130. Self-Pity
Ever get stuck feeling really sorry for yourself?
Life can be so rude sometimes, it’s no wonder if this happens to you.
Or maybe you have a hard time allowing yourself to feel bad about things, because you’re always trying really hard to be positive instead.
Either way, it begs the question: what’s the right amount of self pity?
When should we let ourselves feel bad, and for how long?
Whether you’re building a wildly satisfying life or just trying to get through each day, things will suck sometimes, and you may (want to) feel bad for yourself.
You’ll get a nasty head cold.
You’ll get passed over for the promotion.
Your kid will say something super rude and upsettingly accurate.
And you may find yourself wanting to get back in bed and just live under the covers forever.
Or you may find yourself trying to jump immediately to what’s going well without giving yourself time to allow the negative emotions that are coming up.
So what’s the solution?
That’s exactly what we’re talking about on this week’s podcast: how to feel bad when things are hard without getting stuck in that feeling-bad place.
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WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why indulging in self-pity sometimes feels comfortable.
What might happen if you don’t give yourself the space to feel self-pity.
Why briefly wallowing hard in your self-pity can be extremely powerful.
How to let yourself feel your self-pity without getting stuck there.
The most helpful emotions you can shift to when you feel self-pity.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about self-pity.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I hope this finds you very well. I am recovering from a cold. I had a little cold last week. And it was not my favorite thing that’s ever happened, but I’m feeling extremely grateful to be feeling most of the way better.
And I was coaching one of my clients today, just a little bit ago, and we were talking about a situation in their life where they had been feeling sorry for themselves. And it sort of related to me because I felt sorry for myself last week when I had my cold and I felt really shitty. And so that’s what I want to talk to y’all about this week.
So one of the things we were talking about is why does self-pity feel comfortable? Or why do we want to stay in self-pity even though it doesn’t feel good. And so the thing the client had said is it’s more comfortable to be in self-pity than to switch the perspective and move into something more useful. And I was like, really? Is that true? And I think for most of us it’s not true.
And this client said something brilliant, which is that self-pity can be scrolling on your phone. Sometimes when you start scrolling it feels good. It’s interesting, you’re seeing stuff that your brain wants to think about. But then after a while it kind of starts to feel bad. And I was kind of like, “Well what do you do in that situation?” And the client said that they basically decide when to stop or they’re like, “Oh, this is a good place to stop.”
And I was like, how do we apply that to self-pity? And we were talking about that, about just because we can see that self-pity isn’t the most useful place doesn’t mean we never spend any time there, but maybe we don’t want to get trapped there. We don’t want to spend the whole thing there.
So what we were talking about in this particular coaching was being in a meeting. I think it was a long meeting, like maybe a two hour meeting, and feeling self-pity in the meeting. And that sounds like a long time to be in self-pity, it doesn’t sound very fun to me, but I also know how alluring self-pity can be. And that sometimes if we try to skip it over entirely, it doesn’t really work. It’s almost like taking some time to feel sorry for ourselves can be kind of satisfying in a way.
And for me last week when I felt yucky in my physical body, taking some time to be like, “I feel yucky. It’s terrible and I don’t want it and I’m a baby,” right? And then kind of transitioning from there and then comforting myself was really powerful. So I said this to the client, I said wallow hard and then shift.
And I think that that is something that can be really useful for you to think about. Like if there’s an area in your life where you feel a lot of self-pity, or even a little self-pity, or self-pity sometimes, whatever. When you feel self-pity, some of us will try to skip over that. There’s people among us who will try to skip the feeling entirely and move directly to positivity, that tends to not work. And then we’ll bottle up the self-pity and bottle it up and bottle it up and then eventually that bottle will explode. So that’s one thing that can happen.
But the other thing that happens is, the second one is more where my risk is, that I’ll move into self-pity. I’ll build a house there and I’ll be like, this is my entire life now, is feeling sorry for myself and this is my personality now. So I’ll get stuck in the self-pity.
And so that’s why I think wallow hard and shift. It’s not just wallow hard, it’s not just shift, it’s wallow hard and then shift. And that kind of gives you time to kind of bask in the self-pity for a little bit and feel really sorry for yourself but not get trapped there.
So I think the part that is wallowing hard can be valuable because it allows us to actually have our negative experiences which are part of life. Sometimes we’re physically sick and it does not feel good, and we do not like it, and that is okay. Sometimes at work we’re in a meeting and we don’t want to be in that meeting and we want to have the negative emotion of not wanting to be in the meeting and feeling sorry for ourselves because we’re in the meeting, and that is okay.
Sometimes other things don’t go according to plan, right? Like we go after a new role, and we don’t get it and that feels shitty and we may want to feel sorry for ourselves for a while. We ask out the hot stranger at the coffee shop and they say no and that does not feel good. And maybe we want to feel some self-pity about that for a while. We pitch a TED talk, and either they don’t want it, or we do it and it bombs. Whatever, there’s lots of opportunities in life to feel self-pity.
And the more you’re kind of building this wild, big, satisfying, delicious life, the more, I think, opportunities there are in that we face a lot of rejection when we’re making big changes in our lives and in our world. And so I think if you can’t allow yourself to feel bad at all, that might block you from taking those big actions.
But if when you feel bad, you kind of build the house in there and get stuck there, that also blocks you, right? Because then you’re just stuck in the self-pity versus continuing to go and make new choices and put yourself out there and make changes so that your life and the world are more of what you want them to be.
Whereas when you wallow hard and then shift, then you kind of, I think, get the best of both worlds. And, of course, this applies to so much more than just self-pity, right? Any feeling you’re having that maybe you don’t want to be in for forever, like sadness, grief, despair, even anger, right, it’s like giving yourself permission to really wallow in or go hard in that emotion for a brief amount of time can be extremely powerful.
Here’s what it also helps with, it helps you actually feel that feeling and move through that feeling. To say that a little bit differently, it helps you process through the feeling.
A lot of us, when we have a feeling, we don’t want to because it doesn’t feel the way we want to feel. And so we push that feeling down or we try to skate over the top of it, or we intellectualize it, which is when we use our words to talk about the feeling without actually having an embodied experience of the feeling.
Whereas I think this idea of wallowing is sort of going all in, it’s being with the feeling, but only for a limited amount of time, right? It’s going into that feeling completely without judgment of ourselves, without judgment of the feeling. And spending some time there knowing that we’re not going to be there forever.
And I think knowing that we’re not going to be there forever is so important, because so many of my clients when I’m like, what if we just feel this feeling? They’re like, oh, I can’t. If I feel it, it’ll never end. It’s too big to feel. That’s not the case. Physiologically a feeling is like a cascade in your body.
And if you actually are with the feeling, it should move all the way through in about 90 seconds to three minutes. From the books I’ve read that is about the amount of time it takes for a feeling to process all the way through. But when we’re resisting the feeling or when we’re getting stuck in the narrative of the feeling, that’s when the feeling can last a lot longer.
So another way to think about this idea of wallowing hard and then shifting, is to think about I’m going to go all the way in, and then I’m going to come all the way out, right? So it’s like swimming across a lake, you’re going to go all the way across and get to the other side and then get back out, right? Or swimming all the way across and then coming back to the side you started on and then getting out.
But it’s this idea that we go all the way in. But then we come all the way out, we don’t just hang out there. For certain feelings, this is going to come in waves, right? And for me when I was sick, I felt self-pity in waves. I would feel really sorry for myself and then I would shift. And then I would feel really sorry for myself later also, because I was feeling a lot of physical sensations that were deeply unpleasant to me.
You know, like when you get the really itchy feeling in your nose and you’re sneezing all the time. And your little nose gets raw from all of the times you’ve blown your nose. That’s what I was having, and I didn’t like it. But I also wasn’t just building the house and living inside the self-pity either, because that doesn’t feel good either. In the long run, it tends to feel pretty bad.
So I’ve talked about this before with a lot of emotions, but especially I think like self-pity, outrage, anger, when we first go into them, they can feel really powerful. And I think that’s part of why they’re so alluring. But if we stay in them for a long time, they can feel very disempowering, right? And then we risk going into the pit of despair.
Whereas if you go all the way into the feelings and then shift and come back out, I think that allows you to feel the feeling and have that sort of gratification or satisfaction of the feeling, and not get stuck in it and not become disempowered in the stuckness.
Now let’s talk about the shift. When I talk about shift, you may be wondering, well, where can I shift to? One of the most powerful shifts I’ve seen is going from self-pity to self-comforting. So self-pity, to me, is sort of like it’s not fair, it shouldn’t be like this. It’s kind of like a poor baby to yourself.
But what I see a lot is that often people go into self-pity and then they go into self-judgment, right? They’re feeling sorry for themselves and then they subtly slide over into judging and berating themselves for having gotten in that situation or for not getting back out of it or blah, blah, blah, whatever, it doesn’t even matter.
So when I say wallow hard and then shift, that’s not the direction I’m inviting you to shift in. That’s sort of like a slide down a slope that I don’t think is a very fun slope to go down. So when I talk about shifting, I’m talking about shifting perspective into something that’s going to be more useful.
So, again, I think the easiest shift is self-pity into self-comfort, right? And so we were talking, my client and I, about when I was sick I was feeling sorry for myself that I’m sick. And then that led into what do I need? What could be comforting to me while I don’t feel good, because it is true that I don’t feel good. And it’s not “fair.” I mean, it is fair in that humans get sick and I’m a human, but it’s sort of like it is understandably upsetting to feel shitty.
So what can we do? Since I can’t magically snap my fingers and make myself not feel shitty, what could I do to comfort myself, right? And so, for me, that was having hot tea or ordering Thai takeout because that was going to be comforting for me to eat. Or taking over the counter medications that could lessen my symptoms a little, or giving myself permission to not do the work that I had planned, stuff like that.
Those were ways for me to comfort myself while I didn’t feel well. And it’s also in how I talk to myself, being like, yeah, you don’t feel good. I’m so sorry. But it’s also in things like letting myself watch a lot of TV because TV can be very distracting, right? It was very distracting from my physical symptoms and so it allowed me to move through those symptoms with less suffering because I was distracting myself while I didn’t feel good.
And so that’s kind of what I was offering to my client too, of like, okay, if you’re having a hard time shifting out of self-pity, one of the easiest shifts to make is in the self-comfort. What can make this more agreeable? What can make this more enjoyable? Do I need a drink? Do I need a blanket on my lap? Do I need to put on another sweater, right?
I guess all of those are oriented around like maybe you’re kind of cold. And sometimes we’re kind of cold and we just need to be warmed up. It’s a very straightforward kind of physical approach. But in our heads, when we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, we’re not always thinking about what could be comforting. We’re just focused on what’s not working.
So shifting from self-pity to self-comfort is a way to reorient yourself in a solution-focused way and in a self-caretaking way, and also in a curious way. We talked recently on the podcast about changing your tone of voice, shifting into curiosity of like, well, what could be really comforting? What could help me feel better in this situation I don’t prefer?
There are obviously other shifts you can make instead, right? You could go self-pity to self-empowered, right? You’re like, if I felt really empowered, what might I do here? How might I handle this? Maybe I would have a conversation with this person, or maybe I would ask for an exception to this policy. Or maybe I would cancel all my meetings because being powerful also means being able to say no to things.
So it’s not for me to say necessarily what’s going to be the most helpful for you to shift into. Mostly what I want to invite you to consider is that you can shift and that just because you can shift though, doesn’t mean you have to shift immediately. And it’s okay, if you want to take some time to feel sorry for yourself and to feel self-pity.
I think sometimes self-pity gets this really bad rap, like it’s whiny, it’s complaining, it’s like not helping. But again, it can be really powerful to give yourself permission to be in that space for a while and to really be with yourself and be with your negative emotions and be with the part of you that thinks it’s not fair and it’s bullshit, like whatever is going on in your life because that’s also real.
That’s part of your experience right now and we don’t have to shut that part down in order to create your wildly satisfying life. We don’t have to shut that part down in order to create your wildly delicious career. I think sometimes we think we have to cut that part off, or get rid of that part, or discipline that part, or grow that part up, or teach it to be more productive or more adult or more whatever.
And what I really want to offer you is that you can include that part. But what we want to be mindful about, again, is not necessarily building the house inside self-pity and then moving into the house and staying there forever. Because I think it can be powerful to be with yourself in those negative emotions, but it can also get sticky there.
And if we get stuck there that generally ultimately feels really bad for us and doesn’t help us get what we want because at the heart of self-pity, I do think, is some disempowerment, some like this situation is bigger than me. So I think what can be beautiful is allowing ourselves to travel through that space, to feel sorry for ourselves, to feel some grief about things not being the way we want them to be. And then shifting into whatever is going to be most powerful for us for what we want to create at that time.
So I want you to just take a moment to think about is there an area in your life or your career where you’ve been feeling self-pity and you’d like to now shift out of it?
Or is there an area in your life or career where you’ve been trying to force yourself to feel good and you actually are like, you know what I want to do? I want to wallow in some fucking self-pity for 15 minutes. And then maybe once I do that I will actually be able to shift into something more useful, more meaningful, more geared up to actually help me create the changes I want.
But maybe you haven’t been able to move forward because you haven’t given yourself any time and permission to be with some of those negative emotions that you’re actually having about that.
And as you go forward in all areas of your life this will be incredibly useful, for self-pity and for other negative feelings that come up because those negative feelings are part of life. And even when you have a wildly satisfying life and career like I do, you’re still going to have self-pity.
Like I got sick last week and had it last week. And sometimes things in my business don’t go the way I want them to on the first try and then maybe I feel some self-pity. And sometimes things in my relationship don’t go the way I want them to on the first try and then maybe I feel some self-pity.
Or there’s always projects I’m working on that I’m sort of in the middle of. There’s areas of my life where I’m wildly deliciously satisfied and building more of that all the time. And then there’s areas of my life where I’m like, this is not hitting the way I want it to. And so I need to come back to it and kind of figure out how to create more of what I want. And there may be self-pity and other negative emotions that come up as I go about that.
So it’s like both in that I am still working on areas of my life to be what I want them to be. And even the areas of my life that I have created into being what I want them to be. Life is cyclical, it’s just like we have to keep making meals and doing laundry and paying our rent.
It’s not a one and done, we keep doing those things over and over again. And so even in areas that are wildly satisfying, I keep working on this same stuff over and over again. So this is a skill that if you can learn it, is going to be beneficial to you forever, I think.
So that’s what I have for you this week. And I’m so excited for you to take it into your life and use it. And also guess what? I have something even more exciting, which is I want to tell you that I am currently accepting one on one clients.
So in addition to everything that you’re learning on the podcast every week, you can come work with me one on one. And we can be talking all the time in our calls and in our private Slack about all the ways everything on the podcast applies to your life. And you can get my brain and my strategy on every single decision that you’re working through in your career, in your relationships, in every area of your life.
And I can help you take your life from where it is now to wildly satisfying, whatever that looks like for you. And I would love to support you with that. I’m so excited for a world where more people, and specifically more women and people with marginalized identities, are building and living just delicious, wildly satisfying lives. And I’d love to have you be one of them.
So if that sounds like something you would like to talk about, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let’s talk all about it because I would love to see what the world will be like when you add your wild satisfaction to it. All right, talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all. Hello, hello, hello. Happy Wednesday. I hope this finds you very well. I am recovering from a cold. I had a little cold last week. And it was not my favorite thing that’s ever happened, but I’m feeling extremely grateful to be feeling most of the way better.
And I was coaching one of my clients today, just a little bit ago, and we were talking about a situation in their life where they had been feeling sorry for themselves. And it sort of related to me because I felt sorry for myself last week when I had my cold and I felt really shitty. And so that’s what I want to talk to y’all about this week.
So one of the things we were talking about is why does self-pity feel comfortable? Or why do we want to stay in self-pity even though it doesn’t feel good. And so the thing the client had said is it’s more comfortable to be in self-pity than to switch the perspective and move into something more useful. And I was like, really? Is that true? And I think for most of us it’s not true.
And this client said something brilliant, which is that self-pity can be scrolling on your phone. Sometimes when you start scrolling it feels good. It’s interesting, you’re seeing stuff that your brain wants to think about. But then after a while it kind of starts to feel bad. And I was kind of like, “Well what do you do in that situation?” And the client said that they basically decide when to stop or they’re like, “Oh, this is a good place to stop.”
And I was like, how do we apply that to self-pity? And we were talking about that, about just because we can see that self-pity isn’t the most useful place doesn’t mean we never spend any time there, but maybe we don’t want to get trapped there. We don’t want to spend the whole thing there.
So what we were talking about in this particular coaching was being in a meeting. I think it was a long meeting, like maybe a two hour meeting, and feeling self-pity in the meeting. And that sounds like a long time to be in self-pity, it doesn’t sound very fun to me, but I also know how alluring self-pity can be. And that sometimes if we try to skip it over entirely, it doesn’t really work. It’s almost like taking some time to feel sorry for ourselves can be kind of satisfying in a way.
And for me last week when I felt yucky in my physical body, taking some time to be like, “I feel yucky. It’s terrible and I don’t want it and I’m a baby,” right? And then kind of transitioning from there and then comforting myself was really powerful. So I said this to the client, I said wallow hard and then shift.
And I think that that is something that can be really useful for you to think about. Like if there’s an area in your life where you feel a lot of self-pity, or even a little self-pity, or self-pity sometimes, whatever. When you feel self-pity, some of us will try to skip over that. There’s people among us who will try to skip the feeling entirely and move directly to positivity, that tends to not work. And then we’ll bottle up the self-pity and bottle it up and bottle it up and then eventually that bottle will explode. So that’s one thing that can happen.
But the other thing that happens is, the second one is more where my risk is, that I’ll move into self-pity. I’ll build a house there and I’ll be like, this is my entire life now, is feeling sorry for myself and this is my personality now. So I’ll get stuck in the self-pity.
And so that’s why I think wallow hard and shift. It’s not just wallow hard, it’s not just shift, it’s wallow hard and then shift. And that kind of gives you time to kind of bask in the self-pity for a little bit and feel really sorry for yourself but not get trapped there.
So I think the part that is wallowing hard can be valuable because it allows us to actually have our negative experiences which are part of life. Sometimes we’re physically sick and it does not feel good, and we do not like it, and that is okay. Sometimes at work we’re in a meeting and we don’t want to be in that meeting and we want to have the negative emotion of not wanting to be in the meeting and feeling sorry for ourselves because we’re in the meeting, and that is okay.
Sometimes other things don’t go according to plan, right? Like we go after a new role, and we don’t get it and that feels shitty and we may want to feel sorry for ourselves for a while. We ask out the hot stranger at the coffee shop and they say no and that does not feel good. And maybe we want to feel some self-pity about that for a while. We pitch a TED talk, and either they don’t want it, or we do it and it bombs. Whatever, there’s lots of opportunities in life to feel self-pity.
And the more you’re kind of building this wild, big, satisfying, delicious life, the more, I think, opportunities there are in that we face a lot of rejection when we’re making big changes in our lives and in our world. And so I think if you can’t allow yourself to feel bad at all, that might block you from taking those big actions.
But if when you feel bad, you kind of build the house in there and get stuck there, that also blocks you, right? Because then you’re just stuck in the self-pity versus continuing to go and make new choices and put yourself out there and make changes so that your life and the world are more of what you want them to be.
Whereas when you wallow hard and then shift, then you kind of, I think, get the best of both worlds. And, of course, this applies to so much more than just self-pity, right? Any feeling you’re having that maybe you don’t want to be in for forever, like sadness, grief, despair, even anger, right, it’s like giving yourself permission to really wallow in or go hard in that emotion for a brief amount of time can be extremely powerful.
Here’s what it also helps with, it helps you actually feel that feeling and move through that feeling. To say that a little bit differently, it helps you process through the feeling.
A lot of us, when we have a feeling, we don’t want to because it doesn’t feel the way we want to feel. And so we push that feeling down or we try to skate over the top of it, or we intellectualize it, which is when we use our words to talk about the feeling without actually having an embodied experience of the feeling.
Whereas I think this idea of wallowing is sort of going all in, it’s being with the feeling, but only for a limited amount of time, right? It’s going into that feeling completely without judgment of ourselves, without judgment of the feeling. And spending some time there knowing that we’re not going to be there forever.
And I think knowing that we’re not going to be there forever is so important, because so many of my clients when I’m like, what if we just feel this feeling? They’re like, oh, I can’t. If I feel it, it’ll never end. It’s too big to feel. That’s not the case. Physiologically a feeling is like a cascade in your body.
And if you actually are with the feeling, it should move all the way through in about 90 seconds to three minutes. From the books I’ve read that is about the amount of time it takes for a feeling to process all the way through. But when we’re resisting the feeling or when we’re getting stuck in the narrative of the feeling, that’s when the feeling can last a lot longer.
So another way to think about this idea of wallowing hard and then shifting, is to think about I’m going to go all the way in, and then I’m going to come all the way out, right? So it’s like swimming across a lake, you’re going to go all the way across and get to the other side and then get back out, right? Or swimming all the way across and then coming back to the side you started on and then getting out.
But it’s this idea that we go all the way in. But then we come all the way out, we don’t just hang out there. For certain feelings, this is going to come in waves, right? And for me when I was sick, I felt self-pity in waves. I would feel really sorry for myself and then I would shift. And then I would feel really sorry for myself later also, because I was feeling a lot of physical sensations that were deeply unpleasant to me.
You know, like when you get the really itchy feeling in your nose and you’re sneezing all the time. And your little nose gets raw from all of the times you’ve blown your nose. That’s what I was having, and I didn’t like it. But I also wasn’t just building the house and living inside the self-pity either, because that doesn’t feel good either. In the long run, it tends to feel pretty bad.
So I’ve talked about this before with a lot of emotions, but especially I think like self-pity, outrage, anger, when we first go into them, they can feel really powerful. And I think that’s part of why they’re so alluring. But if we stay in them for a long time, they can feel very disempowering, right? And then we risk going into the pit of despair.
Whereas if you go all the way into the feelings and then shift and come back out, I think that allows you to feel the feeling and have that sort of gratification or satisfaction of the feeling, and not get stuck in it and not become disempowered in the stuckness.
Now let’s talk about the shift. When I talk about shift, you may be wondering, well, where can I shift to? One of the most powerful shifts I’ve seen is going from self-pity to self-comforting. So self-pity, to me, is sort of like it’s not fair, it shouldn’t be like this. It’s kind of like a poor baby to yourself.
But what I see a lot is that often people go into self-pity and then they go into self-judgment, right? They’re feeling sorry for themselves and then they subtly slide over into judging and berating themselves for having gotten in that situation or for not getting back out of it or blah, blah, blah, whatever, it doesn’t even matter.
So when I say wallow hard and then shift, that’s not the direction I’m inviting you to shift in. That’s sort of like a slide down a slope that I don’t think is a very fun slope to go down. So when I talk about shifting, I’m talking about shifting perspective into something that’s going to be more useful.
So, again, I think the easiest shift is self-pity into self-comfort, right? And so we were talking, my client and I, about when I was sick I was feeling sorry for myself that I’m sick. And then that led into what do I need? What could be comforting to me while I don’t feel good, because it is true that I don’t feel good. And it’s not “fair.” I mean, it is fair in that humans get sick and I’m a human, but it’s sort of like it is understandably upsetting to feel shitty.
So what can we do? Since I can’t magically snap my fingers and make myself not feel shitty, what could I do to comfort myself, right? And so, for me, that was having hot tea or ordering Thai takeout because that was going to be comforting for me to eat. Or taking over the counter medications that could lessen my symptoms a little, or giving myself permission to not do the work that I had planned, stuff like that.
Those were ways for me to comfort myself while I didn’t feel well. And it’s also in how I talk to myself, being like, yeah, you don’t feel good. I’m so sorry. But it’s also in things like letting myself watch a lot of TV because TV can be very distracting, right? It was very distracting from my physical symptoms and so it allowed me to move through those symptoms with less suffering because I was distracting myself while I didn’t feel good.
And so that’s kind of what I was offering to my client too, of like, okay, if you’re having a hard time shifting out of self-pity, one of the easiest shifts to make is in the self-comfort. What can make this more agreeable? What can make this more enjoyable? Do I need a drink? Do I need a blanket on my lap? Do I need to put on another sweater, right?
I guess all of those are oriented around like maybe you’re kind of cold. And sometimes we’re kind of cold and we just need to be warmed up. It’s a very straightforward kind of physical approach. But in our heads, when we’re feeling sorry for ourselves, we’re not always thinking about what could be comforting. We’re just focused on what’s not working.
So shifting from self-pity to self-comfort is a way to reorient yourself in a solution-focused way and in a self-caretaking way, and also in a curious way. We talked recently on the podcast about changing your tone of voice, shifting into curiosity of like, well, what could be really comforting? What could help me feel better in this situation I don’t prefer?
There are obviously other shifts you can make instead, right? You could go self-pity to self-empowered, right? You’re like, if I felt really empowered, what might I do here? How might I handle this? Maybe I would have a conversation with this person, or maybe I would ask for an exception to this policy. Or maybe I would cancel all my meetings because being powerful also means being able to say no to things.
So it’s not for me to say necessarily what’s going to be the most helpful for you to shift into. Mostly what I want to invite you to consider is that you can shift and that just because you can shift though, doesn’t mean you have to shift immediately. And it’s okay, if you want to take some time to feel sorry for yourself and to feel self-pity.
I think sometimes self-pity gets this really bad rap, like it’s whiny, it’s complaining, it’s like not helping. But again, it can be really powerful to give yourself permission to be in that space for a while and to really be with yourself and be with your negative emotions and be with the part of you that thinks it’s not fair and it’s bullshit, like whatever is going on in your life because that’s also real.
That’s part of your experience right now and we don’t have to shut that part down in order to create your wildly satisfying life. We don’t have to shut that part down in order to create your wildly delicious career. I think sometimes we think we have to cut that part off, or get rid of that part, or discipline that part, or grow that part up, or teach it to be more productive or more adult or more whatever.
And what I really want to offer you is that you can include that part. But what we want to be mindful about, again, is not necessarily building the house inside self-pity and then moving into the house and staying there forever. Because I think it can be powerful to be with yourself in those negative emotions, but it can also get sticky there.
And if we get stuck there that generally ultimately feels really bad for us and doesn’t help us get what we want because at the heart of self-pity, I do think, is some disempowerment, some like this situation is bigger than me. So I think what can be beautiful is allowing ourselves to travel through that space, to feel sorry for ourselves, to feel some grief about things not being the way we want them to be. And then shifting into whatever is going to be most powerful for us for what we want to create at that time.
So I want you to just take a moment to think about is there an area in your life or your career where you’ve been feeling self-pity and you’d like to now shift out of it?
Or is there an area in your life or career where you’ve been trying to force yourself to feel good and you actually are like, you know what I want to do? I want to wallow in some fucking self-pity for 15 minutes. And then maybe once I do that I will actually be able to shift into something more useful, more meaningful, more geared up to actually help me create the changes I want.
But maybe you haven’t been able to move forward because you haven’t given yourself any time and permission to be with some of those negative emotions that you’re actually having about that.
And as you go forward in all areas of your life this will be incredibly useful, for self-pity and for other negative feelings that come up because those negative feelings are part of life. And even when you have a wildly satisfying life and career like I do, you’re still going to have self-pity.
Like I got sick last week and had it last week. And sometimes things in my business don’t go the way I want them to on the first try and then maybe I feel some self-pity. And sometimes things in my relationship don’t go the way I want them to on the first try and then maybe I feel some self-pity.
Or there’s always projects I’m working on that I’m sort of in the middle of. There’s areas of my life where I’m wildly deliciously satisfied and building more of that all the time. And then there’s areas of my life where I’m like, this is not hitting the way I want it to. And so I need to come back to it and kind of figure out how to create more of what I want. And there may be self-pity and other negative emotions that come up as I go about that.
So it’s like both in that I am still working on areas of my life to be what I want them to be. And even the areas of my life that I have created into being what I want them to be. Life is cyclical, it’s just like we have to keep making meals and doing laundry and paying our rent.
It’s not a one and done, we keep doing those things over and over again. And so even in areas that are wildly satisfying, I keep working on this same stuff over and over again. So this is a skill that if you can learn it, is going to be beneficial to you forever, I think.
So that’s what I have for you this week. And I’m so excited for you to take it into your life and use it. And also guess what? I have something even more exciting, which is I want to tell you that I am currently accepting one on one clients.
So in addition to everything that you’re learning on the podcast every week, you can come work with me one on one. And we can be talking all the time in our calls and in our private Slack about all the ways everything on the podcast applies to your life. And you can get my brain and my strategy on every single decision that you’re working through in your career, in your relationships, in every area of your life.
And I can help you take your life from where it is now to wildly satisfying, whatever that looks like for you. And I would love to support you with that. I’m so excited for a world where more people, and specifically more women and people with marginalized identities, are building and living just delicious, wildly satisfying lives. And I’d love to have you be one of them.
So if that sounds like something you would like to talk about, scoot on over to my website and sign up for a consult call and let’s talk all about it because I would love to see what the world will be like when you add your wild satisfaction to it. All right, talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We’ll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you’re feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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