145. Stop Being So Hard on Yourself: The Power of Self-Compassion
Do you often find yourself being your own toughest critic? Running a business as an interior designer requires resilience, but constantly focusing on what you haven’t done perfectly can hold you back from reaching your true potential. In today’s episode, I’m diving into why practicing self-compassion is one of the most powerful tools you can develop as a designer CEO.
Self-compassion isn’t about letting yourself off the hook; it's about shifting your mindset to support yourself through challenges, setbacks, and mistakes. By embracing kindness and understanding toward yourself, you’ll break free from perfectionism and quiet your inner critic. You’ll discover how this approach not only helps you feel better but also increases your efficiency and problem-solving ability.
Through this episode, you'll learn how to move from a place of self-criticism to self-compassion and how this shift can fuel your growth both personally and professionally. Stop holding yourself back with negative self-talk and start leading with more compassion and confidence.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Why self-compassion is more efficient than self-criticism for solving problems and moving forward.
How being hard on yourself creates avoidance patterns that limit your growth potential.
The two key components of self-compassion: expressing support to yourself and recognizing shared human experience.
Why encouragement and constructive reflection are more effective motivators than negative feedback.
How perfectionism feeds the inner critic and keeps you hiding from opportunities.
The difference between self-compassion and letting yourself off the hook.
Practical ways to respond when you make mistakes or face setbacks in your business.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you're listening to episode 145. In this one, we're talking all about how to stop being so hard on yourself. This is something that I'd say almost every designer I know can benefit from, whether it comes from perfectionistic tendencies popping up day-to-day, navigating the challenges of managing people and projects, or hitting bumps in the road on your way to a big goal. Self-compassion is a necessary and impactful tool in your CEO toolkit.
Today, we'll dive into what self-compassion actually is. I promise, it's not letting yourself off the hook. How it helps you get out of your own way, and I'll give you actionable steps you can start taking today to quiet the inner critic. Because, let's face it, running this business is hard enough.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm really excited about this topic. We're going to be discussing how to stop being so hard on yourself. So many of the designers I work with have a very active, highly engaged member of their team, and it's called the inner critic. While we probably can't fire this part of you, I don't know if we can ever really get rid of the inner critic, we can sure quiet it down, and that is through self-compassion so that you can really get to work on what matters most and stop ruminating on that mental chatter. And it's going to be a way for you to feel better as you face the challenges of being a CEO. Because if you've been around here at all, you know they're inevitable. And so it's all about how you rise to the occasion and lead yourself through it.
Before we really dive into today's episode, I have a quick ask of you. It's my birthday week, and one of the things that I would absolutely be over the moon about is if you would leave a rating and review for the podcast. You can consider it a little way to help me celebrate and connect on this special week. On Spotify, you can only leave the rating, and on Apple Podcasts, you can leave the rating and review. And I love to hear what you enjoy about the show, which episodes you have enjoyed so far, or even just why another designer should listen. So, if you feel so inclined to help me celebrate this week, I truly would appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who has already left a rating and review. It truly makes my day when I see a new one of those pop up.
Now, for a little context, here's why I wanted to do this episode following last week. And in that last week, it was part of the CEO Summer School series where I shared the truth that scaling is an inside job. You don't have to have listened to that one to get so much out of what I'm sharing today. It's a great companion though to what we're going to be discussing. So definitely go back and listen to that one when you have a chance. And know also that you can still sign up for CEO Summer School. We're cruising through it, and it's not too late. So you can go to desicreswell.com/resources and click the CEO Summer School series link and get those extra bonus materials sent straight to your inbox.
Okay, so last week when I talked about scaling as an inside job, what this means is that you have to grow as a person in order for the business to grow and fulfill its potential. The two are happening together. They both need to occur.
There are always new skills to master, new mindsets that you'll want to adopt, and new levels of your tolerance for emotional discomfort and emotional resilience that are really required at every level of your goal-setting process throughout your entire career as a design business owner.
When I think about one of the most supportive things you can do for yourself along this journey is to be nice to yourself, to have self-compassion as one of the major tools that you lean on as you support yourself as a designer CEO.
Growing your interior design business takes some real grit. Some days, you're going to succeed and fail all within a matter of hours. And it's tough stuff that you sign up for when you say, hey, I want to be the leader. I'm going to be an entrepreneur, and I'm going to start my own thing. And the internal work too, that side-by-side scaling of the business and yourself, which means turning the mirror on you and honestly assessing what needs to change and who you need to become in order to reach your next level, that takes courage. There are highs and lows, and some days you really feel like you're becoming your future self, and other days, all your brain can focus on is where you're falling short.
All of this is normal, so we definitely want to celebrate when it's good, and also know that being super hard on yourself does not make a hard day easier. While that might seem really obvious, I don't see it making a shift sometimes. We know, oh yeah, I should be nice to myself, but then being harsh seems to be the pattern for so many of you, and there's some resistance to giving that up, which I'll talk about later on.
Being hard on yourself is just one of the hidden ways you're holding yourself back from reaching your potential. Sometimes it seems like it's the thing that has gotten you where you are. But let me tell you, it's not necessary, and it's actually not the most effective way to get there. Not to mention, it just feels bad.
What I want to sell you on today is self-compassion. Self-compassion is how you're going to lead yourself through challenges, setbacks, and difficulties over the long run, both personally and professionally. And if you don't resonate with the term self-compassion, for me, for a long time, it felt too touchy-feely. You could also think of it as self-kindness, just plain being nice to yourself, or anything else that gives you an entry point into this practice and gives you that sense of willingness to test it out.
The other thing I'll say is that before I started studying and practicing self-compassion, and this was through Kristin Neff, who's a leading researcher and meditation teacher in the self-compassion domain, that's who I learned from, it felt like this big thing I had to learn how to do and then this big thing I had to put on my to-do list, kind of like, oh gosh, I've got to become more self-compassionate. This is like this huge project that I need to tackle, and I'll do it when I have time.
So if you're feeling that way too, I want you to know it really doesn't take that much from you. The only effort that's required is to really notice when you could use some self-compassion. So that's that self-awareness and knowing yourself piece that I talked about last week, and then choosing to offer it up.
All that a self-compassionate act towards yourself requires is that you express support, warmth, and understanding towards yourself during a difficult time. And another piece of it is that you recognize that you aren't alone in your imperfections and your mistakes. So let me repeat that. All you're doing is expressing support, warmth, and understanding towards yourself and recognizing that there is that shared human experience of difficulties and struggles.
The other thing here is that when I used to think that being self-compassionate would take a lot of time for whatever reason, what I know now is that it's actually very efficient. Not that we want to pursue self-compassion just so we can be overly productive and efficient, but what I have found is that kindness towards yourself really helps cut through that mental rumination. And the other piece too is that acknowledging that suffering, challenges, mistakes, however you want to frame that, the fact that's universal can really help to offset feelings of shame, which is another way we end up spinning and spending a lot of time and energy going inward but not in a useful way.
I want to give you an example of this. Let's say maybe you miss a detail on a client's order. This could very well happen, and it might be an instance where you tend to beat yourself up internally. Maybe the internal dialogue sounds like, “I can't get anything right. I'm so disorganized. I can't believe I did this.” I think you get the idea. And then you have to go into problem-solving mode from this frantic, worked-up place. And you're also probably not going to ask your team member for help or ask a colleague for advice because of that shame piece. Because it's not just “I made a mistake,” you're making it mean “I am a mistake. I'm the failure.” It's very personal. And so when we're in the absence of self-compassion, we want to hide.
So, in this way, choosing to be kind and nurture ourselves through the difficulty, choosing the opposite of what we maybe have been defaulting to, is actually going to be the easier path. It's going to be the more effective path to getting the problem solved. And so you might say to yourself, I really wish this didn't happen. I also know that this is something that's probably happened to a lot of other designers at some point or another. I know I'll figure it out.
There's a softness and a shift in that conversation between you and yourself. You're going to go about solving the issue. So you might as well be nice to yourself along the way because you're going to have a quicker, more effective outcome from being nicer, and it feels a lot better.
I want you to just think too about how we are so hard on ourselves, right? Like if we were to have this exact same circumstance happen to a friend or a colleague, you would never tell them that they're such a mess. You would never tell them, gosh, you are such a mess. Get your act together, right? No.
So, as you're listening to this, just get curious about why you would allow yourself to talk to you that way, but you would never talk to somebody else you cared about like that, and you would certainly not accept that kind of talk from other people towards you. So why is it any different? I want you to think about that.
Just like I talked about last week, the awareness of the self-talk in and of itself is very important. And as you start to gain greater levels of self-awareness, you're probably going to notice that a lot of the things you say to yourself aren't very nice. The self-awareness isn't making you more negative; you're just becoming more aware of the negative things that are running in the background of your brain.
For a lot of my clients, perfectionism definitely is playing into this dynamic. And also, it's just a repeated practice way of being in a relationship with themselves because they've mistakenly over the years believed that they've had to be hard on themselves in order to get traction, or maybe they've seen it modeled in their family or with other people.
There's this pushing voice inside of them that says it could always be better. It could be more. It could be faster, and so on and so on. And if you tell yourself this regularly enough, you start to believe it that it's true, and don't even realize when others would say, hey, things are going really well. From an outside perspective, this looks great because that inner critic, that inner negative dialogue about what they're not doing right is so strong.
And now, some people will tell me, yeah, but I have to kind of be mean to myself or be hard on myself in order to get things done. That's how I've done it. That's how I've gotten to where I am today. And sometimes that can work, but it only works for a while. As time passes, the way you speak to and disconnect from that part of you that really requires support and nurturing, what happens is you start to be afraid of that critic voice that's inside of you. And then what happens is you start to make choices to avoid the judgment and blame you'll inflict upon yourself if you don't perform in a certain way or do things to this exacting standard.
If this is the dynamic that you've set up with you and your own internal voice, then you're not going to be willing to set the bar or your goals higher. And I'm not saying higher from this place of not good enough or you're not doing a good job, but higher because you're feeling called through genuine desire or wanting to grow in a certain way. You're not going to want to set it higher because you're not going to be willing to fail then. Because if you fail, then you're going to potentially face that inner storm of negativity. All of your efforts start to be focused on avoidance of what you don't want instead of focusing on what you do want, which was another thing that we talked about in this series.
The contrast to all of this is becoming practiced at encouragement and generosity with yourself. This actually sets you up to get moving with more confidence and greater levels of belief in your capabilities and your capacity and who you can become. You can choose as you listen to this to really start to focus which way that internal dialogue is going to go. Is it going to lead you towards trying to hide from your harsh inner critic? Or is it going to be compassionate and nurturing and supportive and move you towards the vision you have for yourself and your business?
The critical voice that so many of us have developed over the years does believe that it's helping you out. It thinks that it's there to keep you in line and push you harder because that's what you need. But it's not helping you, not nearly as much as you think. And you're going to have to remind yourself of this, that there is a different way to get things done.
I alluded to this earlier, but often we're worried about the impact that self-compassion could have on us negatively, right? We're like, yeah, that sounds nice, but I don't know that it's for me because it sounds hard or because, well, how am I going to get anything done or ever do anything ever again? Right? That's one of the most common myths or pushbacks I hear about self-compassion, is that it's going to underline your motivation to improve yourself or your circumstances.
You think that if you're going to be nice to yourself, then you won't do anything ever again. You'll just sit on the sofa and watch Netflix forever. Or you're going to start letting yourself off the hook and your standards are going to fall and, da, da, da, da, goes to ruins. But that's not actually true. I've seen it for myself, my clients, and research even suggests that support, encouragement, and constructive reflection are the most effective motivators, not negative feedback.
One of the ways I was even thinking about this is like having me as your coach. Maybe you see me as your coach as a podcast listener, or for the clients that I work directly with in my private practice. Having my support and reflection and holding space for their human experience is so helpful. It keeps them moving. Having someone who holds belief in you and your capabilities is going to guide you towards your next step. It's not going to be a hindrance.
The other myth that I hear, too, is that self-compassion is self-indulgent or a reason to throw yourself a pity party. Whereas, again, it's not true. It's the opposite. Self-compassion has actually been shown to reduce burnout, which is better for everyone. It's better for you, it's better for those around you, whether that's your family, your staff, or your clients. It's one of those cases where taking care of you is for the greater good.
Deciding you're not going to be so hard on yourself does not mean you're going to be lazy or whatever other fear you have about this. And instead, you're going to build a strong foundation for your internal and external growth.
I want you to practice acknowledging what feels hard. Speak to yourself like you would a friend or a child with that encouragement and understanding. And remind yourself you're not alone in facing challenges.
This week, when things feel hard, maybe you make a mistake or you don't even just get everything done that you hope to do on that to-do list, try on some self-compassion. Notice if the critical voice is showing up. That's just step one. And consider, all right, I have a choice here. I can decide how I'm going to respond to me. And if I let that negative voice drive the bus, what's going to happen? And then think about what might happen if you related to yourself with even just the tiniest bit of compassion.
Making this shift more automatic can take some time and attention. I will say that. Remember, one of the crazy things about our brain is that it prefers efficiency and the known. So even if the thing you're saying to yourself right now is mean and feels horrible, it is comfortable and a known entity, which somehow to the brain feels better. So you do have some brain rewiring to do, but stick with this and watch yourself and your business flourish. It's all going to start with being nicer to yourself.
I'd love to hear where this takes you. You can always send me a message on Instagram @desicreswell or reply to one of my emails. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode in the CEO Summer School series with truth number 5. And I also have some incredible interviews lined up for you. Make sure you're following the show, and also to take a minute to rate and review.
Until next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
Today, we'll dive into what self-compassion actually is. I promise, it's not letting yourself off the hook. How it helps you get out of your own way, and I'll give you actionable steps you can start taking today to quiet the inner critic. Because, let's face it, running this business is hard enough.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you're ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you're in the right place.
I'm Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let's go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. Today, I'm really excited about this topic. We're going to be discussing how to stop being so hard on yourself. So many of the designers I work with have a very active, highly engaged member of their team, and it's called the inner critic. While we probably can't fire this part of you, I don't know if we can ever really get rid of the inner critic, we can sure quiet it down, and that is through self-compassion so that you can really get to work on what matters most and stop ruminating on that mental chatter. And it's going to be a way for you to feel better as you face the challenges of being a CEO. Because if you've been around here at all, you know they're inevitable. And so it's all about how you rise to the occasion and lead yourself through it.
Before we really dive into today's episode, I have a quick ask of you. It's my birthday week, and one of the things that I would absolutely be over the moon about is if you would leave a rating and review for the podcast. You can consider it a little way to help me celebrate and connect on this special week. On Spotify, you can only leave the rating, and on Apple Podcasts, you can leave the rating and review. And I love to hear what you enjoy about the show, which episodes you have enjoyed so far, or even just why another designer should listen. So, if you feel so inclined to help me celebrate this week, I truly would appreciate it. And thank you to everyone who has already left a rating and review. It truly makes my day when I see a new one of those pop up.
Now, for a little context, here's why I wanted to do this episode following last week. And in that last week, it was part of the CEO Summer School series where I shared the truth that scaling is an inside job. You don't have to have listened to that one to get so much out of what I'm sharing today. It's a great companion though to what we're going to be discussing. So definitely go back and listen to that one when you have a chance. And know also that you can still sign up for CEO Summer School. We're cruising through it, and it's not too late. So you can go to desicreswell.com/resources and click the CEO Summer School series link and get those extra bonus materials sent straight to your inbox.
Okay, so last week when I talked about scaling as an inside job, what this means is that you have to grow as a person in order for the business to grow and fulfill its potential. The two are happening together. They both need to occur.
There are always new skills to master, new mindsets that you'll want to adopt, and new levels of your tolerance for emotional discomfort and emotional resilience that are really required at every level of your goal-setting process throughout your entire career as a design business owner.
When I think about one of the most supportive things you can do for yourself along this journey is to be nice to yourself, to have self-compassion as one of the major tools that you lean on as you support yourself as a designer CEO.
Growing your interior design business takes some real grit. Some days, you're going to succeed and fail all within a matter of hours. And it's tough stuff that you sign up for when you say, hey, I want to be the leader. I'm going to be an entrepreneur, and I'm going to start my own thing. And the internal work too, that side-by-side scaling of the business and yourself, which means turning the mirror on you and honestly assessing what needs to change and who you need to become in order to reach your next level, that takes courage. There are highs and lows, and some days you really feel like you're becoming your future self, and other days, all your brain can focus on is where you're falling short.
All of this is normal, so we definitely want to celebrate when it's good, and also know that being super hard on yourself does not make a hard day easier. While that might seem really obvious, I don't see it making a shift sometimes. We know, oh yeah, I should be nice to myself, but then being harsh seems to be the pattern for so many of you, and there's some resistance to giving that up, which I'll talk about later on.
Being hard on yourself is just one of the hidden ways you're holding yourself back from reaching your potential. Sometimes it seems like it's the thing that has gotten you where you are. But let me tell you, it's not necessary, and it's actually not the most effective way to get there. Not to mention, it just feels bad.
What I want to sell you on today is self-compassion. Self-compassion is how you're going to lead yourself through challenges, setbacks, and difficulties over the long run, both personally and professionally. And if you don't resonate with the term self-compassion, for me, for a long time, it felt too touchy-feely. You could also think of it as self-kindness, just plain being nice to yourself, or anything else that gives you an entry point into this practice and gives you that sense of willingness to test it out.
The other thing I'll say is that before I started studying and practicing self-compassion, and this was through Kristin Neff, who's a leading researcher and meditation teacher in the self-compassion domain, that's who I learned from, it felt like this big thing I had to learn how to do and then this big thing I had to put on my to-do list, kind of like, oh gosh, I've got to become more self-compassionate. This is like this huge project that I need to tackle, and I'll do it when I have time.
So if you're feeling that way too, I want you to know it really doesn't take that much from you. The only effort that's required is to really notice when you could use some self-compassion. So that's that self-awareness and knowing yourself piece that I talked about last week, and then choosing to offer it up.
All that a self-compassionate act towards yourself requires is that you express support, warmth, and understanding towards yourself during a difficult time. And another piece of it is that you recognize that you aren't alone in your imperfections and your mistakes. So let me repeat that. All you're doing is expressing support, warmth, and understanding towards yourself and recognizing that there is that shared human experience of difficulties and struggles.
The other thing here is that when I used to think that being self-compassionate would take a lot of time for whatever reason, what I know now is that it's actually very efficient. Not that we want to pursue self-compassion just so we can be overly productive and efficient, but what I have found is that kindness towards yourself really helps cut through that mental rumination. And the other piece too is that acknowledging that suffering, challenges, mistakes, however you want to frame that, the fact that's universal can really help to offset feelings of shame, which is another way we end up spinning and spending a lot of time and energy going inward but not in a useful way.
I want to give you an example of this. Let's say maybe you miss a detail on a client's order. This could very well happen, and it might be an instance where you tend to beat yourself up internally. Maybe the internal dialogue sounds like, “I can't get anything right. I'm so disorganized. I can't believe I did this.” I think you get the idea. And then you have to go into problem-solving mode from this frantic, worked-up place. And you're also probably not going to ask your team member for help or ask a colleague for advice because of that shame piece. Because it's not just “I made a mistake,” you're making it mean “I am a mistake. I'm the failure.” It's very personal. And so when we're in the absence of self-compassion, we want to hide.
So, in this way, choosing to be kind and nurture ourselves through the difficulty, choosing the opposite of what we maybe have been defaulting to, is actually going to be the easier path. It's going to be the more effective path to getting the problem solved. And so you might say to yourself, I really wish this didn't happen. I also know that this is something that's probably happened to a lot of other designers at some point or another. I know I'll figure it out.
There's a softness and a shift in that conversation between you and yourself. You're going to go about solving the issue. So you might as well be nice to yourself along the way because you're going to have a quicker, more effective outcome from being nicer, and it feels a lot better.
I want you to just think too about how we are so hard on ourselves, right? Like if we were to have this exact same circumstance happen to a friend or a colleague, you would never tell them that they're such a mess. You would never tell them, gosh, you are such a mess. Get your act together, right? No.
So, as you're listening to this, just get curious about why you would allow yourself to talk to you that way, but you would never talk to somebody else you cared about like that, and you would certainly not accept that kind of talk from other people towards you. So why is it any different? I want you to think about that.
Just like I talked about last week, the awareness of the self-talk in and of itself is very important. And as you start to gain greater levels of self-awareness, you're probably going to notice that a lot of the things you say to yourself aren't very nice. The self-awareness isn't making you more negative; you're just becoming more aware of the negative things that are running in the background of your brain.
For a lot of my clients, perfectionism definitely is playing into this dynamic. And also, it's just a repeated practice way of being in a relationship with themselves because they've mistakenly over the years believed that they've had to be hard on themselves in order to get traction, or maybe they've seen it modeled in their family or with other people.
There's this pushing voice inside of them that says it could always be better. It could be more. It could be faster, and so on and so on. And if you tell yourself this regularly enough, you start to believe it that it's true, and don't even realize when others would say, hey, things are going really well. From an outside perspective, this looks great because that inner critic, that inner negative dialogue about what they're not doing right is so strong.
And now, some people will tell me, yeah, but I have to kind of be mean to myself or be hard on myself in order to get things done. That's how I've done it. That's how I've gotten to where I am today. And sometimes that can work, but it only works for a while. As time passes, the way you speak to and disconnect from that part of you that really requires support and nurturing, what happens is you start to be afraid of that critic voice that's inside of you. And then what happens is you start to make choices to avoid the judgment and blame you'll inflict upon yourself if you don't perform in a certain way or do things to this exacting standard.
If this is the dynamic that you've set up with you and your own internal voice, then you're not going to be willing to set the bar or your goals higher. And I'm not saying higher from this place of not good enough or you're not doing a good job, but higher because you're feeling called through genuine desire or wanting to grow in a certain way. You're not going to want to set it higher because you're not going to be willing to fail then. Because if you fail, then you're going to potentially face that inner storm of negativity. All of your efforts start to be focused on avoidance of what you don't want instead of focusing on what you do want, which was another thing that we talked about in this series.
The contrast to all of this is becoming practiced at encouragement and generosity with yourself. This actually sets you up to get moving with more confidence and greater levels of belief in your capabilities and your capacity and who you can become. You can choose as you listen to this to really start to focus which way that internal dialogue is going to go. Is it going to lead you towards trying to hide from your harsh inner critic? Or is it going to be compassionate and nurturing and supportive and move you towards the vision you have for yourself and your business?
The critical voice that so many of us have developed over the years does believe that it's helping you out. It thinks that it's there to keep you in line and push you harder because that's what you need. But it's not helping you, not nearly as much as you think. And you're going to have to remind yourself of this, that there is a different way to get things done.
I alluded to this earlier, but often we're worried about the impact that self-compassion could have on us negatively, right? We're like, yeah, that sounds nice, but I don't know that it's for me because it sounds hard or because, well, how am I going to get anything done or ever do anything ever again? Right? That's one of the most common myths or pushbacks I hear about self-compassion, is that it's going to underline your motivation to improve yourself or your circumstances.
You think that if you're going to be nice to yourself, then you won't do anything ever again. You'll just sit on the sofa and watch Netflix forever. Or you're going to start letting yourself off the hook and your standards are going to fall and, da, da, da, da, goes to ruins. But that's not actually true. I've seen it for myself, my clients, and research even suggests that support, encouragement, and constructive reflection are the most effective motivators, not negative feedback.
One of the ways I was even thinking about this is like having me as your coach. Maybe you see me as your coach as a podcast listener, or for the clients that I work directly with in my private practice. Having my support and reflection and holding space for their human experience is so helpful. It keeps them moving. Having someone who holds belief in you and your capabilities is going to guide you towards your next step. It's not going to be a hindrance.
The other myth that I hear, too, is that self-compassion is self-indulgent or a reason to throw yourself a pity party. Whereas, again, it's not true. It's the opposite. Self-compassion has actually been shown to reduce burnout, which is better for everyone. It's better for you, it's better for those around you, whether that's your family, your staff, or your clients. It's one of those cases where taking care of you is for the greater good.
Deciding you're not going to be so hard on yourself does not mean you're going to be lazy or whatever other fear you have about this. And instead, you're going to build a strong foundation for your internal and external growth.
I want you to practice acknowledging what feels hard. Speak to yourself like you would a friend or a child with that encouragement and understanding. And remind yourself you're not alone in facing challenges.
This week, when things feel hard, maybe you make a mistake or you don't even just get everything done that you hope to do on that to-do list, try on some self-compassion. Notice if the critical voice is showing up. That's just step one. And consider, all right, I have a choice here. I can decide how I'm going to respond to me. And if I let that negative voice drive the bus, what's going to happen? And then think about what might happen if you related to yourself with even just the tiniest bit of compassion.
Making this shift more automatic can take some time and attention. I will say that. Remember, one of the crazy things about our brain is that it prefers efficiency and the known. So even if the thing you're saying to yourself right now is mean and feels horrible, it is comfortable and a known entity, which somehow to the brain feels better. So you do have some brain rewiring to do, but stick with this and watch yourself and your business flourish. It's all going to start with being nicer to yourself.
I'd love to hear where this takes you. You can always send me a message on Instagram @desicreswell or reply to one of my emails. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode in the CEO Summer School series with truth number 5. And I also have some incredible interviews lined up for you. Make sure you're following the show, and also to take a minute to rate and review.
Until next Wednesday, I'm wishing you a beautiful week.
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit DesiCreswell.com, where you’ll get immediate access to a variety of free resources to help you take what you learn on the podcast and put it into action. And if you love what you’re hearing, be sure to rate, review, and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. I’ll talk to you next week.
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