Episode Details

Ready to step beyond gratitude this Thanksgiving? Learn how to practice kindness with yourself first before being kind to others. When your internal dialog is kind, that’s when your world will open up and flow with goodness.

Move Over Gratitude!

Everyone knows the Thanksgiving holiday is about gratitude. Gratitude is a practice that will always uplift your spirit and raise your vibration. So often, we ignore what is good and working well in life because we focus on what we want or what’s not working. That’s just part of being human.

But today, I want to talk about another practice that will also lift your spirits. Kindness. That’s right kindness. What do I mean? The act of being kind to yourself or another person.

Hear more about gratitude.

First, I would ask, how often are you kind to yourself? My bet is not all that often. You might buy yourself something, eat something yummy like chocolate, or have a glass of wine. But it’s time to think bigger with your acts of kindness and self-love.

The biggest act of kindness you can offer yourself is noticing and shifting your own internal chatter. Pay attention to how you speak to yourself. Observe the unusually harsh and nasty things you say to yourself that you would never say to anyone else or dare to utter aloud.

Why do you do that to yourself? Why do I?

If you want to spread love, peace, and experience more joy, start by being kind to yourself.

We Are Harder on Ourselves

We are harder on ourselves than anyone else on the face of the planet. Why is that the natural order? Let’s look at an example of how this normally goes.

Let’s say you forgot to cook a package of chicken and now it’s expired. The internal conversation might sound like this:

“Now you’ve wasted $10, not to mention the food. What an idiot? How could you be so wasteful and foolish? You never do anything right. What a loser.”

That’s how the train of thought might go. You start with a small mistake and rocket into speaking to yourself like you are worthless piece of trash in 30 seconds or less.

Beating Yourself Up

What is the truth of these horrible thoughts? Are these comments about yourself accurate? Of course not!

Yes, you forgot to cook the chicken. (This is a real-life example from someone close to me LOL). Does that make you or me a loser? No way!

It sure does make us human. Humans make mistakes. Too bad we then are meaner to ourselves than to almost anyone else. Here’s an insight – when you encounter a hyper-critical person, that’s a sign they are mega crit