#60: Self-acceptance or self-improvement?
Self-acceptance is overrated, right? I mean, sure, you might feel more at peace if you could manage to accept yourself - but there's so much wrong with you, and accepting yourself would involve giving up on trying to fix all that and accepting that you're never going to be any more assertive, successful, skilled, and confident than you are now. Self-acceptance is just a fancy term for quitting. Right??
Oh dear. What if I were to tell you that if you don't already have self-acceptance, you're not going to get it through self-improvement? And that not only can self-acceptance and self-improvement happily coexist, but self-improvement is much easier when it comes from a place of self-acceptance? Get the kettle on and the earbuds in, and let your Imperfectionist friend talk some sense into you.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends. We have a new cat. Have I already mentioned this? He’s called Pumba and he only has three legs - I’m a sucker for the special needs ones and the elderly ones. We adopted him from a family who used to live 5 minutes’ walk from us and who have moved abroad. He went missing for a couple of weeks and we caught him in a cat trap in the front garden of his old house. Turns out he’s a bit confused about where he lives now. And then, the day after we brought him back, he went missing again. Thankfully I caught up with him again yesterday - though not before accidentally catching and having to release a silly hedgehog who had got into the trap and polished off the snacks I’d left in there - and he (Pumba) is home again and under house arrest. It’s a bit embarrassing to keep losing him like this, so I probably shouldn’t be telling you all about it - but you know I like to keep you updated with the latest cat news from Imperfectionist Towers. The other 3 cats are fine, thanks for asking, and so far there’s no major aggro with introducing a new cat.
Now. Important as all that was, you didn’t come here for a cat update. You’re here because you want to improve yourself, right? You want to become more confident, more assertive, more someone who channels their energy into getting what they want rather than using it up on anxiety. And it’s good to want to improve ourselves. Personal growth, self-actualisation, living ever more authentically, pushing beyond our comfort zones, blah blah blah - these are all great things to invest time and energy in. But at the same time, self-acceptance is also important. If you’re not someone who thrives on working as part of a team, if you’re more of a detail person than a big-picture person, if you absolutely hate public speaking, then while it might be possible for you to change, it could also turn out to be more fulfilling (and less of a headache) for you to recognise these traits - accept that they’re part of who you are - and work with them, rather than against them. You know, not to make it your goal to head up a big research team if you find working with other people exhausting, not to try to become an arachnologist if you’re terrified of spiders, that sort of thing. There’s a tension here, isn’t there? Or, so it often seems to coaching clients of mine. When we come up against some aspect of ourselves that we don’t like and that’s stopping us living the life we want to be living - a tendency to procrastinate, excessive self-criticism, impostor syndrome, and the rest of it - we recognise that life would go better for us if we were able to reign that in, and so we try to change for the better. But when does that desire to improve change from something positive into something toxic? How do we know when we should be saying ‘I need to change’, and when it should be ‘I’m fine just the way I am’? And how do we allow ourselves to say ‘I’m fine just the way I am’ without running the risk of killing our motivation to improve?
I’ve been thinking about this so that you don’t have to. It’s something that comes up in coaching sessions. A lot of us, it seems, have a real problem with working out when to accept ourselves and when to improve ourselves. For some, it’s an all-or-nothing thing: they either give up and accept that the way they are is the way they are always going to be, or they need to overhaul themselves and basically transform into a completely different person. Some see self-acceptance as a form of failure, because they see deciding not to try to improve in some aspect as a form of quitting, and we all know that nobody is allowed to quit anything ever, regardless of what it is and whether it’s worth it and whether your energies could be more satisfyingly directed elsewhere. In short, far too many of you are tying yourself up in knots over this self-acceptance-versus-self-improvement thing. But, believe it or not, this is actually a non-problem. It’s not something that requires a clever, logic-defying solution. Self-acceptance and self-improvement can co-exist. In fact, self-improvement is much easier and more pleasant when it comes from a place of self-acceptance. Despite how it sometimes looks, these things are not incompatible at all. If you’re struggling with this, your problem lies elsewhere. Your problem is your lack of self-compassion.
Let’s dig into all this. If it seems obvious to you that there’s a conflict between self-improvement and self-acceptance, and that you can’t coherently accept yourself while also trying to improve yourself, then perhaps that’s because you currently don’t think you’re acceptable, and that in order to become acceptable you need to change in various ways. So, perhaps your lack of productivity or your messiness or your inability to stick to a workout plan are things that you look to as evidence that you’re not quite up to scratch, in some morally-loaded sense. You’re a bad, flawed, disappointing human. You dislike yourself. And if you’re going to consider liking yourself - no promises, mind - you are going to need to address your many shortcomings. You can’t possibly even entertain the idea of accepting yourself as you currently are. You don’t deserve acceptance in this state. And if you were to take leave of your senses and accept yourself just as you are, then you may as well give up now, because that would deprive you of all motivation for trying to improve. Right?
Sorry, friend, but if that’s the way you think, it’s seriously fucked up. I know it seems obvious to you that you can’t both accept yourself and try to improve yourself, but we both know you have a track record for having some weird and toxic ideas about yourself. To see this, you just need to consider how you think about the self-improvement efforts of your friends, your siblings, and other people you love and care about. Let’s imagine how this might look. Suppose your best friend tells you that she wants to run a marathon next year. Currently she can’t run for a bus without needing a lie down, but she wants to challenge herself. She tells you about this and you say, wow, that’s amazing, I’m here for you if you need my support to cheer you on or give you a kick up the bum on the days when you can’t be bothered to go out and train, or if you just want someone to listen to you moan about how much it all hurts. And suppose that, after hearing your effusive expression of support and encouragement, your friend looks hurt and says to you, well, since you think it’s such a great idea for me to improve my fitness, obviously you have a pretty low opinion of me. Obviously, you think I’m not acceptable the way I currently am.
What would be your reaction to this, do you think? I’m going to bet that you’d find it bizarre. You’d be astonished that your friend would view your support for her in this mean-minded way. After all, it’s precisely because you accept and love her that you so readily offer your support. Your love for her isn’t conditional on her level of fitness, or anything else about her. You love and accept her just as she is. If she wants to challenge herself, you’re right there beside her, and you’ll be happy for her if she achieves whatever she sets out to achieve - but not because it makes her more acceptable to you. You support her efforts to improve simply because they’re important to her. We’re supposed to encourage and support the projects of the people we love - as long as those projects aren’t harmful in some way. If someone were to resent the self-improvement efforts of someone they claim to love, we’d conclude that they don’t actually love that person at all. How can they, if they want to hold them back in that way?
When it comes to the people we love, then, we have no problem accepting them while also supporting their efforts to improve themselves. But there’s something else to say about this. Sometimes, when those we love set out to improve themselves in some way, we think they’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Suppose your best friend tells you that the reason she’s so keen on training for a marathon is that her partner is constantly telling her how unattractive she is, and that she hopes that by becoming fitter, she’ll become more satisfactory to her partner. What would your reaction be to hearing that? If it were me, I’d be telling her to dump her partner before she’d even finished speaking. I bet you would too. We’d tell her that thinking she needs to work on herself in order to become acceptable to a partner like this is a terrible reason for wanting to start running. We’d say things like, ‘If you’re going to do this, do it because it makes you happy and fulfilled, and not because you think you’re unacceptable as you are’. We’d tell her that, even if getting fitter does result in her partner finding her more attractive, her partner doesn’t deserve this sort of effort. Get rid. It’s that ‘if you can’t accept me at my worst then you don’t deserve me at my best’ thing. Find someone who accepts you just as you are, or alternatively - my personal recommendation - get 4 cats and take up knitting instead. We’d say to a friend like that, you shouldn’t have to change who you are in order to be lovable - not unless you’re currently a serial killer or something like that.
Ok, I can hear you rolling your eyes here. Get on with it, Rebecca, and stop going on about stuff that is mind-numbingly obvious. Well, yes, it is obvious - but only when it comes to our perceptions of acceptance and improvement in other people. Things are different when it comes to our own self-acceptance and self-improvement. But, what if they weren’t? What would that look like?
Well, for a start, self-acceptance is a given. That’s your starting point. No exceptions - again, assuming you’re not a serial killer. You accept that you’re completely fine just as you are - just as you accept your friends and other loved ones. That doesn’t mean you have to pretend you have no faults. Of course you have faults. You can even be exasperated and frustrated by your faults - just as we’re often exasperated and frustrated by the faults of those we love - perhaps you have a friend who’s always running late or who is a terrible cook or who always mixes up the names of your children. You can even wish you didn’t have these faults - they’d hardly be faults if you didn’t. But what you can’t do is believe that you’d be more lovable or more deserving of happiness or more morally worthy if you didn’t have them. You wouldn’t think that way about someone else, after all. It might be more convenient if your habitually late friend could manage to be on time, but you wouldn’t find her a better person, in some deeper sense, if she did. She’d just be your friend, but with added timekeeping. You know how to accept your friends. Try turning that on yourself.
Now, what about self-improvement? If you manage to accept yourself, is that allowed? Of course it is. Just try not to think of it the way you currently think of it; in other words, as something you need to do in order to be an acceptable human. If you find yourself considering learning a new language or applying for a promotion at work or working on your assertiveness, ask yourself why you’re doing it. If it’s because you think that you’re in some sense unacceptable until you do this thing, find another reason, or don’t do it. Because you don’t need to do it for this reason. You’re already acceptable. Your friends know this. Your friends aren’t saying to you things like, ‘I can’t truly accept you as a friend until you can hold a conversation in Mandarin’. What do good reasons for self-improvement look like? Well, they look the way they look in your friends when you’re excited for their efforts to improve themselves. Being excited by a new challenge. Wanting a new sense of purpose. Wanting to see what you’re capable of. Having something interesting to do with that extra time you have now that you’ve finished that Netflix series you were watching.
Here’s perhaps the strangest thing about the idea that wanting to self-improve has to involve a lack of self-acceptance. It’s this: if you don’t already have self-acceptance, you’re not going to get it through self-improvement. Let’s return to your best friend and her nasty partner, who keeps telling her how unattractive she is. Your friend tells you that she wants to train for a marathon in order to become more acceptable to her partner. Now, one of the many things wrong with this idea is that you know that it’s not going to work. Even if your friend wins her marathon and sets a new world record, the sort of partner who tells her that she’s unattractive isn’t going to be satisfied for long. They’ll find some other reason to moan. The problem here is not your friend’s unacceptability, but the fact that her partner’s acceptance of her is conditional in the first place. And so, your friend’s efforts at self-improvement are misguided because she views them as a route to acceptance by her partner. You’re just as misguided if you view your own self-improvement as a route to self-acceptance. Get the unconditional self-acceptance first. That’s easier said than done, I know - so try simply treating yourself in the same compassionate, accepting, and encouraging way that you treat your friends. Try it on, even if you don’t feel it at first. It’s so much easier than running a marathon or learning Mandarin.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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