Compassion and accountability - take a moment to sit with each of these and notice what initially comes to mind. What does compassion look, sound and feel like? What do you think of when considering accountability? Are there consistencies in how you apply each of these to yourself? How about toward others? How do you understand the relationship between these two practices? In what ways are they complimentary and when do they conflict?
While most people may agree that compassion and accountability sound like healthy ways to relate to ourselves and others, many of us struggle to integrate these concepts into a practice which truly feels supportive to our personal and relational wellbeing. Perhaps unknowingly, we often attempt to determine which one of the two is an appropriate response to a specific situation. Once we’ve decided on one, to consider the other can feel like it threatens the conclusion we’ve just come to. Like most things in life, this one-or-the-other, mutually exclusive approach does not align with the reality of nuance embedded in our human experience. When we recognize we are deciding between offering compassion or advocating for accountability, how can we broaden our approach to hold space for compassion and accountability?
Translating Theory Into Practice
Compassion is commonly thought of as an offering for grace, flexibility, and understanding. We imagine it to feel soft, easeful and comforting; encouraging us not to worry, to let go of stress and relax into the current state of things. Dr. Kristin Neff, a pioneer in the field of self-compassion, breaks down the concept into three core elements. First, she identifies the clear but often missed step that compassion requires us to acknowledge the presence of suffering in ourselves or another. She then encourages us to find the shared humanity in this suffering so that we may not assign unnecessary blame or over-identify with the discomfort; and finally, to respond with kindness toward the universal difficulties we share in our suffering.
As you develop your own practice with compassion, you may notice yourself placing greater emphasis on the process before the outcome. You may recognize when you’ve set unrealistic expectations, and rather than criticizing yours or anyone else’s failure to meet those, you adjust what a more realistic expectation may be. You will likely find yourself becoming more curious to ask questions and explore the “why” which is influencing challenging interactions and experiences. For those of you that are newer to the practice, you may find your way toward greater self-compassion through considering how you would respond to a friend in similar distress. If you find it’s more accessible to offer yourself this grace while regularly feeling upset or critical of others, then an inverted practice to consider how you would like to be considered in a similar situation can provide helpful perspective.
Whereas compassion prompts acknowledgement and acceptance of the process, accountability places emphasis on action and outcome. Accountability honors another core aspect of our humanity - our responsibility to engage in relationships with ourselves and others in ways which align with our core values. Accountability is an integral component to strengthening a sense of personal choice with the freedom we are allotted in life, to building trust, to learning when the impact of our actions is not what we intended, and to improving our approaches to reflect how we really want to show up in life.
While compassion is thought to be soft, accountability is firm and direct. In its healthiest form, it can empower us to endure the uncomfortable and mundane, to cut through noise and pressure in order to see things clearly and move toward our highest values.
Why We Can’t Have One Without The Other
In our modern day society, great emphasis is placed on work ethic, productivity, and efficiency; and success is measured through uniform monetary and physical ideals. Accountability becomes the driver of our success, and we are taught that the most admirable thing we can do is remain steadfast in our daily actions to “keep our eye on the prize” and never falter in the face of fatigue, overwhelm, or other hardship. We learn strategies to bypass our struggle when we inevitably meet our human limitations, and gradually worsen our disconnect from our internal experience while relying upon the voice of self-criticism to put things in order. Though we may recognize this approach is harsh, we cling to it because we deeply care. We fear that if we loosen our grip on accountability, we will become lazy, inept, and spiral toward failure.
While this approach can be temporarily effective, it is wholly unsustainable. Our body was built to provide us with valuable feedback so that we may learn how different people and environments affect us, and to know when we have needs asking for attention. When we ignore this feedback, we deprive ourselves of the validation and support we need to sustain our commitments. We deepen into burnout, our systems collapse, and the voice of the critic forgets that its purpose was to inspire us as it tears away at our self-worth.
Compassion may now be seen as a comforting replacement to the pain of criticism. When practiced honestly, it should be felt as a corrective experience. Though yet again, if we only offer compassion, we risk misinterpreting the acknowledgement of suffering as justification to disengage from effortful action. This may lead us to neglect setting healthy boundaries or perceiving ourselves to be more helpless than we really are. Where we have now met our needs to be humanized in our experience, we withhold our equally important needs for growth, purpose, and fulfillment.
Practice: A Balanced Response to Hardship
Rather than thinking of compassion and accountability as two opposing viewpoints that threaten the reality of the other, recognize that they exist on separate scales. Our goal is to consider the degree of compassion and accountability that is appropriate for each unique situation to provide a balanced frequency.
Reflect on a recent or common experience you have had in which you feel some sense of guilt, dissatisfaction, or helplessness. Pause any immediate reactions that come to mind and acknowledge the external challenges of the situation you’re in. Acknowledge any aspects about your history, identity or the way you function that may also make this challenging. Acknowledge how you suffer from this experience. Now letting go of the cause of that suffering (whatever the situation is that you’re exploring), simply recognize the emotional, psychological, and physiological pain that you feel. See yourself in this pain without assigning blame, and see how others in the world experience a similar pain to this. Recognize that this pain is an inherent part of our human experience, and offer yourself validation and compassion toward the hardships you must endure.
Take your time with this practice, and if you find something that resonates, maintain your connection to it while you compassionately explore your accountability in the experience. Consider which of your core values you may have neglected, remembering that these relate to how you would like to consistently treat yourself and others in life. Rather than assess your role through a critical lens, try to assume a growth-oriented mindset focused on what you may learn from this practice. Offer yourself compassion through recognizing that we are all in this growth process, and see this as an opportunity to assume an empowered approach to better align your actions with your values. If your focus returns to situational barriers to change, your balanced response may need higher levels of compassion, and you can still consider how you would like to relate to the challenges in values-aligned ways (even if quietly so).
