A Self Care Package

I have a life coach that is so incredibly supportive in helping me define and reach my goals.  She's practical,  she's spiritual and she's unrelenting in holding me to my commitments.  Janice is great.

Last week I was telling Janice that I was having a particularly tough time with my daughter, who's now a teen, as well as dealing with the fallout of a stolen car.  I was overly stressed.

Janice asked me what I thought I needed right now.  I thought long and hard about it, and said, "I need a self care protocol.  I need to focus even more on self care in the upcoming weeks. She asked me to further define that.

So I told her to give me a couple of days, and I would send it over.

After a couple of days, I gave her my list of DAILY self care tasks:

Exercise an hour a day or more.

Take better care of my teeth.  (It's an act of self love!)

Limit screen time...  Do not spend the entire day in front of the screen.

Gratitude List Daily, and Journaling about my progress on these goals.

Read spiritual books/self help books, a few pages daily

This was about a week ago.

So how am I doing?

Well, I can say I have exercised almost every day.  I did miss yesterday.

I have been doing the flossing and brushing twice a day.  This is great for me, I usually don't like flossing and a lot of times it has only been once per day.

I have been conscious about limiting my screen time, although I would still say it's too much.  I am really trying to limit it to 6 hours a day.

I have done the gratitude exercise most days with my wife Lisa, and it's great because she likes it too, and shares the  things she's grateful for with me.

Where I've come up short is in the reading area and the journaling area.  I know I need to do better here.  I have been glancing at a book called "Ask and you shall Receive by Jerry and Esther Hicks.  I need to spend more time in that arena.  

All in all, though, it's been good to shine the light of consciousness in these areas.  Bringing focus and intention to those areas that I know helps me feel better is always priceless.  Having a list like this of things that aren't really that time consuming but have plenty of bang for the buck helps me refocus my energies when I am lagging, and breaks up the day into a nicer rhythm.

I'll try and keep you posted on my progress, and especially, how doing this stuff makes me feel.  So far, so good!