How to Flourish in Life with Purpose, Self-Care, and Well-Being

If you’re up to your eyeballs and beyond with more work and home commitments than you can possibly accomplish, at best, you’re just getting by. Surviving the daily grind, with hardly time to think, let alone feeling good or even considering how things could be different…

In your ‘always on’ work culture, you never get a chance to relax. Even when you do sit down to chill out, the ping of an email, or buzz of a text distracts you and brings you back into that high pressured, highly stressful world of work where the idea of flourishing is often pushed aside. It’s busy, busy, busy all the time. Fighting fires at work, sorting out emergencies at home. There never seems to be an end to it. Until you simply can’t go on.

That, as you know, is a sure recipe for burnout and a lack of positive emotions engaging in your life.. When you’re so exhausted you simply can’t function and live a good life.   Tell me…

Busy-ness or Impact

Are you confusing busy-ness for impact? 

What’s more important to you? Being busy or being impactful and making a positive contribution to others on those subjects that most matter to you?

Because if you’re too busy to think, spending all your time fulfilling someone else’s agenda, you’re losing out on two fronts:

• Wearing yourself down, not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually, affecting your mental health – leaving you with less and less to give to anyone or anything.  Keep this up and you’ll burn out…
• Compromising your integrity and what really matters to you (your sense of purpose in life), not fulfilling on your potential or making the difference you know you’re here to make. This can leave you feeling empty inside with no sense of belonging.

You can carry on like this only so long before your heart cries out for a more meaningful life, and your body cries out for a rest. May even give it to you in the form of a nasty cold or ‘flu.  Interesting isn’t it — and annoying — how that seems to happen the first day or two of your holiday?

Self Care Is Critical to Happiness and Life Satisfaction

That’s why self-care and positive psychology is critically important to you as a high performing female leader. Taking time out to rest, relax, nurture and nourish yourself. Getting the sleep you need; the hugs you need, the intellectual stimulation and spiritual connection you need…

And yet, so few women leaders I work with do this. Indeed, pour scorn on me for suggesting they take time out to nurture and care for themselves.  

“I haven’t got time for that!”

“It’s an indulgence I can’t afford right now.”

“ I’d feel really guilty if I took time out for me”… 

Is this really how to flourish in life?

Some sneak their self care into what I call routine maintenance, because they enjoy that trip to the supermarket, or taking the kids out to their ballet or swimming lessons.

None of that is self care. If you are to perform at peak — and do the meaningful work you are here to do — it is absolutely essential that you care for yourself. 

All talented women need to fill our ‘well of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual wellbeing’ if we are to thrive and achieve our goals.  This from the Gartner report on the state of women. How?

Simple, Not Easy

I encourage my clients to begin with one thing — just one thing that they could do on a daily basis to nurture themselves. It may be in bed by 10 o’clock for a good night’s sleep; drinking 1.5 litres of water each day… or positive experiences like giving and receiving 5 loving hugs. Whatever she chooses, that becomes a commitment — every day. And only once that is bedded in as a routine, do we introduce something else. 

Habits are formed slowly; bad habits have a habit of coming back, again and again. That’s why accountability is so important in making changes, especially ones that feed your body, mind and spirit.  It’s simple; not easy. 

I invite you to go through this process of setting goals with me — leave the busy-busy-ness and exhaustion behind and care for #1 — you. Instead of putting yourself last, let’s put you first, so you can be all you’re meant to be for your work and your loved ones. Let’s set up a call and map out a way for you to flourish and thrive in all you do.