To treat ourselves with patience, kindness, love, and a caring and accepting attitude, even and especially in the wake of personal failures and losses. A self-compassionate person recognizes that humans are imperfect and thus will respond to their own mistakes with gentle understanding and strive toward self-betterment and progress.

Self-talk, also called our “inner dialogue,” is a name for the conversations that take place within our thoughts.

“Negative self-talk” describes our harsh thoughts/inner critic which judges our actions, berates us on our failures, exaggerates our shortcomings and discourages our growth and attempts toward success.

“Positive self-talk” describes our self-compassionate thinking/inner cheerleader that treats us with care and comfort in difficult moments, empowers us to resile through stress and loss, and unconditionally supports our growth.

How we perceive ourselves. Would you describe yourself as intelligent or competent? Do you think you are an attractive or charming person? What do you think you contribute to your friend circle? All of these opinions we hold about ourselves factor into our self-concept.

To be mindful means to devote our undivided attention and time toward our living experience at the present, which has tremendously positive research-proven impacts on our health.

For example, someone who is practicing mindful breathing might reserve a few responsibility-free minutes for the activity, find someplace quiet to sit, close their eyes to block out visual distractions, and breathe slowly, bringing to mind sensory observations from the feeling of their expanding chest to the length of time they’re comfortably able to hold their breath.

Mindfulness could also look as simple as someone who is eating their favorite food slowly and deliberately to really savor the taste and texture of the food item.

A term used to describe when people have secured and surpassed their security and ego needs and are motivated by growth goals and values, such as justice, goodness, authenticity, justice, etc.

10 Characteristics of Self-Actualization from Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman

A strong and stable internal foundation composed of resilience and unwavering self-concept. Someone who practices or possesses groundedness will be likely to successfully resile through difficult obstacles and major changes in their external environments, whether personal or professional.

Self-parenting is when we create and enforce the opposite of a harsh inner critic inside our heads (AKA our inner cheerleader). This encouraging, compassionate inner voice is thought of as a mature, loving mini-parent inside our heads, caring for the vulnerable “inner child” inside of us.

We often look to the adults in our life (parents, teachers) for guidance and validation, so it’s impactful to have a firmly supportive inner parent with us, whether we are just children or fully-grown adults.

According to Raleigh Psychotherapy, “Because no parent or parents can provide for every single developmental need of a child, there are parts of each of us that were neglected, or experienced trauma, or hurt. […] We can reduce the deficits from childhood through self-parenting.”

What we sometimes refer to as “overthinking” — the process of thinking about the same thing again and again.

According to Habits for Wellbeing, “pain” is the physical and objective sense of distress while “suffering” is the more subjective personal interpretation of the painful experience. The more we allow ourselves the permission to feel pain and the unpleasant emotions which accompany it, the less suffering we are likely to experience.

On the other hand, emotional repression or avoidance or resistance is likely to exacerbate the level of suffering we’ll endure during a difficult experience.

When we weigh similarities and differences between ourselves and others. It is a natural human instinct to make and use self-comparisons as a metric for our success.

Self-comparisons, whether they make us feel better or worse about ourselves, can be harmful for the reason that they create the false impressions that 1) we are aware of others’ failures and successes as much as we are aware of our own, and 2) we are afforded the same resources, privileges, community support, etc. as each other.

Self-competition is a method people use to engage their competitive drive and achieve personal and professional success without engaging in excessive self-comparisons and peer competition. It means to compete with ourselves and strive toward surpassing our own past accomplishments, instead of those of others.