Become your own best friend

Do you often criticize your friends? A friend shows you a picture that she painted for two months, and you tell her: “Ugh, that’s ugly!” I mixed the colors poorly and it came out messy. Transitions could have been made smoother. Let’s redo everything!”

No, you won’t say that to your friend. In such a situation, if at first glance you really didn’t like the picture, you will not sharply criticize it, explaining to your friend in every detail exactly what she did wrong and where it needs to be corrected. On the contrary: you will not immediately devalue all the work, but rather change your focus to finding the details that you like. If you look at the picture differently, it turns out that there are a lot of such details in it… the whole work consists of them. And now you look at the picture completely differently: it has ceased to be ugly for you, it has become interesting, authentic and, in general, you have begun to like it.

Now look at exactly the same picture, only drawn not by your friend, but by you. A job that at first glance you don’t like. What would you like to do in such a situation?

It is highly likely that you will have a desire to intervene in your work and change or correct something in it. Can rewrite the entire picture. Maybe leave it in its original form, but hide it so far away that this disappointment will never catch your eye. The action can be anything, but it will not be the same as in the situation with a friend: change the focus and find what you like. The result is the same, but the attitude towards it is coordinately different.

It turns out that we are worse friends to ourselves than to others. We value ourselves less, we place greater demands on ourselves, and we beat ourselves up like no one else after any failure.

The other is more important to us. Someone else needs more than we do.