Think of a time where you lost your composure. Maybe you said something in the heat of the moment. Perhaps you weren’t able to perform as well as you hoped because your emotions got in the way of task performance. My research and work with elite athletes and in executive coaching has shown that developing self-empathy and equanimity can be powerful mechanisms to providing beneficial change for performance.

What are self-empathy and equanimity?

What’s your understanding of empathy? You may have already Googled the term or you’ve found a video clip that will describe it for you.

There are some nuances within academic literature, but common features of empathy are the ability to recognise, observe, understand, validate and share another’s feelings/emotions and have an ability to adopt their perspective.

However, if you are not aware of your own emotions, and how they are influencing you, how can you accurately understand and share the perspective of another? Therefore, to truly be empathic, first requires you recognising, observing, understanding and validating your own experience and emotions – self-empathy. In other words, it is an understanding of what is going on inside of yourself, which obviously requires the skill of self-awareness.

What about equanimity? You read a lot about equanimity in mindfulness literature, but this can often be misunderstood. ‘Accepting’, ‘non-judging’, ‘detaching’ are words used to describe equanimity, but these are just some features that enable equanimity. Having equanimity refers to choosing to be composed, even-minded within all experience, even difficult experience, so that it offers mental, emotional and behavioural stability.

An example experience

Imagine a scenario where you are doing an important presentation or competing in a sporting event. You are unaware of your own emotional state, which perhaps has a level of nervousness or anxiety, and then someone says or does something that you have perceived as disapproval. Your anxiety level increases. Now you are more focused on what others are doing, and their emotional state than on your own emotions and performance task. Your attention shifts to others and further away from being able to notice what is going on for you. You have no accurate sense of your emotions, other than the situation begins to feel overwhelming. So, you try and suppress or avoid the feelings by further focusing on other people, or distracting yourself. Performance suffers and you hate the experience.

You’ve perhaps had empathy, but lacked self-empathy and this has led to a lack of equanimity.

In contrast, what if you are aware of your emotional state. You are able to recognise the feeling of anxiety, observe it and validate it. Perhaps, being more accurate to say that you are just really nervous, and that’s okay because this is important to you. Yes, it doesn’t feel very nice, but you are willing to face up to these uncomfortable feelings because this experience is something you want to do. The other person says or does something you perceive as disapproval. And you notice a jump in your level of nervousness, maybe now feeling a bit anxious. But you have practiced recognising your emotional state, observing it, and being with it. You can validate the rise in feelings as being attributed to what someone has said or done. But you respond in a compassionate way that says it’s okay to have unpleasant experience. It sucks but you can be with it, without trying to change or avoid it. Your tolerance to this uncomfortable feeling has improved. Your awareness is on your own emotional state, and you are responding in a way that is offering more composure, even within this difficult experience. Now your attention can be put more on your performance task. Your performance is good, and you reflect that you can cope with difficult experience really well.

Your self-empathy has enabled you to not only recognise your emotions, but those of others, and then through having practiced being with unpleasant experience, you experience a higher degree of equanimity.

Avoidance diminishes your ability for self-regulation

The most common form of regulation is attempts to suppress or avoid emotions. Neither of which will offer any value to building tolerance to difficult emotions nor a perception of composure or control whilst experiencing them. Avoidance hampers your ability to accurately determine what is actually going on for you emotionally in your experience.

If every time you distract yourself from, suppress or avoid something that feels unpleasant, you are conditioning your brain for these responses. And it is not your fault, as your dopamine system kicks in to say this is a rewarding behaviour. This results in conditioned behaviour to any form of unpleasantness – thoughts, emotions, behaviours. Feels unpleasant – avoidance feels good – avoid.

But this comes with a cost. Now your tolerance to unpleasantness, and perception of control within it gets lower and lower. Soon, any minor disturbance or sense of unpleasantness leads to you wanting to avoid, and your ability to be composed within this situation gets less.

Your ability to deal with  high performance situations that inevitably bring difficult thoughts and emotions is now severely limited.

How to develop self-empathy and equanimity

Developing self-empathy is tough, but it offers release from being trapped in unhelpful emotions and behaviours that get in the way of performing well. It is tough because it requires you turning towards difficult experience. Noticing it. Observing it. Recognising what is going on. Validating your emotion.

Similarly, cultivating equanimity is hard and effortful, but has the potential to elevate your performance levels from being able to perform as you want even within difficult circumstances. It is hard and effortful because it requires you practicing being with unpleasant, uncomfortable or difficult experience.

Here are some ways to develop self-empathy and equanimity.

#1 Notice your emotions

Experiment with noticing when you emotions have changed. For example, someone says something, you get cut off in traffic, you are running late for a meeting. The shift from one emotional state to another can be a threshold point to bring awareness to. Learn to recognise this shift. This self-awareness skill can be hugely beneficial.

Reflect on experiences where you may have missed the emotion change. It primes you to recognise them for next time.

#2 Observe and describe emotions you experience

See if you can more accurately determine the emotion or feeling you are experiencing. Describe it to yourself. ‘I am sensing anger’ – ‘I am noticing the feeling of nervousness’ – ‘I can recognise disappointment’.

This is termed emotional granularity. You are developing the ability to accurately sense your emotional state. With more accuracy you are less likely to put all emotions into one box (e.g. nervousness, excitement, agitation = anxiety).

This describing of your emotions also has another interesting benefit. When you describe your emotions, you are using a more cortex regions of your brain, which diminishes the activity in the emotional areas of the brain, thereby immediately offering some self-regulation

#3 Be with the emotion – develop your equanimity

Okay, this is the tough bit, I’m going to offer some ways of helping you to develop the ability to do this.

When you experience a difficult emotion it often comes with a visceral sense or valence of unpleasantness. This is what makes you want to avoid it. You have a strong dislike to this unpleasantness and you get a craving to want to replace or avoid it. Being able to build your tolerance to aversion (strong dislike) and craving (the strong impulse to replace the unpleasantness of experience with pleasantness – to seek instant reward) is the key to making beneficial change.

Notice moments of procrastination. You procrastinate due to aversion and craving. Practice noticing the dislike to a certain task, the craving to want to do something else (e.g. scroll on TikTok for 20mins) and then resisting the urge. It will feel uncomfortable and probably quite unpleasant. However, say to yourself you will undertake this task for another 10 minutes.

Do something you don’t feel like doing every day. 10 minutes of stretching. Some small amount of exercise. A house chore. Less time on social media. All of these experiences will potentially bring a sense of aversion and craving to do something else. Each time you overcome the aversion and craving, and fulfil what you have set out to do, you are building your tolerance levels. You get a sense of achievement and you can reflect on this later to reinforce that sense of achievement.

Urge surf. Set yourself a challenge that you will not immediately answer your phone when a notification goes off. Instead, you will attend to that message at a time of your choosing – e.g. 5 minutes later. You will get the immediate urge to answer your phone, and it will feel horrible as you sit with that craving to go pick it up. But that urge lasts about 3-5 mins and each time you surf that urge, and overcome the aversion and craving, you are building your tolerance to aversion and craving.

Offer yourself willing consent. The difference between ‘I have to’ and ‘I want to’ can be huge to your emotional experience. When you offer yourself a willing consent to ‘be with’ an emotion, even though that experience may be difficult or unpleasant, it can change the emotional flavour to doing that. If you feel forced to turn towards a difficult emotion, it can exacerbate that emotion. By saying that you are willing to experience a difficult emotion, to approach it, because you want to develop your capacity to be with it, means that it is more likely to just stay at its existing level. It is still difficult and unpleasant, but it is not more difficult and more unpleasant, and that is the key factor.

Cultivate a helpful attitude response. So, you turn towards a difficult emotion, and you are sitting there going, ‘I can’t stand this, ‘this is horrible’, ‘I want this to be different’, ‘why am I doing this’, ‘this is stupid’, ‘this is the worst experience ever.’ Now the difficult emotions gets worse. In contrast, helpful attitudes of ‘okay, this is tough but I’m going to do this’, ‘I am prepared to sit with this’, ‘this may be difficult, but it’s going to help me’, ‘I’m going to be patient here’, for example, change the context that you are experiencing that difficult emotion. Cultivating a helpful attitude to you experience is one of the key drivers of beneficial change.

Empathy and equanimity make you more compassionate

Compassion is a having a sensitivity to your own or another’s suffering, with a motivation and commitment to alleviate that suffering. Suffering, by its definition, involves unpleasantness. Therefore, self-empathy will equip you with the ability to more accurately notice this suffering, and with equanimity you have built the composure to be with that suffering and do something about it.

This ripple effect is something that I have observed in research and in work with elite athletes and corporate executives. However, understanding what is going on in your experience is a huge part in making beneficial change for performance and wellbeing. And these mechanisms of change can be learned. If this article has tickled your interest, feel free to reach out for more information on how you can train to improve these important mechanisms of change so that they are there for when you need them.