Are you mean to yourself? If so, stop now.

Are you mean to yourself? Do you criticise yourself? Is that helpful? Does it make your life better?

If not, stop.

How do you stop? Create new habits. Start sweet-talking yourself. Bring your compassionate wise adult mind (yes, there is one in there somewhere) and your warm tender heart and start being kind to the wounded place in you.

If you criticise yourself, then you must have learnt to do that somewhere. Who taught you to do that? It’s not helpful. Even the police train their dogs with positive reinforcement (encouragement) rather than with negative reinforcement (criticism and punishment). Shouldn’t you be treated just as well, or even better than a dog? If so, don’t criticise yourself.

Begin to see all self-criticism as disempowering and wounded. Start to be compassionate towards the self-critical programme in yourself to understand where it came from; what it was in response to; what it was trying to achieve at the time, all those years ago.

Learn to be kind to yourself and your own best mentor and best friend. Then you will blossom.