My interview with Lisa Olivera is all about cultivating self-love and self-compassion for ourselves. Lisa is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who believes we require more accepting, more good-enough, and more self-compassion. She helps her clients create more compassion for themselves, more capacity to feel the hard stuff, and more understanding of how to manage the stressors and impacts of our history, our environment, and our daily life.
In this episode, Lisa talks about the value of self-compassion and that it’s available to all of us – no matter what. She believes that compassion is one of the biggest pieces to developing a self-love practice.
“Self-love is finding a way to tend to and care for yourself no matter what comes at you, no matter what comes your way, and no matter what you may be feeling in your life…it’s so much more about letting
yourself be okay even when you’re not. And knowing that your worth and your lovability and your worthiness is still there even in those harder moments, not just in the good ones.”
We dive deep into the ways you can start cultivating compassion for yourself – which starts with being mindful of your patterns and getting curious. When we get curious, we allow ourselves to become
aware – which is the key ingredient to making change and creating a space where self-compassion can exist.
We then talk about the ways to identify the patterns in our lives that are holding us back from self-love and compassion. It’s all about being curious about our patterns, because when we identify our patterns, we can change them.
Later in the episode, we talk about comparison on social media and how it’s impacting us. We also cover cultivating vulnerability in our lives, and the first step is being vulnerable with the people you feel the safest with and who support you.
“Know that even when you’re not sure, you’re enough. Even when you don’t feel it, you still are. It’s just a fact. And there will be times when it’s hard and times when we don’t believe it and times where we’re not sure how to access that part of ourselves…and just trusting that it’s still there even when it feels hidden, can be really powerful…None of us have to be perfect to be enough.”
To continue the conversation with Lisa, you can reach her on her website, Instagram, and Facebook.
Thank you so much for an illuminating conversation. Highlighting the differences between self esteem and self compassion is crucial as you both did because of the huge emphasis on self esteen and how if you have good self esteem you arent supposed to be feeling bad during difficult times. I love how shifting to a self compassionate way of life means that we start behaving differently for our well being.