What would happen if every month became mental health month? I sat down with human performance and wellbeing thought leader, author, keynote speaker and coach, Jeanette Bronée, to explore how we can rethink self-care and redefine resilience to make it easier to perform at our best and grow without burning out.
In the first part of our conversation, we explored From Mental Health Month to Mental Health Mindset: Three Power Pauses to Practice Every Day. Her physical, emotional and mental power pauses are effective and easy to implement.
Now we’re exploring Self-Care Mindset®, what we get wrong about self-care, and what we can do about it.
What is The Self Care Mindset?
Essentially, we have self-care all wrong. We tend to think of it as something we do on our own time and, for most, after work to recover instead of recognizing that having a self-care mindset is a powerful support system that helps us work better all day long.
The key to taking better care of ourselves is to learn how to use our minds to work better for us because we don’t just burn out from working too much; we burn out from worrying too much.
If you were to pause for a moment and listen to your own thoughts, you would notice that you have an ongoing dialogue with yourself. We either question ourselves or comment on what we can or can’t do, did or didn’t do. This inner dialogue is with us all day long, and it’s either working against us or for us.
It comes down to learning to ask better questions because intention fuels attention. The way we ask questions either directs our attention to getting stuck in the problem, or we can shift our focus onto the options we have to support ourselves in solving the problem.
The Self-Care Mindset® is built as a framework to pause, listen, and ask questions. It can all happen within a brief moment. I call Power-Pausing, which helps us reclaim agency over how we think, engage, and act so that we can do so with more care and on purpose all day long.
What inspired you to create The Self Care Mindset?
During the pandemic, I could see how stress and worry were taking over. We were talking about wanting more balance between work and life, and yet we couldn’t because we were working at home. We have three core relationships, and they have always been interconnected, which I believe is the key to work-life quality. I think of self-care as a skill, and during the pandemic, it was apparent we needed to rethink self-care.
Thankfully during COVID, we learned to ask for help. However, I want people to recognize that the power of mental health is part of our everyday lives at work. We all have mental health all the time, 24/7, 365 days a year, and how we take care of it is essential to harnessing the power of our humanity at work.
I wanted to share the tools that I have developed since leaving my job as a burned-out fashion executive in 2004 and founding Path for Life to help people be busy and healthy at the same time.
The CARE framework represents years of studies, research, and working with people one-on-one to face all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that is in our lives. It’s vital that we stop thinking we just have to get through, that we can wait, and instead learn the tools to unlock our most unique and powerful human advantage: the power of choice. We have the power to pause and make discerning decisions about what matters based on what we care about instead of reacting on autopilot, trying to keep up with the speed of technology.
The future is not going to slow down, and stress is not going away; how we work with stress is how we find work-life quality and harness the power of human connection. Self-care is not the goal but rather the foundation for how we achieve our goals.
What is one action every reader can take right now to adopt a self-care mindset?
Of course, I do hope that this interview inspires people to get a copy of the book. However, there is no change without being honest with ourselves about the fact that we are all humans, we all have needs, and we cannot keep putting ourselves on hold because our best selves really cannot wait.
The first step is to recognize that self-care is not a treat, it’s essential, and it doesn’t take time away from us; it gives us time back. Start with Power-Pausing. Pause for just a moment to listen inside and ask: hey, how am I in there right now? Just giving ourselves a little care and attention by listening inside goes a long way.
May the PAUSE be with you!