Re-Invent Yourself to Reclaim Your Power
When life delivers setbacks in the form of conflicts, personal losses, financial issues, or health problems, the typical response is to temporarily withdraw from the world until relief comes from the universe. Most people that default to this approach prolong their own suffering and often, repeat the same pattern of behavior that enabled the conditions for their dilemma. Mindset, maturity, and personal characteristics influence how you respond and recover, based on how you deal with your emotions. Building the emotional capacity to face challenges of growth and loss requires some form of personal self-care.
How many of us have actually learned to develop greater emotional capacity? The skill to endure and quickly recover from setbacks is a matter of practice and therefore, a skill. Self-care is a protocol for personal development. Where self-care differs from other personal development systems is due to the aims of this protocol for anticipating and solving specific challenges. Most personal development systems or approaches are open-ended, meaning the ideas are generally true, however, it is up to the individual to guess and frame their challenges in a way that makes it possible for them to be solved.
Master Yourself
Deliberately managing your time and energy and purposefully directing it towards solving problems will vastly reduce the time necessary to see your desired, and often, better results. In stark contrast, conventional wisdom states that it takes time to recover and to be fully functional again. That approach is passive in nature and sub-optimal. SELF-CARE is dynamic and active, which in turn empowers you to learn and improve with every challenge that stands in the way of your individual progress, however you define that term. With your mastery of self-care, every setback offers you an opportunity for growth and the opportunity to create value with meaning. Being integrated consciously and subconsciously, you bring congruity to your identity by matching intentions with action. This coherency builds confidence, credibility, and a resulting reputation for excellence.
In addition to being a protocol, self-care is also a process Each letter of this term has a significance and connected stages of progression. By going through this process and addressing each of the letters of this acronym, you will design and follow a plan of action. In doing so, you thereby exercise the central philosophy of self-defense until it becomes second nature. Morihei Ueshiba the founder of the Japanese martial art of Aikido stated: “The real and most dangerous opponents we face are fear, anger, confusion, doubt, and despair. If we overcome those opponents that attack us from within, we can attain a true victory.” I chose Aikido as a starting point in my journey towards self-mastery. Discipline requires a structure.
The Difference of Being Mindful
There are a myriad of advantages to living life according to a structure that best fits your real apparent needs. In being structured, you will gain both confidence and a better understanding of the link between your thoughts, efforts, and feedback triggers for making changes. Gaining self-awareness leads to a life-changing possibility; overcoming obstacles along the way. By using self-care, you will gain a true self-awareness through observation and a clarity of personal decisions that you actually fulfill by way of effort. Self-care is a structured process for change guided by your efforts.
Structured Process
Effecting change requires us to identify and follow a new process to break patterns that have lead to past results. Self-care broadly spans the following process:
1. Identify the root cause of the problem(s)
2. Evaluate yourself for mental or psychological factors
3. Choose corrective actions
4. Adopt a discipline and complete the actions
5. Refine the repeat the process until the issue is resolved
Healing or regeneration is a matter of following a process whether that problem is physical, mental, emotional, or material. With self-care, we focus on those areas where mindset, psychology, and emotional tension cause problems. In response, self-care provides a self-guided process to improve your condition. If symptoms of a problem are apparent in physical or material terms such as financial loss or physical ailment, you should seek out a specialist or trained professional with the experience to make a difference. In any case, managing any process to change is some form of self-care.
Self-Awareness Requires Effort and Examination
Self-care works through a process of self-awareness, taken in steps. Each step builds on the next through a cause and effect connection. As a problem-solving framework, we progress to each step once we clarify and specify the consequences that result from an emotional experience triggered by an imbalance from both internal and external causes.
The four general practices that makeup self-care include the following practices:
1. Time Management
2. Self-care Process
3. Goal definition and Planning
4. Journaling as a practice
Following these practices regularly enable you to prevent and solve problems, maintain a positive mindset while gaining a better understanding of your own psychology as represented by your actions. We often develop a delusional sense of our personality and a false representation of ourselves towards others because we lack self-awareness. By observing our actual behavior, we can compare how our efforts match up to the ideal that we believe we live by. Only through honest reflection does it then become apparent why we do not achieve our life’s purpose nor enjoy the qualify of life and relationships that make life meaningful. This is universally true. By contrast, high achievers with fulfillment in their lives take their personal self-care as a matter of highest priority. Seldom do the most inspirational leaders compromise and instead, work tenaciously towards achieving their vision. Self-care is a system that everyone can follow to similarly realize their potential. With a simple journal and diligent use of time, a self-care practitioner will become a leader in their own life.
Why You Should Try SELF-CARE
The “Why” for self-care is very simple to explain. I personally took time away from self-care for 90 days to experience life based on a purely unstructured way of living to observe its effects during the COVID 19 quarantine. What resulted for me was disastrous in contrast to the ways described here as outcomes. In summary, my inner state mirrored the nature of the world that in 2020 can only be described as chaotic. Perhaps the most unique attribute of the self-care protocol is the negation concept that is embedded in the process. When you observe the self-limiting beliefs, attitudes, and negative consequences in light of expectations vs. results, the efforts must change to experience a different reality and this must be self-directed.
By using the framework and process outlined in this article, I saw peak performance across the entire plane of my existence. My health, outlook, physical strength, spirituality, and social interactions declined in the absence of self-care. The evolution of this system and its structures have proven self-care to be a corrective framework for meaningful change. Similarly, I have provided consultations for other individuals that faced unexpected changes to their lives and by collaborating with them, they achieved growth from self promotion and overcoming their challenges by seeing and acting on opportunities instead of defaulting to wishful thinking.