Taking care of yourself, on the soft side of Leadership

Taking care of yourself is a daily task, same as any other of your daily tasks in your role as a leader. Your team will really see you and not only listen to you and follow instructions.

We all know that to live a healthy life we must accomplish the habits of doing 4 main things regularly:

  1. Eat healthy in small proportions 5 to 6 times a day,
  2. Exercise
  3. Sleep well
  4. Relax (walk in the park, enjoy the outdoors, meditate, etc.)

All above is definitely in the line of taking care of yourself, although for this  topic, it  is not what I want to share with you.

Taking care of yourself in a way that you no longer expose yourself, even unconsciously, to situations where your feelings are being hurt blaming others for feeling that way.

Let me ask you this, who took care of you as a kid? Your parents, maybe a grandmother, grandfather, aunt or uncle? Whoever was responsible to help you grow providing food, shelter and clothing, was also teaching you the basics for you to relate and “integrate” society.  They also try their best in protecting your feelings from being hurt by others and the only reason they did it was just because you were growing chronologically and were obviously just learning the facts of life.

Now you are all grown up and I ask…who is taking care of the child that remains within?  Yes, I’m talking about that same child who was taken care by older folks, your inner child that needs to be taken care by no other than you.

We often forget to take care of our inner child thinking that we have already grown all our “childish needs”, and reality is that child sometimes needs to hear that she is fine and that no one will hurt her because you got her/him.

It’s not only people with past traumas who can benefit from self-assurance to ease the pain or to manage their feelings, we all need some pampering from time to time right?, so this is what I suggest you do.

These are 5 things your inner child needs to hear from you:

  1. I love you – You cannot give what you don’t have and loving yourself is the only way to allow yourself to love others.
  2. Thank you – We tend to give ourselves for granted or expect to receive thanks only from others not appreciating the things we accomplish or even simple things we do.
  3. I’m sorry – In my case, I tend to push myself to hard, overdoing things and still feeling that I’ve not done enough so I follow this one with the next phrase
  4. You did your best – Doing your best is always enough, don’t push yourselves so hard.
  5. You are perfectly imperfect – Perfection doesn’t exist. What is perfect to me is not the same to others, so embrace your imperfections.

We cannot give something we lack of, we cannot teach something we haven’t learn somehow. Taking care of yourself will allow you to  care of others and as a leader in the corporate world or in any other environment this is also needed, this way you are in a much better position to help others evolve to their best version.

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Author: Jessica Applewhaite

“Breath, breath …. enjoy life! Uplifting your persona, getting rid of stress, anxiety, never second guessing yourself.“ This is what Life Coach Jessica Applewhaite from Panama says. Take a look at her website an you'll see what she means. http://jessicacoach.com/main/

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