Kyle MacDonald

That sounds like your problem.

Yeah, or actually that they were never taught or supported or that actually they experienced enough anxiety or fear-provoking situations in their childhood that what you find quite naturally is it might be quite terrifying for them.

So it does come back to that idea of compassion in the sense of being able to try and think it through from the other person's shoes.

And then, of course, the opportunity to support people that we care about to do those things is great.

I mean, I often think about it.

People often experience me as quite direct, which is quite funny because I don't think of myself as direct.

I just think of myself as honest.

But actually, it's important to remember sometimes that a lot of times we dance around the truth in life.

I mean, I kind of think therapy is more a search for actually trying to figure out what's true than feeling good or feeling calm, that actually a lot of times we dance

We fool ourselves with little lies and denials.

And so sometimes the truth can be quite confronting, but ultimately it's the best way to find your way through these situations, I think.

Yeah, so that's a big question.

I mean, I think most of us have a critic of some description and it's useful from the point of view that it's one of the ways that we motivate ourselves to get better.

For me, it's about what sort of balance do we have?

And I often think about this as a balance between the carrot and the stick.

You know, so that old idea that you can get a donkey to move forward with a carrot on a stick or you can hit it with the stick.

And most of us in our childhood, I think, probably experienced a balance of those things.

Positive, warm encouragement and reward versus, you know, criticism and a kick up the bum, metaphorically, hopefully, not literally.

And so recognizing what is that balance within us I think is often a good place to start because when we talk about people who struggle with a self-critic, often it's that they don't have enough of the carrot.

And so that's about then learning how do we warmly encourage ourselves and make sure that we're rewarding ourselves for the things that we do well as well as giving ourselves a bit of a push when we need to.