Who do you admire?

Who do you admire?

Maybe it’s someone you secretly admire.  Maybe it’s someone you wish you had met before they died, or someone you who has passed on that you want to spend time with in the next dimension.

What traits do these people have that cause you to admire them?  Are these traits you can develop in yourself?

The people I admire the most are persistent, authentic, and creative.  They have presence and a sense of humor.

I don’t model myself after anyone, but I am continually learning from those I admire.  They demonstrate to me how to play on my strengths in order to be the best version of myself.

Think about the people you admire.  Are you fond of them because they successfully utilize a trait you have but don’t quite know what to do with?  Learn from them. Develop your strengths. 

Nurturing vs. Enabling

In her book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron identifies the difference between friends who nurture you (“give you a sense of your own competency and possibility”) and friends who enable you (“give you the message that you will never get it straight without their help”).

I am fortunate to have a few friends who nurture me, who assure me that I am competent and talented in my own right – with or without them.

I am pleased to have put distance between myself and those who enable me, who act as if I need them in order to be a worthwhile human being.

This doesn’t just apply to friendships but to professional relationships as well.

A nurturing manager will coach you and empower you to do the job without them while an enabling manager will be constantly critical of anything that doesn’t originate with them.

A nurturing coworker will show you how to do something new and then let you to try it on your own until you get the hang of it.  An enabling coworker will express doubts about your abilities and do new tasks for you.

Examine some of your relationships today.  Are they nurturing or enabling?

The fine line between self-care and self-harm

You know those mobster movies where some schmo is getting in the way of the organization’s operations and the head honcho gives the nod to a henchman and says, “Take care of it”?

The next scene usually shows Schmo floating to the bottom of the river with a cinder block tied to his ankles.

That’s what I think of when people say something like, “I’m so stressed out/not feeling well today.  I’m going to go home and take care of myself.”  I always wonder what, exactly, they mean by that.

Are they actually going to take care of themselves, or is this code for “I need comfort, so I’m going to go kill myself slowly by eating an entire chocolate cake”?

I know this is a thing, because I used to do it.  Any heightened emotion (positive or negative) made me crave junk food, and I would convince myself that I was taking care of myself by having a treat.

Treating oneself is reasonable, but splurging on something that you know you’re allergic or sensitive to or splurging to a harmful degree (even on healthy food) is unreasonable.  This is not a true exhibition of self-love.

I finally stopped when I had damaged my body to the point that the reactions to certain foods (such as nightshades) became so severe that it was no longer a “treat” but more like “torture”.

And I’ve done this with other things.  “I’m not going to walk today because I’m not feeling well, and I need to rest.” Which is perfectly valid – until I use that excuse so many times that I sabotage my self-care walking routine.

I haven’t taken a poll or done any clinical research, but this seems to be a pretty common thing.  We humans habitually turn self-care into self-destruction.  Why?

I don’t have an answer to that, but now that I’m conscious of the fact that I do this, I’ve become much better at figuring out when I’m actually taking care of myself and when I’m about to send myself swimming with the fishes.

I encourage you to pay attention to what you do the next time you set aside time for self-care.  Is it a restorative slice of self-indulgence?  Or the entire fatal hedonistic pie?