for you is a wonderfully self-compassionate habit to adopt. However, depending on how many responsibilities and obligations you shoulder, it may also be one you need to be very, very committed to in order not to become discouraged when what's good for you doesn't sit well with what others think is good for them. While we often chuckle and nod our heads in rueful agreement when seeing the adage “If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy” on a T-shirt or plaque, truthfully, in most families momma is the happy-maker. How can an unhappy-maker help anyone else be happy? Simply, the energy of an unhappy momma is enough to dampen the atmosphere in most homes.

Therefore, prioritizing what is good for you is doing a favor to everyone with whom you relate, live, work, and play. But that favor will come to fruition only when you follow through and let yourself do what is good for you.

Set yourself up for success by being realistic in your answers to the question “What is good for me?”