Wishful or Committed?

During a recent teleclass with some awesome virtual assistants from AssistU, time management guru and VA Amy Thill began discussing how important it is to include self-care in your routine. The more she talked about the benefits of self-care, the more I got to thinking about how, for many of us, that’s the thing that gets bumped out of our schedule first.

The Reality
I mean, think about it – you’re up late one night working on a client project. The next morning when the alarm goes off at 5:30 am so you can get to the gym, you’re exhausted and roll over for more sleep.

When you finally DO get up, you’ve run out of time to exercise, pack a healthy lunch, or even pull together a decent breakfast. You run through the nearest drive thru for coffee and a pastry.

Lunchtime comes, and with no healthy option from home, you head out with the gang to grab whatever is closest (and tastiest).

There are more changes to be made to the client project after a crazy-long afternoon meeting.  Your evening agenda consists of staying at the office and ordering a pizza in order to get the project done.

The Perfect World Scenario
Intellectually, you know you should get eight hours of sleep. You know eating vegetables and drinking lots of water makes your insides feel better. And you definitely see the correlation between exercise and more energy.

So, what’s the solution for getting off this kind of non-self-care treadmill?

At the end of my thinking, it comes down to this:

• Self-care = making an appointment or agreement with yourself to exercise, sleep enough, eat right, or get regular massages

• Self-leadership = following through on the agreement or appointment instead of letting all the “other” things take it’s place

I hadn’t ever really thought self-care that way before and it was eye-opening to consider that I wasn’t giving 100 percent to myself when I put other’s needs/wants/deadlines above my own.

1. What sort of self-care do you want to incorporate more regularly into your schedule?
2. What priorities do you need to shift in order to fit that self care in?
3. And finally, how will you successfully engage your self-leadership in order to make sure that the self-care maintains a priority status in the face of “other” looming “obligations?”

Still struggling with your priorities? Not sure how to fit self-care into your calendar through self-leadership? Call Mattson Business Services, Inc. to help! [email protected] or (704) 553-8082.