Let’s examine some of the benefits of committing to a more friendly relationship with yourself:

1.    You are more efficient – less time is wasted being hard on yourself or wasted procrastinating or wasted on excessive planning in trying to do everything “perfectly”.

2.    You are able to think more clearly and learn from your experiences – by embracing the attitude of, “What can I learn from this situation going forward?” while continuing to be gentle with yourself is so liberating.

Another question you can ask yourself when things don’t work out as you’d hoped is, “What is good about this situation?” You will always find something.

The alternative is to operate with great internal stress, even compromising your health, with thoughts like: I could’ve done it better, I should’ve known better, Why didn’t I think of that? I should’ve said it differently, I wish I’d ______, etc… You get the idea.

3.    You feel happier and lighter – wow, it’s amazing how great you feel when you’re not beating yourself up or holding yourself up to achieve some impossible standard of perfection.

4.    You’re more “in the moment” – when you’re being hard on yourself, you take yourself out of the present moment and go away into negative non-space where you don’t have access to your higher, wise-self or to others.

5.    You’re a lot more fun to be around – when we’re hard on ourselves we tend to have less acceptance of others. We reflect the negative attitude we have for ourselves by being more critical of others. Positive self-talk allows us room to breathe as we give ourselves a break and appreciate we’re all human and we all have our challenges.

6.    You have more energy – because you focus on the things that are important to you and meaningful to you versus over-analyzing how you could’ve executed that speech, project or communication more “perfectly”.

And so much more…

Embrace a commitment in your relationship with yourself that includes zero tolerance toward any kind of self-invalidation and watch the positive results unfold. Zero tolerance speaks to your commitment to engage in a more compassionate relationship with yourself from this day forward.

With all there is to be gained, it is a no-brainer. Are you in?