Your Mask First!

I travelled this weekend to a lifelong friend's wedding that required being on a couple of airplanes.  I've been on enough flights that I am pretty familiar with the safety briefing, but sometimes there can be various circumstances that make the familiar new again.

Last week I had several conversations that included the topic of self-care practices - the activities and strategies we use to help us refresh and recoup our energy. Most of those chats involved people who are in some type of helping profession whose primary role is to constantly be giving of themselves to others. In those circumstances it's easy to just keep giving and giving, often sacrificing time for ourselves and many of those self-care practices, because there is so much need around us. I suspect this is sounding pretty familiar!

This is why the oxygen mask part of the safety announcement stood out to me a little more this trip. They tell you that if you are travelling with young children or people who may require assistance putting on the oxygen mask, that you should put on Your Mask First, and then assist those who need help with their mask. From a very practical perspective, if you help them first and then you happen to pass out from a lack of oxygen, they can't help you put on your mask. But, if you take care of yourself first, then you will still be capable of helping them with their mask.

I don't think I need to connect too many dots here for you! If we are running low on critical elements of our own healthy functioning, like energy or emotional well-being, it's possible we could get to a point where we don't have any capacity left to help those people who are around us. But if we take a little time for ourselves and make sure we have what we need to function, that isn't being selfish, it's acting in a way that is actually the most caring for those people who are around us.  The struggle is, it's counterintuitive. It feels like what we need to do is just keep helping everyone around us, but it's possible to reach a point where we aren't any good to anyone else around us, and we might actually be doing more harm in the long run by incapacitating ourselves!

If you were going to take some time this week to put on Your Mask First, what kind of activities would you engage? Are there some small steps that you could prioritize this week that would help bring a sense of care and healthy stability for yourself? Would it help to just take a small walk on your break, or listen to music in your car while you eat lunch? Maybe you need to go to bed early one night or spend 5 minutes just being quiet and taking deep breaths? It's important to recognize that small acts of self-care have a cumulative effect on our overall wellbeing, so you don't have to come up with some big gesture, maybe just a series of small actions that help to prioritize you!

Here's to putting on Your Mask First this week!

Be Well,

Stephen

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.

Safety Valve!

I'm not sure if you can imagine this, but I have had several conversations in the past week (including with myself!) about the need to blow off some steam. For many of us, that phrase is all about what we need to do with our emotions so they don't get the best of us, but I am old enough to understand where that phrase originated!  

Caution: Nerd Alert!

Before the invention of the combustion engine, most everything that was powered used a steam engine.  You've probably seen an old steam locomotive where fire is used to heat up water, turning it into steam. That steam gets stored in pressurized tanks and then released in streams that have enough force to push parts, that move other parts, that make the locomotive move. 

Before you stop reading, there is another very important part attached to those pressured tanks that keep them from blowing up - the pressure release valve, or Safety Valve.  Basically, if the pressure in the tank gets too high, this valve is triggered and "blows off some steam" so the whole thing doesn't explode.  

Now that you've had a lesson on steam engines (in case you didn't know already), you see where I am going with all of this. We all need a Safety Valve in our lives - ways in which we can blow off some steam so we don't actually blow up!

What are the kinds of practices you use as a Safety Valve to keep you from exploding? Are there people you have in your life who function as a Safety Valve for you - people you know will hold safe space for you while you blow off some steam, knowing they won't take it personally and will keep your confidence? How could you be a Safety Valve for someone else this week who just needs to vent so they don't explode themselves?  

Let's be honest, it sure feels like the pressure around us is continuing to build, so no matter what tools we use, or who we talk to, it's important we all take advantage of our healthy Safety Valves!

Here's to using, and being, a Safety Valve this week!

Be Well,

Stephen

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.

Seeing Them!

Ok. You know how this works. I have some chats with various people. Read some stuff. Hear something interesting. Then those threads come together into a central idea that I share here with you!  So of course it happened again, and it feels timely this week.

I don't know if you realize this, but we are on the eve of an election here in the US?! In case you weren't aware, there has been this interesting phenomenon in the past several election cycles here in our country (and it actually runs deeper than that in history) where the division and animosity has ramped up and escalated to what feels like epic proportions. Now, we could spend a ton of time looking for the root causes and trying to place blame, but that would be an exercise in futility (in my mind anyway). What I think is more important, is to acknowledge that what has resulted in almost every corner of this process is the "other" has become a "them."  What I mean by that is we've stopped seeing people who have names and hopes and dreams, and we've reduced them to "the other side" or some ideology, or we've lumped them together into some other generic category. For example, it seems rather tragic that we've heard the term "garbage" thrown around by people on both sides of the US political aisle in reference to people on the "other side." 

While we could spend a lot of time trying to figure out "Who started it?" that would most likely only result in a never-ending circle of, "Yeah, but they...!"  or "Yeah, but you....!"  What I am most interested in is how I can be part of ending this awful cycle.  And to be clear, I don't think the results of an election are somehow going to magically make it all go away. I think it actually starts with individual choices, in individual relationships. It has to start with me. In other words, I can't change the national conversation (or even the one in my local city or county by myself), but I CAN do something about how I See Them.  I can decide they are a person with a name and a story, rather than just someone in that group with a predetermined ideology. I can attempt to be curious and at least start by wondering what their hopes and dreams are and how we might be able to find some common ground together in our humanness.  

Please understand, I think I am probably writing this message to myself this week more than I am writing it to you. It's so easy for me to fall into this trap of dehumanizing the "other" and to just stop Seeing Them.  But I want to be someone who Sees THEM - a person with a name and a story and a history and hopes and dreams, even if those may not line up with my desires. They are still someone, and I want to be the kind of person in the world who is actually trying to See Them.

With all the tension and anxiety in the air right now, would you be willing to join me in trying to See Them? Is there someone who comes to your mind that you could wonder about with curiosity, considering what might be in their story that may be contributing to their perspective? Is there someone you are tempted to refer to with a "name" other than their actual name, and could you start by just refusing to use that derogatory term and only refer to them by their actual name?

I'm going to do my best to See Them this week. Would you join me?

Be Well,

Stephen

Center was created to support individuals and teams so they can live from their Purposeful Center.  We specialize in professional coaching and leadership development and we’d love to support you!  Click on our Services page to book a free consultation.