How To Create A Radical Self-Care Plan
A lot of folks are talking about self-care these days. And for good reason. It’s pretty damn important.
How we take care of ourselves on a consistent basis impacts every aspect of our lives, from our mental health to our relationships. In my work with clients over the years, I have emphasized the importance of developing a self-care practice to help them cope better with life challenges and manage depression and anxiety.
Even if you are not struggling with mental health issues, accessing what you need for your well-being is essential to feeling more empowered. There are so many things about life that we cannot control, and we experience so many events and feelings in the course of a day which can throw us off balance. When we have a self-care practice which supports us and allows us to provide for our own needs, we are better able to engage people and our environment with awareness and presence.
Creating a radical self-care plan means transforming the way you prioritize self-care.
It means deciding for yourself what is important to you and how you want to feel. It means being deliberate and thorough about what you choose to do to take care of yourself, making a plan of action, and then committing to it, in order to experience yourself and your life in a more positive way.
In my own self-care journey, I realized when I moved to Belize that I needed to be more mindful about how I took care of myself. Going through such a huge transition, I needed something to ground me every day, to connect me to myself and help me manage how overwhelmed I was by all the changes I was experiencing in my adjustment to moving abroad. I decided to do a 30-day yoga challenge as an experiment, and soon realized that yoga was something I wanted to do every day in order to feel more balanced and grounded. It became the foundation of my self-care practice.
Beginning a self-care practice (or expanding the one you currently have) starts with a plan. Just as I decided to do yoga every day for 30 days, growing your practice takes time. It helps to put some things in place as your practice develops, and creating a plan will provide you with a clear course of action.
Here’s how to create your self-care plan:
Assess your needs
Check in with yourself. How are you feeling? What’s your energy like? What has felt difficult or challenging? How do you want to feel? This is the part where you decide what you need your self-care to provide for you. Do you want to feel relaxed? Energized? Grounded? Maybe you need a self-care plan which helps you feel focused and centered in the morning before you start your day, or one which helps you wind down and release stress in the evening.
Choose your self-care tools
Which self-care tools will you be using? It can be one thing or a combination of things. This can include meditation, journaling, going for walks, or taking an hour every weekend to show your body some love. You want to choose tools which are healthy, supportive and help you feel how you want to feel. If you need some ideas, I wrote a list of tools here.
Plan your self-care
Decide when you will be doing your self-care. Be specific. Look at your calendar or planner and schedule in your self-care for the week or month. This is a very important part of this process because it’s where you set your intention and make a commitment to yourself. You can start with one thing. Just commit to it fully.
Take action
Do it. Begin.Try it for two weeks and see how you feel. This is when the magic happens.
If you need support & guidance for creating your self-care plan, I look forward to connecting over a session.