This week I'd like to begin talking about the self-care planner.  This can be downloaded from the website.  There are several areas that the self-care planner goes over.  There are four main sections: 1. This is me; 2. Mental health; 3. Self-care; and 4. Notes.  The planner is designed to help you get to know yourself and begin to understand the values that you have.  This is a very nice complementary tool to use with the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.  CBT helps you identify problems and gives you suggestions and/or tools to help you resolve these issues.  The self-care planner makes everything visual and gives you a place to record certain things. 

The first area I would like to go over is the "This is me" section.  There is a good quote: "There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self."  From my own journey with personal growth, I have to agree that getting to know yourself is very hard.  You would think to yourself that something like this is ridiculous, right?  "Of course I know myself."  You almost want to say "duhhh."  But when I started looking deeper into myself to figure out what my values were and want I wanted out of my life, I realized just how hard it really is.  I mean, deep down, we do know ourselves.  But to actually think about it and articulate is another thing.  What we are basically doing is we are digging deep and bringing everything from the back burner to the front burner.  It's there, we just need to find it and think about it.

So, basically, instead of thinking of this as "getting to know yourself," think of it as getting to UNDERSTAND yourself.  That is what we are really doing.  We are digging deep, investigating thoughts and feelings and trying to make sense of it all.  We are trying to put everything into perspective.

So, please take the time to download the self-care planner and fill it out.  Compare it with the ABC form that you are using and you will have a much better understanding of who you are, why you feel a certain way and what thoughts are provoking these feelings.  Once you get this down, you can use all of this information to help put everything in perspective which, will in turn, help you to manipulate those negative feelings and turn them into positive feelings.  And once all of this starts happening, you can build on all of it to improve your self-esteem and your confidence.