One Small Promise
Question for you: What's one small promise you can make yourself this year?
This is a question I'm asking myself and offering my clients to use as a guiding light for the year ahead. The world is still too topsy-turvy to make any grand plans or sweeping goals but that doesn't mean we can't deeply care for ourselves and our dreams in small, nourishing ways.
Now, this small promise is less about committing to drink a green smoothie every morning or to never yell at your kids again but rather about choosing something that will remind you of your aliveness and reconnect you to your essence, your wisdom and your power.
Think about it as a practice of homecoming.
The little promise I've made myself this year is to dance my ass off whenever my body and heart feel the need for it. We are all so good at overriding the requests of our body yet these requests are the exact care we need. Self care is no big mystery. Our hearts and bodies are always telling us what will make us feel better, both physically and emotionally. The problem is we rarely take the time to listen and then honor what we hear.
With that, I made a dance video for you to get you feeling big, bold and wild. As we've all been sequestered in our homes for the last 10 months now, if there's anything we're collectively craving (besides health and safety for ourselves and our neighbors) it's to feel a little wild.
After you watch the video and dance your ass off, place a hand on your heart and ask,
"What's one small promise I can make myself this year?"
Trust the first thing that comes up and notice what shifts in your body and life as you honor that promise over the next week.
If you enjoyed this post, please keep reading!
As a self care coach, schedule buffering is one of my go to self care tips after a big presentation, after a work trip, after solo parenting, after a holiday party, and after any sort of transition. I make sure to enter slowly. I don't over commit. I leave LOTS of space for me to take it easy and move at a slower pace rather than slamming into the next thing after having just put so much out.
Women are uniquely tasked with carefully navigating the way we interact with the people around us. We aren't to make anyone mad. We can't let anyone down. We mustn't offend anyone. Don't even think of hurting anyone's feelings. And don't you dare inconvenience anyone.
Truth is, many of us are amazing shit-picker-uppers. It doesn’t matter who the shit belongs to, if someone drops a steaming pile of it in front of us, we always pick it up. Always.
I've been thinking a lot about change recently. It's as if every time I catch my breath and get used to life "as it is", something shifts. There's a change in the world. A change in my 3 year old's sleep pattern. A change in my body. A change in the law.
Change, change, everywhere change.
In my 15 years of coaching I've had countless clients ask me, "If I know I want to be less controlling in my life, why do I keep defaulting to it?" There are a number of reasons why we seek to control. Many of us developed controlling behaviors as children to create a sense of stability and safety in an otherwise chaotic/unsafe environment.
For most of my life I toggled between wanting to be a "good girl" and wanting to tell people (and systems) to leave me the f*ck alone. It was a hard line to walk with one part of me wanting to be liked and held in "high-standing" and the other feeling put upon, judged and resenting it.
Question for you: What were you taught about slowness? Perhaps you were taught that slowness is a form of laziness. Perhaps you internalized the message that going slow is a waste of precious time. Maybe you see slowness as the antithesis of productivity or worse, that slowness is a reflection of low intelligence.
Since January began, my partner Adam and I have been randomly looking at each other and making an exasperated "BLAH!" face. It's the face we use when either of us is feeling uninspired, listless or just, well, BLAH.
As the days shorten we find our bodies naturally craving slowness and inwardness.
This conversation is between myself and an incredible woman named Ani, who shares how she learned how to be authentic, practice self-compassion, and take up space without guilt or shame through my 6-month group coaching program, Homecoming. Ani is a model for how to excavate internalized misogyny and live authentically without fear of others’ opinions. The conversation originally took place on podcast, The Path Home.