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Experimenting With Self Care

Hey, I’m super excited to be here with you. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about self-care and how you can experiment with self-care.

This week, I’ve had so many conversations with leaders who are feeling some burnout, especially people in Canada, with all the lockdowns. And it’s really hard to get outside and really hard to have kind of that feeling of a normal life. Burnout is a real risk for people and burnout can last a really long time. And I think many people I talked to don’t take their vacations and things like that, because they’re waiting. But there’s some real function to those vacations. And I also think that one of the things that you can do you, when you think about self-care, you want to kind of dig deep for yourself, you want to look for ways that you can step back and pause. And that’s sort of the taking time away from work, then you also want to look for a variety of things that actually rejuvenate you.

So, it might be searching for joy. And when I say joy, it’s like those tiny moments where you actually allow yourself to be fully present. It might be going for a walk in the woods, or going for a walk outside where you let yourself feel the skin, you know, failure the air on your skin, and you’re just being fully present to your life. It’s very rejuvenating to do this. You can also look for things that bring you closer to other people and I know with lockdowns, that’s really hard. But look for ways that you’re fully present that you’d put down the devices that you have a conversation with, ask a question of someone that you’ve never asked before. Because all of those things bring a novelty like we use vacations often for novelty, and this year has had little novelty.

So, as we try to fight burnout, as we try to do deep self-care, you know, we can eat well, we can exercise, but we do need to fight burnout. And so, we want to look for novel situations, we want to look for times that we’re fully present, we want to look for times that we engage with our body, our mind and our emotions. And any way that we can do that creatively is a really good way to do self-care. I think self-care is always important. And when we most feel like we need self-care, one of the things I’ve noticed as a coach is that sometimes people reach for, you know, the martinis, or the comfort food. And those aren’t the ways that we really double down for ourselves, to take care of ourselves at the hardest times. So I always say make sure that you are putting yourself first that you’re being very intentional, when you need self-care, is time that you really need to take some time, make a plan, but the intention there and then follow it through so that you can take yourself very seriously, and your needs very seriously so that you don’t succumb to burnout so that you do continue to love the work you do. Because all of that is a really good investment in yourself.

Anything you do for self-care is a quiet investment. Because if you love your work, then your whole life is full of joy. I hope that that’s helpful. experiment for yourself around what works for self-care. Try something and then don’t forget that second step of thinking about hey, how did that work? How did I feel afterward? Did I feel you know sort of rejuvenation? Did I feel joy? So, don’t forget that reflective part. That’s the data collection part behind you know, every experiment. Don’t forget to do that when you experiment with your self-care. Have an amazing week and go experiment.

 

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