How to decrease your stress level by giving yourself grace

I want to talk more today about giving ourselves grace and space for difficult times in life. These include times of life with massive changes. It can be marriage, moving in with someone, moving to general cities or houses, changing jobs, ending a relationship, or having a baby for the first or subsequent time.

My process helps professional moms with the seemingly perfect life who are silently suffering on the inside to know that they're not alone and that they reclaim their confidence and power to have the life they want even if that feels impossible right now.

These situations require a period of adjustment and grace. Grace is an important concept to learn to give ourselves because it is truly the opposite of how so many of us were raised.

Push, push, push. Perfection. Excellence. 100% on exams, class ranking, success, etc. Be tough, don’t whine. Now I'm definitely not a proponent of whining. However, I am now a proponent of being gentle with ourselves. This kind of sounds lame as I say it, but it is a necessary "lameocity". We must work on being okay with B+ work, things not always done our way, or some of the literal and figurative messiness of life.

My mom was a captain in the Indian army. She is such an incredibly strong woman. She taught me strength, and an awesome work ethic; took pride in her work and was an example of a self-sufficient successful woman. At that time, she was one of the only female internists in my small town. She had to fight to get her place. She ended up being the chief of medicine there.

I mention this story because our parent’s generation, our mothers had to fight to work in a man’s world. We still are. Part of this is being tough, though which to a degree we do need. Often, this practice turns into a mean inner critic. You’re not smart enough or thin enough or enough period. How terrible right? How can we be happy when this voice lurks in the background? When I start working with my clients, I tell them one of the rules is no inner critic. Shut that shit down. ASAP. No space for that voice anymore because it does not add anything. I want to add balance to this though, and that is where the grace comes in.

Grace that we are enough as we are. Yes, we’ve made mistakes, but we are always learning and growing. Nothing wrong here. Doing great!

Giving oneself grace means being gentle with oneself - the ability to treat oneself as a friend or like you would your own child.

Examples of how we can give ourselves grace:

not obsessing not going down the rabbit hole-refer to episode #10 on managing catastrophization
acknowledging when we’ve made a mistake and that we are human and being perfect is impossible
easy does it, going easy on ourselves, resting when we need to
getting help and not feeling guilty
outsourcing and not feeling guilty
caring for ourselves and not feeling guilty

Not feeling guilty is a major theme here. Perhaps I should focus more on realizing that mothers will always feel guilty - acknowledging that and moving forward without harping on it. So maybe we will always feel guilty and accepting that is what we can do to lighten our load and decrease our suffering.

I make sure I do what I need to do to stay well - be it coaching, group therapy, alone time, or connecting with dear friends. I feel guilty any and all minutes I take myself away from my children. Yet it’s not practical to be with them 24/7. I also would not want to smother them. My solution is understanding this is impractical and knowing I will feel guilty no matter what and proceeding anyway. The end product is inner peace and happiness which then transmits to my children.

When you find yourself slipping into an old pattern or are triggered, give yourself space that you’re not perfect you’re working on it.

Not being so hard on ourselves - which is really difficult to do because so many of us moms working in male-dominated fields, we strive for excellence - demanding it from ourselves and often others.

Sit with yourself quietly

Be okay with who you are and where you are right now. Be okay with who you were. Be okay with your previous programming even if you’re trying to re-wire all of that.

Grace:

What if we could know that we are doing our best? And honestly, it’s probably better than our mothers did because understanding where we come from, healing old trauma and wounds, trying to care for our own mental health - these things have become so much more mainstream. And we have the opportunity to do better for ourselves and our kids. As we give ourselves grace we become less harsh with ourselves and others. There is a ripple effect there. Imagine them giving themselves grace more naturally than we do because it was modeled to them while they were growing up. What?! Incredible. The work we are doing here is so critical in healing ourselves but also improving generational mental health. If you want to dive deeper into this work, I have a handful of spots opening up for private clients.

Prianca NaikSeptember 21, 2022