Why Self Care Is So Hard For Heros & Caretakers
My life’s purpose distilled down to one word is peace. The way that shows up in the world for me is through serving others — and I’ll add that I really desire to be the most effective I can be at doing it. I’ve had some interesting revelations about this recently, especially in how serving others relates to my other high priority of taking care of myself.
During a recent session with my coach, we made an important distinction about self-care and service to others — that self-care is actually a vehicle to being able to serve others. In other words, when I take good care of myself, it leaves me better able to bring the best of myself to the people around me each day.
And to take it another step forward: Caring for myself is really the thing that can motivate others to be in service of themselves. Meaning, if I’m walking my talk with healthy self-care, I’m serving as a model of how to care for myself to the people I care about and want to help. After all, if I’m not caring for me, I certainly can’t inspire them to care for themselves and live their lives to the fullest.
It is a catch 22 of sorts. If I’m not taking good care of myself, I can’t serve others at the highest level. So if this is the case, it seems like it should be easy for me to do what I need to do to care for myself, yet the truth is, I struggle with it regularly. And, I’ll admit I own the humanity in this statement and appreciate the value in just speaking these words.
How Self Care & Service Play Out in Real Life
For me, taking care of myself and serving others seem to be at odds, especially lately. They are conflicting priorities in my life which I will speak about in my next blog (that’s called a teaser). What actually happens for me is that when I’m in service mode, I make my helping and serving other people my top priority — and I let all else fall to the wayside. I end up choosing to be in service of others over my own well being. Part of this I acknowledge is because serving others is built into my survival mechanism and helping others certainly boosts my feelings of self-worth.
Let me back up for a minute and explain this a little further. We all have a survival mechanism — you may even have a few of them. Your survival mechanism is your default behavior you learned at a young age to do to cope with the circumstances around you. I have names for mine — “Polite Prisoner” and the “Heartbroken Hero” are two of them. My Heartbroken Hero loves to save the day and swoop in to help others — and he feels great doing so — but deep down this comes at a cost because he isn’t able to tend to his own heart too.
On the other hand, when I have a fully empowered self-care project going on in my life, I am, for the most part, at my highest and best. Right now my life happens to be filled with new and difficult challenges and there is a tremendous amount of strain on my time and energy. Like many busy individuals, I find that the very first thing I let slip away is my self-care. My Heartbroken Hero shows up and I let things get in the way of being the person I am committed to being for myself.
This is simply a pattern of old habits coming home. These patterns work their way back into my life while I’m playing the little DutchBoy in my mind, running around filling in all the gaps in the dam to save the village. And I’m
A New Mindset: You Matter
A repeating theme for me and for many of my clients is the need to look at ourselves as if we matter. When we matter, we value our contributions to others and at the same time, we show up and love ourselves just as much. When both are present, we have a huge impact on the world. One client put it best today with this insight: When she feels like she doesn’t matter she plays a small, very slow paced game in life. She’s not able to show up fully and live from her highest potential.
So here’s the message I think we all need to hear: You matter! Your self-care matters too. And it’s something we must practice regularly — loving ourselves enough each and every day to have our self-care be an unwavering daily practice.
Here’s what my ideal self-care practice looks like:
Part of my self-care practice is waking up early enough each day to get a 45 minute (or more) workout in, and then eating a good breakfast afterwards, which could be as simple as having a protein smoothie (vegan of course). It also includes taking time daily to connect with my family — my girlfriend, my daughter, and my girlfriend’s son. Another part of my self-care routine is dedicating the time to appreciate the gifts in my life. For me, this is taking my presence walk with our dog, Charlie and getting to have that time with him.
Self-care practices are also important to incorporate throughout my days too:
Eating throughout the day, with presence.
Regular times of slowing down and checking in with myself — even if only for a few minutes.
Bringing the gift of music to myself daily for at least 30 minutes.
I have also taken on a new practice of growth through learning and reading on a daily basis.
Last and probably the most important practice, is no smartphones in bed — my girlfriend and I have taken this one on and it is life changing!
Could you too benefit from adding some self-care into your daily routine?
Here are two easy steps to make sure self-care is part of your day:
1. Identify your self-care needs. Take the time to really define what self-care looks like for you and create a list of what’s important to you.
2. Make sure you do them by having a plan. Schedule them in your calendar and commit to yourself.
Pretty simple, right? Creating a self-care routine really comes down to awareness — being mindful of your automatic habits, what your needs are, and making a conscious plan. It’s also about a commitment to your self and your “I matter” mindset — to show up and live from your healthiest and highest good.
Could you use some support with your own self care project? I can help you. Click here to sign up for a free Possibilities Conversation with me. We’ll spend 30 minutes together and talk about where you are right now and the steps you can take to get yourself back on track and in integrity with your needs.