Self Care: What It Takes to be Me

The journey to become a pretty face and beautiful soul is the life’s work of the grown women. Essentially, you can’t be what you want to be to others before you actually are what you need to be for yourself. What’s so interesting about your grown woman self-care is that many women often figure out the importance of it AFTER getting kicked in the stomach far too many times to count. What’s more is that many of those kicks came when you knew better! You knew you needed a break or to avoid something or someone; but like a moth to a flame, you burned yourself. Then, one day, you realize that it isn’t worth it to keep setting yourself on fire. You realize that your days on the earth are limited and you should have as much fullness and joy as your heart can hold each and every day. You become serious about spending your time and energy in supportive and nurturing spaces, guarding your heart, and looking for ways to spend your energy in rewarding endeavors. Finally, the beauty of self-care lessons learned by fire is that you develop unshakable confidence in certain practices and perspectives because you’ve seen how they work in your life. Below are a few mine unshakable mantras and habits; what are some of yours?

Time and Money:

Never spend all of either.
Saving some of both is an important element of self-care and self-preservation.
How you use them reflects your personal values and self-worth.
The practice of regularly reserving some will make you less impulsive.

Choose your defining habits:

Be disciplined about them.
Know why you have them.
The effort to maintain them will redefine your priorities and focus.

Study your deal-breakers:

Stand up for what matters to you.
Know that you don’t have to explain or justify yourself.
Accept that some people won’t understand or agree with your deal-breakers.

Raise your personal integrity (stop contradicting yourself):

Recognize that contradictions between your lifestyle choices and your values compromise your self-esteem.
Display your values and priorities through your every day life.

Regularly evaluate yourself:

Reflection helps you avoid returning to your own vomit.
Study your successes so that you can duplicate your wins.
Penning your experiences helps you dissect unhealthy recurring experiences and behaviors.
Look at your pain; avoid the temptation to escape feeling the losses and pains of life.

Put your full self, your full effort, into the things that matter to you:

Aim for excellence: true satisfaction comes from doing your best.
Fear is likely the reason you’re not investing your full effort; ask yourself what you’re afraid of.
The pain of failure is less than the angst of disappointment when know you’ve done your best versus when you know you cheated yourself.
Either feed it generously or starve it.

Take care of your health FIRST:

Find places and people where you can be the client at appointed times so that you avoid chronic clienting and clienting in unsafe spaces.
It includes rest.
Use mindfulness to notice when things are wrong.