Caring for Yourself First

Chances are good that you believe (either explicitly or subconsciously) that your nurturing role as mother demands self-sacrifice. And so you do…you find time to drive your kids to all their activities, but don’t find enough time to exercise…you love to read, but are too tired or busy to lose yourself in a good book…

Are you putting off taking care of yourself? Are you waiting until you have enough time, or enough money? Until you’ve reached a certain level of success? Until your next project is completed? Until your children are older? 

The problem with this approach is that you always end up waiting.

There’s a paradox to effective self-care: you need to do it now, already. By starting now, you’ll begin to create the resources that will help you sustain your self-care over time. I can’t express this emphatically enough: once you start taking good (really good) care of yourself, you start to develop now the habits that will help you find time, achieve success, complete your projects, and raise your children without burning out. 

What do I mean by “taking good care of yourself”? I mean figuring out what it is that you need to make your life more fulfilling, and getting it into your life on a regular basis. I mean learning how to set boundaries on other people’s demands on you, so that you can devote your time to what is important to you. I mean figuring out what drains your energy, and making it stop draining you. In all of these, the common thread is to come to an understanding of how you’d like your life to be, and to learn and practice doing the things that will make it actually be that way. 

Psychologists have learned that mothers who are fulfilled raise better-adjusted children than mothers who are not fulfilled. Isn’t that a lovely win-win formula? You’re certainly not the only mother who has put her own self-care on the back burner while she tried to nurture everyone else. But you can choose, now, to join those of us who have made our self-care a priority and, as a consequence, have improved our ability to care for our families at the same time as we have improved our own well-being.

So what are you waiting for? Contact me and let’s get started taking care of you!