Learning how to observe your unhealthy or unwanted behaviours without shaming or blaming yourself is a game-changer.
It allows you to be honest with yourself that your busy role is costing you precious family time,
Or to observe yourself making compulsive and unhealthy food choices,
Or to notice your short temper with your kids or your partner,
Without descending into self-criticism, guilt and shame.
This is HUGE. Because as long as we’re locked in the blame-and-shame spiral:
we either carry on making unaligned choices because we cannot bear to look beneath the surface, or
we get stuck in so much self-criticism that we can’t move forward.
When we stop making ourselves wrong for patterns and behaviours that make perfect sense given our conditioning and experiences, we free up so much of ourselves to actually make changes.
Moving from the blame-and-shame inner spiral into gently-notice-and-adjust changes everything. And it’s something that can be learnt. (Or rather, remembered – because little kids don’t beat themselves up for their behaviours. We teach them to do that.)