What True Self Care Can Look Like When Running a Business

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Self-care in business is more than taking a bubble bath or treating yourself to your favorite take-out. True self-care is a long game and requires us to dig deep beyond the instant gratification a quick fix gives us. Listen in as Katrina reveals how to approach self-care by getting really honest with your fears and scary decisions.

Thought Catalog Self Care Article

The episode:

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Badass Business Squad podcast. Today it is just your host Katrina Widener here, talking to you all about true self care. So self-care and self-love are these hot topic words that we see everywhere in Instagram, or we hear people talking about all of the time. And if you've been around here for a while, you know that I really approach self care differently. Today I wanted to take the opportunity to talk to you about true self care and how self care goes really beyond the bubble baths, manicures, the glass of wine at the end of a day. Even though I'm not shitting on any of that stuff, if you know me, you know I love a bubble bath. But really I'm hoping in this episode to open your mind a little bit and change the way that you view self care. Instead of looking at it as a bandaid or a quick fix, or a immediate in-the-moment serotonin rush, we're really viewing self care as the long game. As a holistic, going inward and saying, "How can I build a life that I don't need to escape from in the first place?"

And so I wanted to start out by sharing a little bit from the article that changed my entire outlook on self care. And don't worry, I will link the article itself in the show notes, and I won't go too far in depth with reading this out loud to you. But there is one part of the quote that I found has really, really impacted me. As well as the people who I've shared this with.

"True self care often takes doing the thing you least want to do. It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye, and restrategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way the other people won't, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can't. It is letting yourself be normal, regular, unexceptional. It's sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn't going to be having abs, and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way being trained to think before you even knew it was happening. It is becoming the person you know you want, and are meant to be."

And so the main reason why I wanted to share that quote with you, is because when we think about self care and when we think about the way that we approach it, it's often described as "self-care Saturday" or "treat yourself." And it's really these in-the-moment things that might yeah, give us a raise of good emotions, but that boost of emotions falls flat just as quickly as it went up. And so if you think about it, having a job where you feel unhappy and you don't like who you are while you're in it, having a glass of wine at the end of that day isn't going to solve that, right?

I think about this a lot with my clients. When we look at, "Oh hey Katrina, I'm making over a hundred grand a year and I'm so proud of myself. And I feel so excited because I was able to bring in that money. But it's not all it was cracked up to be. I was told that success was making six figures and here I am burnt out, overwhelmed, feeling like crap." Or "Here I am being inconsistent and not being able to show up for the people around me the way that I wanted to." Or "Here I am turning to food to self satisfy or celebrate or self-soothe." And what I have learned myself in my own personal journey with self-care is that over the last five plus years that I've been in this business, the moments that I have really been taking care of myself the most and the most effectively are when I am sitting down and looking at, "Hey, I didn't love doing exclusively one-on-one coaching. Why is that? Why does that not feel that great to me? Why is this not the emotion that I thought I would get?" Or "My entrepreneurial book club failed. Why did that happen that way? Why didn't it work the way that I wanted it to." Or even, "Oh my gosh, I did this entire rebrand and launch and I didn't get the influx of new clients that I thought I would."

And the truth is that all of those things were what society told me was right for me, and told me it was right for my business. And instead when I was willing to look inside and look at myself and get really, really honest with myself, I was able to say "It's because I don't want to do explicitly one-on-one coaching. And I don't really want to do a book club. I liked the community aspect." I was able to look at my failures and my disappointments and say, "How can I turn this into something that's working for me instead of against me? How can I take it and slightly adjust and move forward so that it does work for me?"

It's the moments when I was able to say, "How am I getting in my own way? How am I blocking what I want?" Instead of looking at it as if there's this magical, mystical thing that I need to do, right? Some secret roadmap or magical word or magical marketing strategy (to be more honest), to me being successful in me getting what I want out of life. Instead, it was me sitting down and saying, "What are the beliefs that I have that's in my way, as opposed to pushing, pushing, pushing forward?"

Here's basically what I want to break it down to. There are parts of our lives that are actually stressful and then our parts of our lives that we fixate on. And so if we are offering a service in our business that we don't actually like doing, having a clean kitchen sink isn't going to make it feel better. And yet we like to fixate on having the clean kitchen sink. As that quote said, it's not about abs and keeping up with the people around you. It's about building that life that you don't want to escape from. And when we really look at the quality of our self-care over the quantity of our self care? Or the quick fixes of our self-care, right? We all expect that quick fix is going to be what gets us there. And maybe even if we don't expect it, we hope for it, right? This is why fad diets have been popular for so long. This is why people will honestly book an intensive with me for three hours, and then never follow up with coaching after that. It's because they're hoping that three hours with me will fix the things that they've been struggling with for years.

And the truth is that true self care is a long game. True self care is changing the underlying heartbeat of our day to day, as opposed to switching things up really quickly in the moment. And this is why all my clients are six month contracts, because I know that the magic happens not in one month or two months, but in the much longer timeline we'll say. This is also why my most successful clients have been working with me for years nonstop, not even just those six months. It's having that ongoing self support to make the decisions for yourself from a place of, "I'm able to have the self-awareness to look at what is and is not working in my life, and change that. Even if it's scary. Even if it's difficult. Even if it feels overwhelming? Doing it anyway. And making the choice! There's a difference between making a choice and making a choice.

When I decided to start my own business, I made a choice. But when I decided to quit my job and bet on myself, I made a choice. And it's not like flirting with the idea of something. It's not having it be on a side hustle. It's saying "This is not a hobby to me. This is something I'm taking seriously." And for every entrepreneur out there listening to this, you probably are like, "I know exactly what that means. When I made the choice that I was going to run my business, that was a Choice, capital C."

When I made a choice of what I having for dinner, that's a choice, lowercase C. And you have to do the same thing when it comes to self-care. It has to be a Choice, capital C. It has to be an, "I am making the decision that I am tired of living the life that I'm currently living, and I am tired of complaining about the same things over and over and over again. And I'm tired of having things not work out the way that I need them to. And deciding to make the major changes that go along with that." And for me, when I started my business, it was getting out of my job, that was making the major change. On a day-to-day basis now, it's doing the active work to reprogram my limiting beliefs and to take action when I'm afraid to anyway and to get my business as aligned as possible to who I am.

And to take it back to that example of me not loving one-on-one coaching, or me not loving the entrepreneur book club. Do you know what I do love? I love group coaching. I had to look critically at the services in my business and change them accordingly to get closer and closer and closer and closer to what does feel good when I'm doing it. And that's the trick that you can utilize for literally any part of your life. It can be scary. It can be scary to say, "Hey, I make a lot of money doing one-on-one coaching, but I'm not going to have it on my website anymore." It can be scary to say, "Hey, I'm in this relationship with a friend or a partner and it's not making me happy on a day-to-day basis." It can be scary to say, "Hey, I know that I don't treat myself the best. How can I make the choice to do something about that instead of just letting it happen and going another day, and another day, and another day, and another day, where I'm not showing up the way I want to show up, because I don't believe in my own worth?"

So I know that this is a little bit different of a podcast episode than what we might normally do, but it's something that I keep seeing people talk about more and more recently, and it's something that I keep seeing show up on social media especially in these pandemic days when we're talking about self care. And we really do have a lot of things in our lives that are making us feel not like ourselves. And so I want to end this episode by also putting that caveat out there. That it is a pandemic, and some of these things you will not be able to make a capital C choice on. You can't make a capital C choice to have a pandemic go away. It just doesn't work that way. As much as we all really wish we could. But it is saying, "What are the things that I can change on a day-to-day basis? How can I give myself this opportunity and then doing the hard, difficult work to do it?"

True self-care is not easy. True self care does not feel as fun as going and getting a manicure. True self-care can be sitting journaling about your biggest fears, and bursting into tears because it feels so hard to face it. But the truth is that unless you face it, you're not going to move past them, and that's what that true self-care is all about anyway, is growth.

So I hope that this was helpful for everyone listening. If you need any assistance around this subject, if you're feeling a little raw, a little scared, please, please, please reach out to me. I am always here if you email me, you will hear back from me: If you DM me, you will hear back from me. So I am always here as a resource and I hope you have a good day.