Being kind to yourself is different from letting yourself off
Say you miss a run, then another. Somebody tells you to be kind to yourself about it, and part of you bristles. Kindness sounds like the thing that got you here. If you go easy on yourself now, you suspect the runs will stop altogether, and you will have given yourself permission to quit with a warm feeling about it.
So you go the other way. You tell yourself you are lazy, that you always do this, that you have no discipline. It feels responsible. It feels like you are at least taking the problem seriously. And then, for most people, nothing happens. The harsh talk does not turn into a run. It turns into a bad evening and a slightly lower opinion of yourself, and the trainers stay by the door.
That is worth looking at closely, because the fear underneath it is reasonable and the conclusion it leads to is wrong.
Two things that get confused
Letting yourself off means deciding the thing does not matter. You missed the run, and you tell yourself running was never that important anyway, or that this week was impossible, or that you will sort it out properly in January. The commitment quietly gets smaller so that you do not have to feel the gap between what you meant to do and what you did.
Being kind to yourself keeps the commitment exactly where it was. It changes how you speak to the person who fell short of it. You can say, plainly, that you meant to run three times and you ran once, and that you would like to do better next week. You can say it without adding a speech about what that proves about your character.
One of these lowers the standard. The other leaves the standard alone and stops punishing you for being a person trying to meet it. They are easy to blur together because they both sound gentle, but they point in opposite directions.
Why harshness rarely gets you out the door
Think about how you would talk to a friend who was trying to start running and kept stalling. You would not call them lazy. You would ask what got in the way. You would probably point out the one run they did manage, and help them work out how to make the next one a bit more likely. You would do that because you want them to keep going, and you know that someone who feels ashamed tends to avoid the thing that shames them.
The same is true when the friend is you. If every missed run is followed by a round of contempt, then running becomes the activity that produces contempt. Of course you start steering around it. The harshness is supposed to be fuel, but mostly it makes the whole subject unpleasant to think about, and things that are unpleasant to think about are easy to put off.
Kindness, used properly, keeps the subject approachable. You can look at what happened without flinching, which means you can actually learn something from it. Maybe the evening slot never works on Thursdays. Maybe you planned a run for a day you already knew would be long. Those are useful things to notice, and you only notice them if you are willing to look.
What it sounds like in practice
It is less soft than people expect. Something like: that did not go the way I wanted, and that is disappointing. It makes sense, given the week I had. I still want to do this. What is one thing I can set up so tomorrow goes better?
Notice that nothing in there pretends the miss did not happen, and nothing in there gives up on the goal. It just refuses to add a second injury on top of the first. You were already disappointed. You do not need a lecture as well.
It also helps to be honest about the opposite case. Sometimes, when you look kindly at a bad week, the answer really is that you could have gone and chose not to. Kindness can hold that too. You can admit it, feel the sting of it, and still decide to go tomorrow without first proving to yourself that you deserve to.
If you are hard on yourself right now
If you are reading this after a stretch where the runs dried up and the self-criticism did not, try an experiment for one week. Keep the goal exactly as it is. Change only the way you talk to yourself when you fall short of it. Speak to yourself the way you would speak to someone you were rooting for.
You may find the standard does not slip at all. What tends to go is the dread, and the dread was doing more to keep you indoors than any lack of discipline. You can still expect a lot of yourself. You can expect it in a voice that makes you want to try again.
Written to encourage, not to diagnose. If something hurts or feels wrong, please speak to a doctor.