What Would Make Your Self Care List?
Steven Pressfield in his book “Turning Pro” declares that maintaining resilience ultimately comes from our ability to consistently believe in ourselves. If our self belief is in tact, we will persist.
Do you agree? I do.
Having a strong belief in your capability will keep the mind and body reassured that ‘you’ve got this!’. However, what about your emotional needs that also require attention? Failure to deny these needs can lead to burnout. A challenging process I have experienced twice in my career, despite my self belief being in tact. The irony here is that my relentless self belief that I could manage everything at the expense of my own needs only exacerbated the path to burnout.
Self Belief vs Self Care
So, in my opinion self belief is essential to building resilience and self care is vital to maintaining it. We have emotional drivers for food, pleasure, troop (belonging with others), security, sex, territory and power. This is normal and healthy. Knowing our drives and what is most important to us is crucial to our wellbeing.
Awareness of our most powerful emotional drivers is key, yet action to manage and meet these needs is essential to maintain resilience alongside strong self belief. Take Adam, a CEO who knows that regular bike rides helps to keep his body and mind in check, yet struggles to commit to this because of late night and early morning meetings.
The strength here is that Adam knows what works, yet he is not managing his boundaries well enough around work activity to make this a priority. Over time neglecting this simple need for exercise (which can fulfil a number of emotional drivers, for instance; pleasure, risk, competition, troop and so on) can lead to the build up of emotion, such as, resentment, which can show up towards the job or even colleagues in unhelpful ways.
How do you identify your drives and meet them? This is where the self care list comes in.
My Self Care List
Turn the page in your notebook or open a new tab to write down the top 10 things that make you feel good, that soothe you or make you laugh. It can be anything simple such as listening to music, meditating, buying fresh flowers or activities such as cycling, board games, and reading for example.
Commit to doing something off your self care list once a day. If your feeling out of sorts, go to the self care list and take something from it to do.
Turn thoughts into action
As an Insight Coach I regularly use this successful technique with my clients to help very busy people create awareness and action to do small things every day to meet their emotional needs and therefore increasing the chances of staying in a good place to provide a strong foundation for self belief to flourish.
Don’t just take my word for it, here is one of my clients at Twitter commenting on the impact of the self care list:
“Putting my own self care list together during Tamson’s coaching, was both insightful and thought provoking - I realised that some of the items were very simple yet made me feel happy and content. Fulfilling at least one self care activity a day is a sign to myself that I am taking care of myself amidst living a hectic and demanding lifestyle. My self care list reminds me of the things I value most in life.”
The self care list provides clues to what is currently most important, paying attention to bring the self care list in your everyday life (no matter how small) will help to offset your busyness and create space for your needs.
For more information on how to develop robust self belief and how to better understand your emotional drivers and how to meet them, give me a shout! tamson@amaralife.com