Two Beliefs to Trash Today

We Are Our Beliefs

Accepting a belief = making it our truth. This holds for limiting beliefs and empowering beliefs alike. It’s my belief (yes, here we go) that we become our beliefs. We literally embody our beliefs. The question then becomes: Do our beliefs support or cripple us? Help or hinder? Free us or imprison us? Well, a really good way to put beliefs to the test is to see how they hold up during a crisis.

We currently face an ongoing crisis of global proportion that directly impacts every area of our lives. We are being bombarded physically, mentally, spiritually. It’s a whole world crisis and also a whole-Self crisis for us as individuals and it’s particularly challenging for women.

As far as crises go, the data clearly shows the pandemic hit women hard. We’ve left the workforce in record numbers, we are bearing a large brunt of the stress at home, and we are caregiving in the most extraordinary of circumstances. As we manage all of this it is easy to put off caring for ourselves. We prioritize other’s needs over our own, taking care of everyone and everything else before we look to ourselves.

This is dangerous and unsustainable. It also reveals a belief we need to bust wide open: that we should defer our self-care until everyone and everything else is taken care of. Another equally damaging and equally limiting belief the pandemic has exposed is how we define self-care. 

#1: Defer Self-Care

Regardless of where you picked up this belief, summed up as prioritize everyone and everything else before you take care of you, it’s garbage. It’s also currently contextually impossible. We face tremendous uncertainty every day, everyone and everything is not ever going get taken care of. So replace the old belief with: prioritize myself every day so I am resourced every day because I really need to be given all the uncertainty we’re facing. 

#2: Self Care as Reward or Indulgence

Yeah . . . no. Why? Because especially now, in the face of ongoing COVID overwhelm, that hard-won, time-alone bubble bath is a bandage, not a cure. I’m not saying don’t enjoy the bubbles or the massage or the mani/pedi or the girls’ night out or meditation retreat. Go do it! But for your every day, the day you’re in right now, have an everyday self-care practice that can, with practice, become habitual self-care. When you have the habit of caring for your self everyday, you’re cared for. Full stop. Nothing limiting there.

(My favorite daily Self-Care is a walk, preferably in nature. Walking is proven to be effective for body, mind and spirit—your whole Self. Walking is also proven to have immediate positive physical, mental, and emotional effects and when done regularly over time, it will transform your life. Walking works.)

Daily Self-Care Is The Center Of Your New Normal

To restate: we face tremendous uncertainty every day; daily Self-Care is more important than ever. It is essential, sacrosanct, non-negotiable. The ongoing uncertainty of our circumstances means there’s no nice tidy normal to return to. So let’s stop trying to get “back to normal” and start living the day we have in the moments we have in the best ways we can, starting with beliefs that support us in substantive ways. Beliefs that support Self-Care so we can accept the uncertainty and move into it reset, refilled, refueled. As needed. 

Those two limiting beliefs? Take them to the trash today.