Episode Overview

In today’s show, we will be shedding light on the topic of self-care. What is it? Why is it important? And most importantly, how can we care for our self? While I will tell you that lighting some candles and laying down to relax are a great place to start, throughout this episode I will take a different look on self-care and how we can prevent the need for reactive self-care by being more proactive in our approach to our physical and mental health. We dig deep into why caring for yourself is important especially when you want to help other people and we delve into the problem of self-worth when it comes down to putting yourself first. As light and lovely as caring for yourself sounds, it can actually be quite difficult and scary to do properly, because it means breaking through old beliefs and changing how we view both the world and our self, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Through my personal story I will tell you how I tried to care for myself for many years, but came to realise that the way I was doing it created more problems than it solved and towards the end we will cover my best advice to begin caring for yourself and a practical exercise to begin your journey of true self-care right now, so make sure you stick around until the end if this sounds like something you need.

Welcome

Good morning, good evening, good whatever it is wherever you are and welcome back for episode number two! The topic of today is very close to my heart because of my own personal experience with self-care, as well as witnessing SOO many people who want to care and love for their self, but are struggling to find the way how. I would love to give you the answer right away, but let’s first dive into the idea of self-care and gain a deeper perspective on what it means to care for yourself.

Self-Care Today

The theme of self-care and self-love has exploded over the internet. Slowing down, taking a bath, booking a massage and doing some Yoga – all actions that have their place in the world that we live in and necessary to combat the stresses of everyday life, but what if we could look at self-care from a different perspective?

Self-care for most people is REACTIVE. What this means is that most of us do is wait until things are falling apart before we take any action. We book a massage when our body is so stiff and tight that we can’t move. We go to the doctor once we are already sick and decided to start eating healthy when we see that our weight and/or health has gotten out of control.

Let’s take a moment to think about this. If you have been doing something long enough that it has begun to form serious or semi-serious problems in your life, just how much do you think that one hour of self-care is going to help you? This is not to take away from the strength it takes to take some time for you or depriving you of the satisfaction of caring for yourself in this way, but it is raising a serious, realistic problem that I believe we all have to face. That is, that if we spend 12 months beating up our body, one massage won’t change our life. If we have eaten crappy foods, not exercised and lived in negative thinking for five years, 1 week of diet and exercise probably won’t fix everything. You might call this pessimism or negative thinking, please, feel free to, but this is what I call realism. Looking at the reality of the situation because if we are not willing to look at what it really takes, how can we ever do what is required?

What Issues are there with Self-Care?

There are a number of issues that arise when we think about self-care: lack of time, lack of money, have to do things for other people, not looking at the problem, misguided information and acting reactively rather than proactively. Allow me to let you in on a littl