What’s your approach to self-care? Is self-care an activity or an attitude?
When self-care is perceived as disparate activities—do yoga, drink water instead of soda, journal, eat kale, wear sunscreen, meditate—it’s all too easy to get caught up in the business and busyness of life and skip X, Y, Z acts of self-care.
Too many skipped kale smoothies and missed workouts mean days pass with self-care out of sight, out of mind.
But this is less likely to happen when self-care is an attitude rather than limited to a set of actions.
An attitude of self-care isn’t an appointment in your datebook. It’s not an item on your To Do list or something separate that you do. Instead, it’s a tendency, an orientation, a point of view. It’s your approach to living, plain and simple.
Embracing self-care as an attitude
I made this shift after years of self-care being an on-again-off-again struggle. I stopped limiting self-care to external acts I either was or wasn’t doing (usually wasn’t).
Self-care is no longer (only) about getting a massage or refusing to rush.
Instead, I started embracing self-care as an attitude for moving through the day in ways that refresh, replenish, energize, and allow growth.
I’ve found an attitude of self-care is deeply and deliberately intentional. And it’s all-embracing.
- From the way you feed your body to the quality and kindness of your self talk.
- From the boundaries you set to your practice of self-compassion.
- From the degree to which you live your values to the support system you cultivate.
Here’s your mini mission
Consider your current approach to self-care. How can you move from one-off acts to a pervasive attitude of self-care?
