Mantra with Jemma Sbeg - I Balance Self-Improvement with Self-Acceptance

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

This week’s mantra is: "I Balance Self-Improvement with Self-Acceptance." Growth is important, but so is knowing that who you are right now is already enough. This episode explores how to hold space for both ambition and self-love, and how to pursue your goals without turning yourself into a constant project. Self-improvement should feel empowering, not punishing. This mantra invites you to evolve from a place of compassion rather than criticism, and to celebrate progress without abandoning who you are today.Mantra is an OpenMind Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to OpenMind+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Mantra! Instagram: @mantraopenmind | @OpenMindStudios TikTok: @OpenMind Facebook: @0penmindstudios X: @OpenMindStudios YouTube: @OpenMind_Studios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Open Mind. Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your mantra. I balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. I'm Gemma Spag and every Monday I give you a simple but powerful phrase to consider and bring into your life a philosophy to guide you in the week ahead and hopefully even beyond. In each episode, I unpack what our mantra really means, how it has shown up in my own life and how you can bring it into yours

with journal prompts, tips, psychological strategies to help you take this mantra and put it into action. At Open Mind, we value your support, so please make sure to share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow mantra to help others discover the show. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access, and ad-free listening, join our Open Mind Plus community on Apple Podcasts. Each month, I love responding to your questions and comments in our bonus episodes. So if you want to be part of those bonus episodes, you can also leave me a comment or question

on this episode or on Instagram at Martra Open Mind. Stick around. We'll be right back after this short pause. If you missed my live show, don't stress, you can still be part of it. The full thing is available on demand at pave.live. Live, but only until November 30th. So if you want to catch the real talk, the big feelings, and the unfiltered VIP after party, this is your chance. Head to pave.org now and watch the full video before it disappears. It's week three of Canadian tires early Black Friday sale. These prices won't go lower this year.

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I balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. Let's begin by answering a very important question, although certainly not a simple one. Where does our desire to improve ourselves come from? Is it innate? Is it socially conditioned? Or is it a mixture of, both. I feel like this is a really important question to begin with, especially as we kind of end

the year and go into 2026. A lot of us are focused on some form or some kind of self-improvement. So we want to know where that's coming from and whether it's an organic feeling. So our desire to improve ourselves is such a fascinating aspect of being human. On the surface level, it seems like a natural instinct, right? We strive to learn, to grow, to overcome challenges. yet when we dig deeper, it also becomes clear that this is in some ways shaped by culture and society and has been shaped by culture and society over time until it has reached the level of importance that it does and has right now. So from a psychological perspective, there is this idea of self-actualization. Self-actualization was initially described by Abraham Maslow,

but it's important to note he got a lot of inspiration for this idea from many Native American groups that he spent time with, particularly the Blackfoot Nation, who already had a deep understanding of this and taught him a lot of what he communicated in his papers and his research. But essentially, he stated that humans are not just motivated by survival and comfort. They also have this deeper motivation that comes from growth. We are wired to seek progress because it creates meaning and it creates purpose in our lives. And without that movement towards something that is greater or bigger than us, we risk stagnation, boredom or a sense of futility. Improvement becomes a way of affirming that life is not just about existing and eating and sleeping and resting, but also about expanding.

humans also have this very deep need for goals, right? Goals give us structure to our days. They give us something to orient ourselves around. And it gives us evidence that we are in charge in some ways, that our efforts kind of matter. Psychologists would call this competence motivation, the satisfaction that comes from mastering skills and achieving milestones. When we set and reach goals, our brain obviously rewards us with dopamine and that reinforces the behavior and pushes us to continue. This cycle of striving and achieving helps explain why progress, small wins, getting better at something feels so deeply rewarding. Studies have shown that individuals without goals on the flip side, when they don't have something to strive for, they report lower life

satisfaction, less reason for being, poorer relationships, and greater levels of boredom. If you want to feel good in life, you need something to work towards that's personal and meaningful. Now, that could be a wellness goal, a mindset goal, a health goal, a financial goal, a professional goal, just to name a few. It just has to matter to you. It doesn't matter what it is. It just has to matter to you. Now, at the same time, our environment and social conditioning, heavily reinforces this inherent drive. From a young age, many of us are taught that achievement equates to worthiness, grades, promotions, accolades, they all act as these external signals of progress.

Cultures often celebrate self-improvement stories. You know, we love to see the underdog who rises and becomes the winner, the comeback story, the individual who betters themselves. These narratives become part of our collective psychology, and that encourages us to see growth, not just as personal, but as a form of social currency that can help us get ahead or impress people or be part of the in-group. We see this happening a lot in, of course, the self-help space. Now, I work in this space. I run two self-help podcasts. I have a self-help book. And I really love what I do. I also see some issues in it, especially when self-help content

becomes the only content or lifestyle that we surround ourselves with. It can begin to give us this false idea that there is constantly something in our life that needs fixing, constantly something that we could be better at, more enlightened about, more educated in. There is this underlying theme of optimise, optimise, optimise, that may be helpful at times, but can also quickly become all-consuming. Progress and self-improvement isn't just about. being perfect or always working towards something. It's also sometimes about the reverse. It's about unlearning, sewing down, maybe even not setting a goal immediately after achieving one because you are in tune with yourself and what you need. But with so much outside content and beliefs coming

in, it's hard not to feel like everything in your life could be perfect if you just kept pushing harder, did it all, put more on your plate, stretch yourself thinner. I think additionally, we start to concoct these external standards as well for what we should be doing. We think everyone is looking. Everyone is doing better than us. So it can also become rather competitive rather than intrinsically motivated. As someone who has tried this, who has tried to do everything in the name of self-improvement, you will learn that you burn out quick. And you will realize there's actually very little happiness in this journey if it is not an authentic one. So how do we know when our desire to improve ourselves supports us versus diminishes

our sense of self-worth and self-acceptance? When self-improvement is intrinsically motivated and combined with self-acceptance and self-love, you will notice that it feels expansive, not restrictive. You feel curious, you feel energized, you feel open to new experiences. You will notice that it is process-oriented. You enjoy the journey of learning, practicing, exploring, even if the outcome isn't what you wanted. And it also co-exists with a lot of love that you have for yourself. You can hold these two truths at the same time. I'm enough as I am. I love myself as I am, but I also want to grow, and I also want to see myself be better. There's compassion in that, there's flexibility in that, rather than urgency or shame that is

driving the change. Now, when self-improvement diminishes your worth, it is fueled by comparison, you will find that the bar keeps raising, nothing that you do is ever enough, and it becomes identity threatening. Instead of being someone who enjoys what they're doing and who get satisfaction out of growth, you become someone who always needs to change, who needs to do this to prove something about who you are. It's rooted in this innate criticism that we have for ourselves rather than respect. So how can we honor the desire to improve whilst recognizing and celebrating who we are right now? One of the most powerful ways to honor the desire to improve without losing

side of who we are, is to really deeply question, why am I doing this? Why are you doing this? Make sure you have a good answer and make sure you're being truthful with yourself about what that answer is. Secondly, instead of seeing improvement as fixing floors or closing gaps, we can approach it as expansion and experimentation. There aren't strict things we need to do. We are just exploring what makes us feel better and then chasing that good feeling. Another way is to integrate celebration into the journey itself. Make sure that you are leaving space to be excited by your progress, to be excited by what you're learning about yourself, to be excited by your small victories. Pausing to like appreciate progress in real time really does allow you to anchor

into the present and acknowledge your current self. It might look like journaling about what you're discovering, practicing gratitude for how far you've come, simply telling yourself or telling others, like, I had this small win and I feel really excited by that and I'm proud of myself today. By noticing and affirming who we are now and who we are in the process of who we are becoming, we don't wait on future success to feel value. Balancing growth and self-acceptance means noticing where our efforts supports us and where it kind of quietly erodes our sense of self-worth and recognizing the value that we always have, especially right now, even as we want to improve.

So when we come back, I'm going to share about how this has shown up for me and maybe some further ways that we can implement it in our own lives. So stick around. We'll be right back after this short break. Hack the holidays with the PC holiday insiders report. Try this PC porquetta. Crackling, craveworthy. You gonna eat that?

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behind today's mantra, I balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. It's time to get personal with you guys and share some of my own insights and reflections about this phrase. As I said before, and as obviously you all know, you are listening to a self-help podcast, after all, I'm deep in the belly of the self-improvement beast.

This is what that has kind of done to my mindset over the years, even though I do think I've been doing a good job at keeping a balanced approach and focusing on what feels aligned and best for me, what creates growth instead of just displacement and discomfort, I still feel like you cannot be in this space without sometimes really doubting yourself and feeling like you're not enough. I obviously have a big focus on wanting to improve and wanting to be better, but also on wanting to be better in terms of my enjoyment of life, in having more fun, in having greater self-acceptance. So when I am in this space and when I am investing to deeply in perhaps the more toxic sides of self-improvement, what I have noticed is that I lose

my desire to do this for me. It doesn't become an authentic endeavor. It becomes something that I'm assuming people are going to look at from the outside and judge me by, and I want their judgment to be a good one. Sometimes that's made me feel like my life was a project rather than something that I was living. There always needed to be an update on whether I was still following that goal. There always needed to be some kind of progress that other people could see. I always needed to be doing something and it had to be visible. This also made me kind of ashamed about talking about the times I'd slipped up or failed or didn't have the perfect glossy image of the perfect lifestyle. Although I'm not, you know, the everyday like self-help fitness influencer,

So sometimes I'd get these weird expectations that maybe that's what people were starting to expect from me, that maybe what I was portraying online was a lie because it didn't match up with their expectations. And it also felt like I always needed to be consuming more content or I needed to be buying more stuff or reading the next book or investing in the next it lifestyle routine that everyone was doing. It felt like in order to self-improve, I basically had to follow this formula, and it was a formula that wasn't going to work for me.

This is where the balance with self-acceptance and authenticity when it comes to self-improvement comes in. You cannot identify the parts of you that are actually genuinely holding you back or genuinely do need to be improved if you are easily convinced that everything is a problem, and if you don't have enough self-awareness to really identify what you don't like about yourself, because others have told you not to like it and what you don't like about yourself because it's genuinely making your life harder or more painful. This is the example I always think of when people ask me about my thoughts on self-improvement and whether it goes too far or how to not buy into it.

I always think of hip dips and my hip dips. I'm not even going to tell you what this is. I'm sure you might know you can Google it if you don't. But back in high school, I remember everyone suddenly became obsessed with this idea of not having hip dips. And then if you had hip dips, like something was wrong with you, it wasn't attractive, it didn't look good. And I would really, really focus on this. I would do all these like stupid bizarre exercises that probably really didn't contribute to my lifelong fitness goals or my strength in general. But they match this current expectation for what my body should look like. The thing is is that my hip dips weren't hurting me. They weren't wrong. They weren't a problem. There was nothing bad about them. I was just made to believe they

were a problem because I was listening too much to external sources of information about myself and because of a lack of self-acceptance. This was, I could admit now, driven by self-criticism and it was also driven by perhaps this little inner part of me that wanted to punish myself because I wasn't perfect. How many people do we see online who are actually just punishing themselves and calling it self-care? How many people are doing things that aren't actually helpful and aren't actually useful and aren't actually improving them in any discernible way or for the sake of so-called self-improvement? Therefore, we have to again start the conversation through the lens of self-acceptance and what is actually going to expand our capacity to love ourselves more or expand our

mind or our body's ability to meet our goals better? Maybe that's the very question you have to ask yourself. Will this behavior, change, action, skill, tip, will this allow me to love and care for myself more? If the answer is no, if the answer is even maybe, perhaps this isn't really necessary for your life. I think this might be a great first question because it doesn't just automatically eliminate things that are hard. Like some things are hard and are uncomfortable, but because you still do very much need to do them. It doesn't make them wrong. Sometimes things are hard and uncomfortable because you shouldn't be doing them and because it won't help you love yourself more. So you have to make sure that you are walking this line very carefully and that you're not sliding into one of

these camps, specifically the camp of, this isn't going to make me love myself more and it's making me uncomfortable. We don't want to fall into that camp and call that self-improvement. Here are some other questions that I think would be important for you to ask yourself. If no one else knew I was doing this, would I still want to pursue it? This is important because it allows you to acknowledge whether you are just doing something. something through a social lens and because you think others expect it from you or you're trying to prove yourself or whether you're doing it because again, this is a important part of your journey and expanding your self-acceptance and love for yourself. The second question that you

should be asking yourself is, does this practice make me feel energized and proud or drained and ashamed? Third, can I realistically maintain this habit without burning out? This is important because yes, there might be something in your life that you want to change that would bring you more energy and that would make you better and make you able to love yourself more. But if you can't sustain the process by which you're going to get there, there's really no point in doing it unless you've found a way to do it in a way that's really going to be long term. Finally, if you failed, would you start again? This question is important because it eliminates an all or nothing. type of goal setting whereby you are either 100% achieving the thing, doing the thing, making it

happen, or you feel like you're a failure and can never try again, or that you will never be better, or that you should just give up. This is very common with perfectionists and high achievers. If a goal requires you to be 100% perfect, that's not a goal. A goal is something that you're trying to get better at. And implicit in goal setting is failure. is quitting and trying again or failing and trying again. So if your goal doesn't have space for that or doesn't make room for that opportunity, I don't think it's really coming from an authentic place or an authentic desire to self-improve. Some other practices that could really help you balance self-improvement and self-acceptance is reminding ourselves continuously what we actually

do like about ourselves, even as we're trying to improve parts about ourselves. Celebrating wins beyond the goal that you've set, you know, honoring moments of rest, honoring moments of connection and happy days, not just milestones and big achievements, giving yourself periods of stillness and to do nothing in between your goals. I have this terrible habit. I do one thing and I suddenly feel like I need to set another goal for myself. Last weekend I ran a half marathon and suddenly I'm like, well, I was saying to my boyfriend last night, well, you know, I just feel like I haven't really done anything this year. And he was like, you ran a half marathon less than a week ago. It's because I didn't have a current goal that I couldn't appreciate

my previous goals. It's this constant cycle or kind of constant like hamster wheel of needing something new to preoccupy yourself with. I also think it's important to notice what is a trend and again question why you're doing something. As a bit of a reminder, you know, self-improvement. It's valuable and important. And it is something that I personally do invest in. We're not trying to villainize self-improvement. I just want you to really interrogate your intentions and be selective with where you choose to concentrate your energy and time and mindset on to get the best and actually most helpful outcomes from yourself and from your circumstances. That's really the biggest reminder and the biggest line that connects everything in this episode. Okay, we've explored

the balance that we need to strike with growth and self-acceptance. But when we come back, I want to give you a few other ways to turn these insights into action. So stick around. When you fly an Emirates business class and you're picked up by your private, luxury, chauffeur-driven car, you'll see that your vacation isn't really over until your flight is over. Fly, Emirates, fly better. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made to measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more

than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us, and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Welcome back. As a reminder, this week's mantra is I balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. We're going to start with our deep thought of the day, which comes from Taranah Burke. Perfection is not a requirement for your worthiness. I love this quote because I think it's a reminder that self-improvement should never come at the cost of your inherent value.

You don't need to earn love, you don't need to earn belonging or respect by being completely flawless. Growth can actually be a healthy pursuit, but it becomes damaging when it's rooted in the belief that only perfection makes you deserving. This quote really reframes that. You don't need to fix anything to become worthy. You are already worthy. When it comes to goals, achieving them can really add meaning and add direction for you, but falling short doesn't diminish who you are. Worth is not some invisible scoreboard above your head of wins and losses. It is intrinsic. And I think this perspective allows you to hold space for both ambition and acceptance at the

same time, and it means that you will have a healthier approach to your wins and your losses. Let's also dive into our journal prompts for this episode, which will hopefully help you uncover how this mantra is maybe showing up for you on a deeper level. Our three journal prompts for the day start with this one. First, can you think of a time when celebrating your progress alongside your floors helped you grow in a more meaningful way? Next, where in your life right now are you striving for improvement, and how could you honour yourself in the process? And finally, what small practice could you put in place to nurture both self-improvement and self-compassion each day?

Now that we've given ourselves some more things to reflect on, let's give our mind a moment to rest. In just a second you'll hear a music track. I encourage you just to take this opportunity. to process this week's reflections in whatever way feels right to you, no pressure, no expectations. And if this isn't something you connect with, that's totally okay. Just feel free to skip ahead about 30 seconds, but as you settle in, please keep our mantra in mind. I balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. All right. As we wrap up this week's episode, I want to share a few

final thoughts about this mantra. My final thoughts are this. Growth and self-acceptance are actually not opposites. They can both exist at the same time. In fact, I think they have to. They are two sides of the same journey. As you honour your progress, as you do desire to expand yourself, you have to acknowledge that you can't want those things if you don't begin from a place of love. If you don't begin from a place of knowing that you are worth more and wanting more for yourself purely because you know you deserve it rather than because you think people expect it from you. Please don't fall into the trap of following every wellness trend, every self-improvement

trend that was going to change in the next month anyway and lead you astray. get deep and maybe even get dark and get very inquisitive about what is actually going to lead you to a better life even if no one is talking about it and why you want to pursue that and I think that is where you create space to not only be more successful but to combine both courage and compassion to guide your choices. Thank you for joining Mantra, an exclusive open mind original powered by Pave Studios.

At Open Mind, we really value your support, so please share your thoughts on social media and remember to rate, review and follow Mantra to help others discover the show. For ad-free listening and early access to the show, make sure to join Open Mind Plus on Apple Podcast. I'll share another mantra with you next Monday. Until then, keep showing up for yourself and your journey. I'm Gemma Spag. See you next week. Mantra is hosted by me, Gemma Spag, and is an Open Mind original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the incredible

mantra team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Stacey Warren Kerr, Sarah Camp, Jen Passavoy and Paul Lieberskin. Thank you for listening. If you missed my live show, do not worry. You can still watch it on demand until November 30th. Head to Pave.orgive. Live to catch the real talk, big feelings and the unfiltered VIP after party before it's gone. Hey, it's me, Steve Burns, and I'm so glad you're here because you and I go way back, right? Yeah, and look at us now. Like, we're all grown up.

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