How To Take Care Of You

The following is an edited excerpt from the book Life as a Masterpiece: Design and Live a Life You Love Today by Cathy Christen.

***

“It all begins with you. If you do not care for yourself, you will not be strong enough to care for anything in your life.” — Leon Brown

I spent all of 2007 working really hard to surpass my sales goal for the year. I was at my peak professionally, but I wasn’t fueling my energy in any way. By the end of the summer, I was number one in a quarter-billion-dollar company, but I hated my life.

Initially, I blamed my job for why I felt so terrible. All the things I loved about working there — building relationships, connecting with people, helping others realize their potential — had disappeared into a numbers game. If you had asked me who my top thirty people were that year, I could have told you their names, but I didn’t know anything about them as people. I didn’t know what goals they were working toward or what their personal dreams were. With the connection to people gone, I no longer felt happy or excited about the work I was doing.

When I mentioned this to my mentor Trent, he was surprised to hear that I was unhappy with my job. He knew how fulfilling I’d always found it and began asking me about my lifestyle. What was I eating on a regular basis? How often was I exercising? What was I doing for fun? When was the last time I’d gone to church?

I told him I didn’t have time for any of those things. The only thing I had time or energy to think about was hitting my sales numbers for the year.

“Cathy, there’s no wonder you’re so drained,” he said. He pointed out that I had been thinking exclusively about serving everybody else’s needs while completely neglecting my own. If I didn’t take care of myself, Trent warned, I’d never be able to serve people at the level I wanted to.

The job wasn’t the problem. I was the problem. I wasn’t taking the time to do the things that refueled my energy. Working somewhere else wouldn’t fix my life. What I truly needed was to reconnect with the things that excited and healed me. Only by prioritizing my own energy could I influence and impact people in the way that I wanted to.

Reconnecting With My Energy

As I mentioned before, I attended a leadership conference shortly after this conversation with Trent. The conference was held at a church, and as my friend Lisa and I approached the entrance, I started to feel nervous. I hadn’t been to a church in a long time, partly out of exhaustion from my job, and also partly because I was still dealing with anger over the death of my cousin. Growing up, my spiritual energy had been a powerful source of motivation for me, but at that point in my life, it was practically non-existent.

As soon as we walked inside, though, I immediately felt the presence of a powerful energy in every part of me. As people began singing and dancing, that feeling became so strong that I started to cry. That energy had always been such a big part of my life, but I’d been missing it for so long. That event made me realize how much I needed to take care of myself, and that this started with reconnecting to my spirituality.

I began filling myself up spiritually by reading scripture and journaling. Those practices immediately impacted my emotional energy for the better, and the more positive I felt, the more clearly I was able to think. I saw that if I was going to do all the things I wanted to do, I needed to create a process that would fuel the happiness I needed to be truly productive.

Refueling Myself… And My Team

My new system started with identifying what I needed to do in order to show up at my best. I used my staff as a motivator: if I didn’t take the time to take care of myself, I wouldn’t be able to serve my people at the level they deserved.

I began each day with an affirmation. Instead of rushing out the door, I took a minute before leaving the house to look in the mirror and remind myself that I was a badass. Instead of running to the drive-in for lunch, I picked up healthy food and juices from an organic café. And at least once per day, I stepped out of the office, turned off my phone, and refueled my energy with a boxing session or a yoga class.

The more time I spent focusing on programming positive, energy-fueling practices into my life, the better our team performed. The next year, we broke the all-time national record for a summer campaign, in spite of a whole slew of crazy challenges that had never happened before. We got kicked out of our office, forcing us to move the whole business in the middle of our busiest season, lost our phone lines, and our internet didn’t get installed until a full month after the move. It was a total mess, and I worked much harder in the summer of 2008 than ever before, but I was undoubtedly happier that year than I’d been in a long time. My team and I were positive, resilient, and able to laugh through the challenges. We were so committed to our goals that there was never a doubt in our minds we would find a way to make things happen.

As the office leader, it was my job to set the example for everyone. The fact that they were able to lift each other up, take initiative in solving problems, and have fun while working their butts off was a direct result of the work I’d done on retraining my priorities.

I remember watching that summer unfold and thinking, more than once, about what a difference a year can make. By focusing on the importance of taking care of myself, I was able to influence those around me and help create an incredible, rewarding summer for everyone.

Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First

When you’re on an airplane, you’re instructed to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you. It seems counterintuitive, but in order to help other people, you have to be alive and breathing yourself. It might feel like the right thing to do to help someone else survive before looking after yourself, but it’s actually not the smart thing to do.

The more you want to do and the more you’re trying to cram into your days, months, or years, the more important it is to constantly refuel yourself — there’s only so long you can sacrifice yourself before you run out of fuel. And when that happens, the consequences are truly scary!7 You’ll become burned out as well as resentful or angry toward others for needing so much from you. However, that anger isn’t other people’s fault — it’s the result of not taking care of yourself.

No matter what kind of relational position you might be in — leading an office, parenting a child, being married, serving as part of a team — you always want to show up at your best for the people who count on you. For women in particular, this often creates a tendency to sacrifice themselves in order to take care of everyone else. Women often say that all they care about is serving their family, but in reality, neglecting themselves only makes them less happy and less effective. It’s extremely important for women, as it is for everyone, to make sure that they’re filled up so that they’re able to continue giving, loving, and supporting the people who matter most to them.

Find Your Peak

As we’ve talked about before, everyone has different needs and preferences around how and when their self-care happens. It’s up to you to find the conditions that best suit your means of refueling your energy and create rituals and routines that ensure your refueling takes place.

Brian Tracy says, “Successful people have successful habits.” Just doing something once or once in a while isn’t going to refuel you the way you need. You have to program your habits into your life, so you engage in them easily and automatically. The less you have to think about your refueling opportunities, the more you’ll get out of them.

Sometimes, the conditions that best serve us require we change our current habits. I used to hate getting up early in the morning, but once I discovered the magic of listening to a mood-improving song (U2’s “Beautiful Day,” remember?), I’ve found that mornings are my best time to get stuff done. My motivation to give mornings another try came from a friend, mentor, and former colleague at Vector, Hal Elrod, who is now better known as the founder of the Miracle Morning community and author of a book called The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life (Before 8AM).

Hal writes that he went through a tough time during which he wasn’t on his A-game. Like me, he felt drained, disconnected, like nothing was going right for him. A friend told him something very wise: his level of success would never surpass his level of personal growth.

With that advice in mind, Hal began researching the habits and self-care rituals of the people he admired. He learned that the most successful people were fueled by things like journaling, exercising, affirmations, and visualization. Hal wrote down everything he learned and turned it into an acronym that helped him get his life back on track. This simple formula has now also helped transform the lives of millions of people across hundreds of countries!

The Life-Saving Acronym: SAVERS

S IS FOR SILENCE.

Silence includes any sort of mindfulness practice — prayer, meditation, or just deep breathing. The most successful people are those who take time to stop, pause, and breathe. It’s such a gift to pause and take time to connect with either yourself or God. Doing this sets you up for your day in a way that nothing else can.

A IS FOR AFFIRMATION.

It’s not a coincidence that the most famous celebrities and top athletes are vocal about affirmations, visualizations, and positive thinking along their journey to success. Successful people often talk about how they visualized what they wanted. For example, Jim Carrey wrote a check to himself for the film salary he would earn one day. Muhammed Ali constantly told himself (and everyone who would listen), “I’m the greatest ever.”

Affirmations remind you of what you’re capable of and what you can do, but their real power is in being spoken out loud. By speaking the words out loud, you’re reprograming your inner self to become who you want to be. The more you feed your mind positive thoughts, your actions will align with these.

When creating your affirmations, identify what you really want, why you want it, whom you are committed to being in order to get it, and what you are doing to obtain it. You can include inspirational quotes and philosophies. If you’re stuck for ideas, search for sample affirmations online. There are so many out there for increasing energy, having great relationships, developing self-confidence, building wealth, or losing weight.

V IS FOR VISUALIZATION.

A lot of people don’t believe in visualization, but there’s so much science which suggests that our brains don’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s not. For decades, this practice has been used among high achieving athletes. Research shows that in many cases mental practice is almost as effective as actual physical practice. In a study11 conducted on Soviet athletes from the 1970s, they found that the athletes with twenty-five percent physical training and seventy-five percent mental training were more prepared than those with one hundred percent physical training. When we see things, even in our imagination, our brain feels them.

Try it out for yourself. Think about a moment when you accomplished something amazing. Let your brain focus. What happened? Where were you? How were you standing? Who was around? How were you smiling? How did it feel to have accomplished that?

Create a picture for yourself of everything that happened, allowing yourself to feel anything that comes up — take a second to close your eyes and try it. (Seriously — take a second!) Did you notice yourself starting to feel happy and proud? You’re not even in that moment and yet, because you’ve seen it in your mind, you start feeling the positive feelings associated with that moment.

The same happens with a negative memory. If you think of a time when you were sad, such as a time of loss or frustration, you’ll start feeling those negative emotions in your body.

Visualize something like buying a house for your mom or taking your family on an incredible vacation that they’ve always dreamed of. Picture the looks on the faces of your loved ones; imagine them jumping up and down with excitement and calling their friends with the good news. Once you visualize how incredible that would feel, your mind and body can’t wait to take action. It’s almost like you’ve hypnotized yourself to think about those things.

As soon as you open your eyes, your mind and body feel ready to take on the day. Not only does your mind know what it’s working for, but it also knows how good it’s going to feel when you get to that end result. That way, you’re able to propel yourself to get there so much quicker.

E IS FOR EXERCISE.

There are endless benefits of exercising, but you must find something that works for you. Many people say they don’t exercise because they’re too busy or they are just exhausted, but I have found that people are pretty good at making time for things that are fun or important to them. As we talked about back in chapter 9 my first recommendation is to find something you enjoy so that you want to do it! Next, start thinking of exercise as the way to obtain the physical fuel you need to achieve your goals. Do you want to run around with your grandkids? Climb a mountain? Have more self-confidence? Be more focused? Whatever it is you want to accomplish, exercise can help prep your mind, body, and spirit to be in the best state to accomplish it.

R IS FOR READING.

We’ve talked already about how the most successful people spend time feeding their minds and expanding their knowledge. The more you learn, the more success you earn…and this doesn’t only have to do with money. You can learn through reading how to be wealthy in joy and love, how to succeed more as a better parent, how to grow closer to God, how to perform a new skill. The list goes on and on. Reading can help you become a better person and a better leader.

S IS FOR SCRIBING.

Scribing is just another word for writing stuff down. We’ve talked about how important it is to write down goals, but Hal advises taking that to the next step with journaling, another technique used by most successful people. Personally, I find journaling especially helpful in practicing gratitude, but it’s also a good way to help you evaluate your life, your dreams, your goals, and the breakdowns of each goal. You can use your journal to celebrate the things that went well for you, building positive emotions that help propel positive actions. Journaling also helps you gain clarity by emptying your mind. Whenever you feel like you have a lot going on, write it down on paper — you might be surprised what comes out.

Along with all of its other benefits, scribing (or journaling) is a strategic way to avoid overwhelm and process emotions. I discovered this after Trent, my mentor, sent me a Jim Rohn journal that came with a CD about how to journal. At first, I was self-conscious about it — was I supposed to write “Dear Diary” at the beginning of every entry? However, as I practiced it each day, I realized how helpful it was to capture ideas, sift through my thoughts, process emotions, and gain clarity that ultimately helped me create better plans of action.

Later on, it also occurred to me that the thoughts I captured in my journals could be helpful for generations to come. Maybe that isn’t the case for you. You may write certain things which you never want anyone to read. In that case, you can burn them. But regardless of whether you end up keeping your journals, it’s therapeutic to get your thoughts out of your head and body, and onto the page, where you can do whatever you want with them.

Stay Strong

Sometimes people do things to fill their tank, and these actually end up depleting them. We all know people who love going out to party all night, people who indulge in certain substances that affect their ability to make good decisions, people who can spend hours zoning out in front of the TV or the internet.

While these things might seem to refuel them by helping them relax or forget their stress, they actually have the opposite effect, especially over time. When you stay up all night, chances are you won’t be able to sustain the levels of energy you need to fuel your success the next day. Absorbing too much of the content that’s prevalent on TV or the web has the opposite effect of feeding your mind, causing negative thoughts and emotions that hold you back.

Be intentional about the activities you engage in to feel happy and bring yourself energy. Do these serve your goals by properly fueling your energy, or do they drain energy away and make you incapable of carrying out all that you want to do?

If you have chronic problems such as addictions or abuses, or you find your mental patterns really difficult to break, don’t be embarrassed to seek out professional help. Although some people regard others as weak when they turn to a professional for help, in my opinion, those who seek help are stronger than those who don’t. It’s a brave decision to want to be at your best and realize that you can’t get there on your own. By getting help, you’re letting your pride down. You’re being stronger than your own ego.

Happiness Loves Company

While self-care is important, you don’t have to do it by yourself. Find people who can support you on your journey and help get you to where you need to be.

I advise people to think of their self-care routine the same way they would think about their hygiene. Could you go days without a shower? Technically, you could, but it wouldn’t be ideal. By making a daily practice out of fueling yourself mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically, you’ll be able to go into every new day feeling fresh and replenished.

Whatever you do choose to do to take care of yourself, make sure it works for you. No matter what habits and rituals you set for yourself, you don’t have to be strict with the time you spend on each step. The most important thing is to create a routine which serves you and that you know will help fuel your energy.

To keep reading, pick up Life as a Masterpiece: Design and Live a Life You Love Today by Cathy Christen.